14 November 2024

by Paul Haneke

Have you ever been properly “rage-baited”? For example: Let’s say you are enjoying the ephemeral pleasures of short form video content à la TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, or whatever your preferred poison might be. But this time, instead of simply letting the scrolling slowly but surely pull you into its anaesthetic vortex of content, you finally take action by steering your thumb away from its usual route of swiping and instead open the comment section. A fatal mistake. The top comment, yelling at you in all caps, proposes the most outlandish opinion you have heard in quite a while. “Who would think something like that?”, pops into your mind, closely followed by “what do others think about that?”, as your already semi-numb thumb delves into yet another layer of outrageous opinions about even more outrageous opinions. And there goes another 15 minutes. Sounds familiar?

Rage-baiting is one of many tactics employed to keep your attention on the app. Why social media apps want you to stay on them for as long as possible is fairly obvious: ad revenue. These companies do not care whether watching their ads leaves you happy or enraged, as long as you do watch them. Therefore, they will do anything to keep you glued to their apps: provide you with content their algorithm knows you will like, as well as content it knows will produce any emotional reaction; the stronger the better. That’s where the comment section comes in.

Not only the main content itself is being tailored exclusively for you, but the comment section is as well. There are algorithms analysing your behaviour around comments with the simple goal of finding out what makes you spend the most time while reading them. The comments you are being presented aren’t in any way the ‘most popular’ or ‘most recent’ but rather the ‘most engaging’; for you that is. The person sitting next to you on the train could watch the exact same video at the same time and still have a completely different order of comments, depending on their specific “comment section behaviour”.

This phenomenon can sometimes make you feel like you are surrounded by the most infuriating opinions and crude negativity. However, it can help to take into consideration that, while these opinions do exist, they are almost certainly not as omnipresent as your comment sections would have you believe. They are merely being presented there in order for you to stay on the platform a few minutes longer.

And you and I both know that you were going to do that anyway. Happy scrolling.

Further reading:

https://www.socialmediatoday.com/news/threads-look-reduce-presence-rage-bait-posts/729131/

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2019-04-02/youtube-executives-ignored-warnings-letting-toxic-videos-run-rampant

https://arxiv.org/abs/2202.07853

Munn, Luke. “Angry By Design: Toxic Communication and Technical Architectures.” Humanit Soc Sci Commun, vol. 7, no. 53, 2020.
 (full article: https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-020-00550-7 )