'Rage Bait' Named Oxford Word of the Year 2025 (bbc.com) 58
Longtime Slashdot reader sinij shares a report from the BBC: Do you find yourself getting increasingly irate while scrolling through your social media feed? If so, you may be falling victim to rage bait, which Oxford University Press has named its word or phrase of the year. It is a term that describes manipulative tactics used to drive engagement online, with usage of it increasing threefold in the last 12 months, according to the dictionary publisher.
Rage bait beat two other shortlisted terms -- aura farming and biohack -- to win the title. The list of words is intended to reflect some of the moods and conversations that have shaped 2025. "Fundamental problem with social media as a system is that it exploits people's emotional thinking," comments sinij. "Cute cat videos on one end and rage bait on another end of the same spectrum. I suspect future societies will be teaching disassociation techniques in junior school."
Rage bait beat two other shortlisted terms -- aura farming and biohack -- to win the title. The list of words is intended to reflect some of the moods and conversations that have shaped 2025. "Fundamental problem with social media as a system is that it exploits people's emotional thinking," comments sinij. "Cute cat videos on one end and rage bait on another end of the same spectrum. I suspect future societies will be teaching disassociation techniques in junior school."
Re:yay (Score:5, Insightful)
We are getting stupider.....
Sadly no, we're simply exposing our existing latent stupidity. People like to argue. Ragebait makes arguing more likely. Arguing is considered "engagement".
Prove me wrong.
Re:yay (Score:4, Insightful)
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Using /. as an empirical example, people are behaving poorly. A decade ago you'd never see personal attacks moderated up just because it was politically aligned with the person moderating. Today such behavior (both attacking and partisan moderation) is commonplace. People are just less civil. I see this as symptom of de-cohesion - no shared values, no imperative to act civil.
How do you know this to be true and what steps could I take to verify the claim? Here's a cherry picked "Hillary Clinton Declares 2016 Democratic Presidential Bid" slashdot article from a decade ago (April 2015) https://politics.slashdot.org/... [slashdot.org] for illustration.
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Overall decline in civility (Score:2)
Easily stated here is that there are enough people who cannot have a political or social discussion with anyone who does not 110 percent agree with their own beliefs.
Those people resort to personal attacks and repeated discussion ending tactics as a way to prevent any discussion with ideas disagreeing with their own ones.
You should be able to discuss politics and social issues with your neighbor, disagree on them and still remain good neighbors. That is being civil and and being an adult..
It's easier to avo
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Re: yay (Score:1)
Why not legalize suicide, since living around people like you makes me not want to live?
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Hmm, two decades ago perhaps. We must be getting old because it doesn't seem like that long ago.
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Using /. as an empirical example, people are behaving poorly. A decade ago you'd never see personal attacks moderated up just because it was politically aligned with the person moderating. Today such behavior (both attacking and partisan moderation) is commonplace. People are just less civil. I see this as symptom of de-cohesion - no shared values, no imperative to act civil.
I think you’re right about the symptom and wrong about the diagnosis.
Something really has shifted. I’ve been around slashdot long enough to remember when naked personal attacks getting +5 Insightful was rare enough to be comment-thread drama instead of background noise. The de-cohesion you’re talking about is real in the sense that shared norms feel weaker and more fragile.
Where I disagree is jumping from “norms are under strain” to “no shared values” and “peo
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We are getting stupider.....
Sadly no, we're simply exposing our existing latent stupidity. People like to argue. Ragebait makes arguing more likely. Arguing is considered "engagement".
Prove me wrong.
Okay, challenge accepted. If you build machines that relentlessly reward our dumbest, angriest impulses, you’re going to get more of them. That’s not a mirror; that’s a factory. You’re treating rage bait as if the internet were a geological survey: we dig, and whatever stupidity we find was just lying there all along. That’s way too generous to the system. What we actually built is more like a Skinner box. If you pay people in attention and dopamine hits specifically for kne
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If you build machines that relentlessly reward our dumbest, angriest impulses, you’re going to get more of them. That’s not a mirror; that’s a factory.
