Classic reactive
Inflammatory content designed to produce an emotional reply from a specific person or group. The provocation is the point; the topic is a vehicle.
Responding at this level
Disengagement still usually works, but the pull to answer is much stronger because the bait is now personal. This is where knowing the pattern by name does most of its work.
- Don't feed the trolls →
Declining to reply, so that provocation produces no reaction and no audience. The most repeated advice on the internet, and among the least examined.
- The grey rock method →
Responding in a deliberately neutral, minimal and emotionally flat way, so that provoking you stops producing anything worth having.
10 tactics at this level
Flaming
Direct hostility aimed at a person rather than an argument, intended to produce an emotional reply.
Bait
Ad hominem baiting
Attacking the person so the reply becomes self-defence rather than argument.
Rhetorical
Quote-dunking
Requoting someone to your own audience for ridicule, so the reply is performed rather than exchanged.
Amplification
Tone policing
Rejecting a point because of how it was said, converting the subject into the speaker's manner.
Rhetorical
Strawmanning
Refuting a weakened or invented version of the argument instead of the one actually made.
Rhetorical
Nut-picking
Presenting the least defensible member of a group as representative of it.
Rhetorical
Hypocrisy bait
Provoking an inconsistency so the conversation becomes about your consistency rather than the issue.
Rhetorical
Sensitive-topic digression
Introducing a charged subject to make continuing the original discussion socially costly.
Rhetorical
The "just joking" defence
Retroactively reframing a provocation as humour, so objecting to it becomes the offence.
Bait
Poe's-Law gaming
Performing a position ambiguously enough that sincerity and parody cannot be distinguished, then punishing either reading.
Bait