By baiting, I mean posting deliberate dog whistles, often as crude proxies of what they fear and hate, and set off what is sometimes hours of chud barking in that area, whether it’s a game’s lobby chat or Discord or whatever.

Examples I’ve seen include old and exhausting shit like “did you just assume my gender” and “check your privilege, shitlord” 4chan greentext-tier staleness, but sometimes they can get slightly more cunning and insidious, such as portraying themselves as farcical LGBTQIA+ people then announcing an intent to do (conspiracies/crimes that chuds accuse LGBTQIA+ people of here) and keep up the whistling until every chud is barking across the site.

I do play some online games and calling out bait sometimes works, but it’s still exhausting when a cooperative game shuts down because some chud starts a hate rally and effectively shuts down the game’s cohesion for a while.