No, by your own logic the machine only works if dumbness exists. Someone not susceptible to ragebait isn't ragebaited or magically starts raging. This isn't training, it's abusing an underlying characteristics.
Rage bait is absolutely a geological survey (I like that analogy). The human impulses are very much there. The only thing this is doing now is algorithmically digging in the right place to bring those up impulses up.
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If you build machines that relentlessly reward our dumbest, angriest impulses, you're going to get more of them. That's not a mirror; that's a factory.
No, by your own logic the machine only works if dumbness exists. Someone not susceptible to ragebait isn't ragebaited or magically starts raging. This isn't training, it's abusing an underlying characteristics.
We’re not actually far apart on the premise. Of course the machine only works if the vulnerability exists. Slot machines only work because humans have a reward system; cigarettes only work because we have nicotinic receptors. Here is where we start to diverge, though: The fact that a behavior or susceptibility pre-exists doesn’t mean the industry sitting on top of it is just exposing it. In behavioral psych, “repeatedly exploiting an existing reinforcement pathway to change how often a b
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We are getting stupider.....
Sadly no, we're simply exposing our existing latent stupidity. People like to argue. Ragebait makes arguing more likely. Arguing is considered "engagement".
Prove me wrong.
Engagement used to not include a greed factor to monetize. THAT is the fucking problem.
When we find social media narcissists posting THE most embarrassing, childish, cringe-filled losses online for the world to see, Shame is not a factor only because of the delusion of greed. The loser posting that crap still thinks it’s a win, because it might go “viral” and be worth money.
Shame, needs to become priceless again. Because we know who is becoming worthless.
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Engagement used to not include a greed factor to monetize. THAT is the fucking problem.
Technically incorrect. The term engagement was *created* by those monetising the use of media services. It was fundamentally a measure of the ability to monetise.
We didn't have that term back when Facebook was used to send pokes to each other on campus.
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Prove me wrong.
Well played. You are truly a master ragebaiter.
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No we are not, those with power are just getting more and more manipulative with their detailed knowledge of human psychology :(
How can the average person compete with Big Biz spending billions? It's the same with advertising and politics.
I have the time to study this stuff, so I don't get take in. As much. Most people do not :(
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Oddly relational.
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Imagine if you did something useful with all that wasted time...
Re: Is free speech the problem? (Score:1)
Do you mean useful like writing social media software?
Re: Is free speech the problem? (Score:1)
Have you asked ChatGPT to plain-ASCIIfy your posts?
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Mod parent down!
Re: Is free speech the problem? (Score:1)
Why moderate at all, when you can not be lazy and respond to words with better words?
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Mod parent up!
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If I like to respond to every post I disagree with, why is that so offensive to mods that I get banned and feel suicidally depressed as a result, not because of the free expression of other posters, but because mods prevent me from responding as I see fit?
“If I like to respond to every post I disagree with”
You kind of answer your own question in the first clause.
What you’re describing isn’t “free expression.” It’s an asocial urge to jump into every disagreement, everywhere, all the time, and “respond as I see fit” with no real limit except your mood. Scale that up to dozens or hundreds of threads and from the moderator’s perspective it doesn’t look like participation, it looks like one guy try
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Well said.
Re: Is free speech the problem? (Score:1)
What if all that verbiage just means "I'm butthurt, waaaah!"?
Re: Is free speech the problem? (Score:1)
Since the social world you've built has no place for me, and if I try to point out I'm nonviolently not cooperating, your sensibilities are offended and you deny my attempts to petition for redress of grievances, why not acknowledge suicide should be legal?
Why should I want to live in a society where I am not wanted or needed?
Also, what if my arguments actually give rise to painful cognitive dissonance in you, and so rather than change your thinking to accommodate the uncomfortable truths I bring up, you ju
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Yeah, this isn’t the devastating rejoinder you seem to think it is.
Since the social world you've built has no place for me, and if I try to point out I'm nonviolently not cooperating, your sensibilities are offended and you deny my attempts to petition for redress of grievances, why not acknowledge suicide should be legal?
