By Kyra-lin Hom

Have you ever stumbled across an article online that is so inflammatory and absurd that you can't help but read it? There you are, minding your own business, just casually perusing your regular news site when – BAM! Your attention is waylaid by an aggressively punchy headline or snagged by some ridiculous or crude photo of truly “are you kidding me?!” proportions.

Whatever you're looking at is hosted by said news site so you, equal parts intrigued and appalled, click on the link. Next thing you know, you're mired in an article that has all the reasonableness of a berserker honey badger. Your heart rate rises as your faith in humanity drops. Is this article for real? It must be because it's backed by a professional news organization. It's just that you had no idea this kind of opinion was out there let alone prominent enough to be featured on a mainstream news page...

Congratulations. You've just been rage baited. It's a modern phrase for an age old tactic. According to the handy-dandy online Urban Dictionary, it specifically refers to: “a post on social media by a news organisation designed expressly to outrage as many people as possible in order to generate interaction.” Similar to tabloids, scams or plain old pig-tail pulling, rage baiting is an online tactic designed solely to get your attention – good or bad – because your 'attention' is the internet's bread and butter.

Making money online is all about user traffic. Well, advertisements and user traffic, that is. Think about how many services you actually pay for personally online – probably not many. That's because other companies are willing to pay for ad space in the hopes of catching your eye and maybe even charming you into clicking on their flashy links. The more views a website racks up, the more money it can earn from selling ad space. Basically, user traffic equals money.

So online businesses will do anything to sieze your attention. For news organizations that means going extreme: extremely cute, extremely cool, extremely scary or extremely infuriating. It's just like TV. They want to hook you by the feels – by your emotions – because you are much more likely to be dragged about by your feelings than an academic curiosity. Hence rage baiting, actively provoking outrage.

I'm all for a good sharing of vastly different opinions. Everyone is entitled to their own, after all, regardless of what anyone else might think of them. And generally speaking, we as a society are better off for the variety. But that's not what rage baiting is. Rage baiting is about manipulating people with false opinions for the pure purpose of making money. No discussion. No debate. This is about pissing people off.

For organizations that claim journalistic legitimacy, rage baiting is frankly irresponsible and gauche – not to mention unprofessional. Doing so abuses their positions as current events authorities and makes completely ridiculous, often hurtful opinions seem more prevalent and popular than they are. And anyone who's gone to high school knows how damaging that can be.

Yet the tactic still survives because it works! We see something triggering and we click on it. It's like a masochistic or morbid reflex. So I have no illusions that knowing what's happening when that headline catches your eye will prevent you from clicking the link. But here's to hoping that, when you read the article, you are aware enough to not take it too seriously and to not let it get to you. Don't feed the monster.