Understanding the Climbing Rage Bait Trend, with Owen Clarke

In this episode of the podcast, we have adventure writer Owen Clarke on the pod to talk about rage bait, and how it’s showing up in climbing media and culture. Owen Clarke is a prolific writer, who regularly contributes to Summit Journal and Climbing.com, as well as many other media outlets. Recently, he covered rage bait for an article on Climbing.com, where he dove into a case study of the free soloist Lincoln Knowles. Rage bait is content that is intentionally created to elicit strong reactions from people—it’s trolling with intention, in order to drive clicks, comments, and other forms of engagement. Dive in to this episode to hear from this expert about why rage creates engagement, how shock-factor in traditional action sports media lends itself to evolving into rage bait, the unique elements of climbing rage bait, and why its specific to short-from media.