Slashdot, and any other online forum for that matter, is not “the social world.” It’s one community, with shared norms, a karma system, and user-driven moderation. The people modding you down and tagging you as the troll you are are your peers, not some shadowy corporate cabal. Mod points are handed out by karma, and meta-moderation is done by anyone who hasn’t cratered their own karma, so the feedback you
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If I like to respond to every post I disagree with, why is that so offensive to mods ...
Are you sure that it's the fact you respond as opposed to the content of your responses. I mean, seriously, let's take just one example from above: "Why not legalize suicide, since living around people like you makes me not want to live?"
What possesses you to think that people 'want' to be treated / spoken to like that, or that people will tolerate being treated / spoken to like that? If anyone spoke to people like this in real life they would quickly be ostracised. Why would you think that an online commun
Re: Is free speech the problem? (Score:1)
What if I am ostracized from real life society, and this is the last place I can try to make the case that you're all being unfair and we should legalize suicide? Why do you ban talk of suicide?
Also, how do you know I haven't extensively sought professional help, but it didn't help because the therapists didn't like me either, and had more important patients to focus on?
What is your solution to the problem of me? Why isn't legal suicide the most cost-effective and efficient solution?
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What if I am ostracized from real life society, and this is the last place I can try to make the case that you're all being unfair and we should legalize suicide? Why do you ban talk of suicide?
You're picking the wrong fight, with the wrong person here.
My personal belief system essentially starts with the principle - well, it's more a corollary of the first principle - that everyone has the right to choose how / when to end their life. I find the notion that suicide should be illegal is ludicrous, not to mention non-sensical - it's a little hard to prosecute someone who's dead! Likewise, I'm definitely not advocating banning conversations about suicide. It would be hard to talk someone out of it i
The word of the year is two words (Score:3, Insightful)
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The word of the year is two words
As has been tradition for many, many years.
Anyone still using the famous Oxford Words of the Year "squeezed middle" or "big society" in 2025? Or even heard of them before today?
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Anyone still using the famous Oxford Words of the Year "squeezed middle" or "big society" in 2025? Or even heard of them before today?
No, but I feel them every time I put on a pair of jeans.
Re: The word of the year is two words (Score:3)
New pants? In THIS economy??
Yes, I freely acknowledge that I am adding nothing to this conversation. But Iâ(TM)m not sure thereâ(TM)s much to add to it. Iâ(TM)ve probably been made stupid by ragebait.
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Someone smarter than me can tell us if this is true literary irony or not. I never got the concept very well.
I blame Alanis Morisette.
Anyways, I'd say yes to ironic, especially if people do not recognize that within themselves (regarding what ragebait is and how it works).
Re: The word of the year is two words (Score:3)
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It's more like "dictionary entry of the year". Some things where the two words have to be used together for a specific meaning have dictionary entries, such as speed bump, for example.
Rage bait (Score:2)
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This entire subject infuriates me!!! Why did the BeauHD even post it?!?!
(Dick) ”Hey Bob, what’s say we throw up the ol’ Oxford live ticker and see where the Word of the Year is polling.”
(Bob) ”Fo shizzle.”
(Harry) ”C’mon now Bob. No padding.”
Sadly, piccolo didn't won this time around (Score:2)
The big green is the very definition of aura farming
That's two words, a perfect example of rage bait. (Score:3)
Seriously? (Score:3)
"Do you find yourself getting increasingly irate while scrolling through your social media feed?"
If so, STOP doing that!
Go outside. Experience sunshine. Meet real people. Live life while you can.
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"Do you find yourself getting increasingly irate while scrolling through your social media feed?"
If so, STOP doing that!
Go outside. Experience sunshine. Meet real people. Live life while you can.
Yes! Just Say No!
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Imagine thinking real people are any different and less annoying. Some people are even religious. In 2025. Well after magic was debunked.
But life is an illoooozhun! Lunchtime doubly so.
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Go outside. Experience sunshine.
In London in the winter? How???