Paul Graham characterizes marketing strategies designed to intentionally anger people for attention as a tactic of "scammers." He argues that such approaches reveal a lack of long-term focus and earnest engineering, predicting that companies relying on these gimmicks will never become truly massive.

Even if 99% of a VC's portfolio is solid, one viral "rage bait" company can dominate public perception. Due to the internet's nature, this single controversial investment can get 1000x more attention, tarnishing the fund's brand and making it known for "slop" rather than its serious investments.

Go-to-market strategies built on outrage and controversy (rage-bait) attract attention but create a fragile brand. The audience you build is not a community of supporters but a mob waiting for you to fail. This makes it a spiritually and strategically poor choice for sustainable growth.

Startups like 'Chad IDE' are moving beyond using outrage for marketing. Their core product differentiation—like integrating gambling into a code editor—is the rage bait itself. This strategy risks alienating potential investors, customers, and talent, who may actively root for the company's downfall.

Video-gen startup Higgs Field achieved unprecedented hypergrowth by evolving beyond its initial base of casual content creators. The company now reports that 85% of its usage comes from social media managers who treat the platform as essential production infrastructure for their entire workflow.

When an influential institution like YC promotes a company with a "rage bait" strategy on its official channels, it signals approval. This can mislead young, impressionable founders into believing such tactics are a necessary or endorsed path to success, potentially corrupting the startup ecosystem's norms.

The most salient near-term AI risk identified by Eurasia Group is not technical failure but business model failure. Under pressure to generate revenue, AI firms may follow social media's playbook of using attention-grabbing models that threaten social and political stability, effectively 'eating their own users.'

The IVF company Nucleus ran a subway campaign with provocative slogans like 'Have your best baby' to deliberately anger a segment of the population. This 'rage bait' strategy manufactures virality in controversial industries, leveraging negative reactions to gain widespread attention that would otherwise be difficult to achieve.

While stunts and "rage-bait" can generate massive initial attention for a product like Clulee, their impact diminishes over time. Once an audience has been enraged, it's harder to provoke the same reaction again, making it a powerful but unsustainable long-term growth strategy compared to consistent value proposition advertising.