Don't Like - Falling For Rage Bait

There’s an idiotic and gross post getting traction on Substack right now.¹ It wasn’t written by someone with a large following. It isn’t interesting or even particularly well-written in a subversive way. For those reasons, it feels like it should be pretty easy to ignore but I keep seeing it get restacked (Substack’s version of retweeting). Every time someone restacks the piece, they add their two cents as if the post had any merit, which it does not. So, the only reason they engage with it is because they can harvest their own engagement from it. They can do that because when you restack a post it becomes a Substack note where even more people can see it. In this case, with a post that has such an obviously heinous premise, people are sharing it to dunk on it by saying something about how terrible the writer is. But the thing is, you can’t dunk on rage bait because once you engage with it you’ve already paid the troll toll.

1. I’m not going to link to it but if you’re curious, scroll through Substack notes until you see a post by a middle aged man about young girls that’s really creepy—or don’t because it isn’t worth your time.