Bait / This is Bait

(work in progress)

About

Bait is a an internet slang term used to describe comments or opinions which are considered to be made purposefully to troll other posters or to start a flame war. The term is commonly found on message boards and in comment sections, especially 4chan imageboards.

Origin

In the 1990s, the term “flamebait” was used on Usenet to describe posts made specifically to incite an argument. One of the earliest examples of this was posted to the rec.autos.tech^[2] newsgroup on August 20th, 1995 in response to a post complaining that American-made cars, stating that soft suspensions and automatic transmissions made Americans look weak and incompetent. After the poster went on to complain that the United States was spending money that they thought should have been allotted for healthcare and education on the military, another user called the post “flamebait” for these comments.

Spread

“Flame bait” was added to the Free On-Line Dictionary of Computing^[3] on May 27th, 1998 as a Usenet posting intended to cause hostility. It was similarly defined on Urban Dictionary^[4] on March 24th, 2004. By September of that year, discussions self-identifying as “flame bait” had begun to appear on message boards^[5] as well. In 2005, both tech site Search SOA^[6] and English education blog Antimoon^[7] (shown below) looked at the differences between flame baiting and trolling, noting that the actions were often quite similar but fueled by different motives.

On February 2006, flame bait was added to Wiki Wiki Web^[8], noting that some posters may realize that their discussions are flame bait and will apologize in advance to limit the damage.

In 2013, an image macro featuring the “this is bait” term was created, using royalty free clip art picture ^[1] with a caption “This is bait”.

This image macro is currently assumed to have been used originally as a reaction image on 4chan. An archived thread is being searched for at the moment!

The term is most commonly used on 4chan, in response to posts considered to be trolling, though related image macros have also been used on other websites, such as Reddit and Funnyjunk.