Open your phone, scroll for thirty seconds, and you can feel it: the internet seems built to make you mad. ESPN’s Mina Kimes just explained why, and she did it with more than ten years of sports media experience behind her.
Watch What’s Trending Now!
Kimes made the comments on South Beach Sessions with Dan Le Batard in a clip the show shared on Instagram. Batard was a longtime ESPN personality who now hosts South Beach Sessions as his long-form interview program. Kimes was joined by Bill Lawrence, the creator behind Scrubs and a co-creator of Ted Lasso.
“Not just the madder the better; the more likely the more provocative you are, the more of a gotcha, the more angry, the more political, the more likely it is to go crazy. So there is an actual incentive, sometimes financial, for people to be angrier than even 5 to 7 years ago,” Kimes said on the podcast.
Kimes pointed to X as an example. Its For You page is algorithmic, she said, and it did not exist before. Go there now, and the angry takes and the gotchas are what do well.
Lawrence came at it from a different angle. He said what blows him away is that there are no consequences for being completely uninformed on a topic.
That is true, he said, even when someone argues against someone who’s spent a career studying it. Experts no longer carry any weight online, and Lawrence said he finds that fascinating.
It is not just two people with a hunch. Oxford University Press picked “rage bait” as its 2025 Word of the Year after a public vote of more than 30,000 people. Oxford says usage tripled over the past year, and last year’s pick was “brain rot.”
As per Oxford University Press, rage bait is an “online content deliberately designed to elicit anger or outrage by being frustrating, provocative, or offensive, typically posted in order to increase traffic to or engagement with a particular web page or social media account.”
Casper Grathwohl, the president of Oxford Languages, tied the rise to how the internet works now. He said the web used to chase attention by sparking curiosity in exchange for clicks, and that it now shapes how people feel.
He described a cycle that sounds a lot like what Kimes was describing.
“Together, they (rage bait and brain rot) form a powerful cycle where outrage sparks engagement, algorithms amplify it, and constant exposure leaves us mentally exhausted.”
He also said the word’s rise shows people are noticing what is happening to them.
“The fact that the word ‘rage bait’ exists and has seen such a dramatic surge in usage means we’re increasingly aware of the manipulation tactics we can be drawn into online.”
A Cambridge-led analysis of more than 2.7 million Facebook and Twitter posts found that posts about political opponents were shared about twice as often as posts about someone’s own side.
Kimes is a familiar face at ESPN, with appearances on Around the Horn and Highly Questionable alongside her NFL work.
Kimes has seen how fast a take can turn into a fight. This week, her post about the Chiefs signing Justin Tucker drew criticism from former NFL player Emmanuel Acho, who called the outrage selective.
Kimes also hosts The Mina Kimes Show, a football podcast featuring Lenny, produced in partnership with Omaha Productions for ESPN.
That may be the most interesting part of her point. People inside sports media are not just watching the anger machine from the outside. They are working in it every day.
The uncomfortable truth is that it works. The next time a take makes your blood pressure spike, it might be worth asking who gets paid when you reply.