Rage baiting and engagement baiting are the absolute worst trends to emerge from modern social media. Not just because they are annoying, but because they have transformed interactions on social media into a product to profit from. The goal of content creation is steering away from creating meaningful things and is now to make users feel something strong enough to warrant commenting.
If you have never heard of this trend, engagement bait is a term that describes content intended to elicit a reaction, causing viewers to comment, react to, or share the content. Ragebaiting does this through angering and annoying the user, which is exactly the problem. people hating content can now be just as valuable as them loving it.
A 2017 study found that moral emotional language increased diffusion of posts by around 20% for each additional moral emotional word. Emotional content spreads, the angrier, more offended or outraged we become the more likely we are to interact. Unfortunately, the algorithm does not care why we interacted, just that we did.
A 2021 study found that posts containing language about political ‘out-groups’ were shared or retweeted almost twice as often as posts about the ‘in-groups’. From this a bizarre paradigm emerges, why bother saying something insightful when you can simply insult those who disagree with you.
This behaviour works especially well in the political sphere, and I see it as a driving force in creating the extreme polarisation we see between supporters of modern political parties. We see it everywhere, from ridiculous takes to influencers doing infuriating actions, such as grammatical errors, impossible puzzles, videos with no result. Creators have realised that angry comments are still comments and are still monetizable.
The worst part? Every time we share it with friends, comment saying “this is the dumbest thing I’ve ever seen” or even watch a video more than once tells the algorithm it is worth showing to other users online. Social media is designed to keep people connected and now it is rewarding people for irritating us. Maybe the most influential thing we can do is simply scroll past.
denneyl 
Caufield1986 
Kyle Halcyon
This is a well-reasoned article, and you express your argument very well. That said, as a millennial woman who has been using social media (and their earlier predecessors, the message board) for clearly much longer than you have, I would argue that “ragebaiting” has been a constant installation in the internet sphere(s).
This is not a new phenomenon.