Rationalizing

It's not hard to find someone who will pontificate against the tendency of social media and news platforms to present audiences with "rage bait" and other fare that's designed to drive interaction by making people angry. What I'm much more curious about is why people are so willing to take the bait, and/or reward other people for doing so.

I suspect that part of the reason why it's so much easier to find people willing to talk about the former than the latter is that railing against, say, Jubilee on YouTube for posting videos designed to drive thousands of hot-takes is a form of rage bait, and perhaps virtue signalling, in and of itself. It allows people to present themselves as righteous, and an audience can feel righteous along with them, feeling themselves superior to both the purveyors of the content, and the people who rush to engage with it.

Understanding why it comes across as so compelling and satisfying to react to (even if one hasn't bothered to fully understand, or even watch, read or listen to it) is unlikely to simply present other people as stupid or uneducated. Sure, there's still likely to be the ability for an audience to hold themselves as above whomever is being spoken of, and to declare themselves immune from such open manipulation.

But I also think that the truth of the matter, the reasons why it's so easy to spark people to outrage, especially by simply hinting that certain people are not simply Other, but bad people for that, is that it's dry, and technical. And so it doesn't offer a quick dopamine hit, or a fix of Meaning. Instead, it's simply a lesson in human psychology, something that people don't find all that interesting, judging by how little it appears in feeds or podcasts.