About

Joybaiting or Joy Bait is a slang term describing content that is explicitly made for the purpose of causing joy in others online. It is the opposite of rage bait, which describes content made to cause anger in others online. The term started spreading online as early as June 2025 and was popularized on TikTok in August 2025 through a series of videos where TikTokers show themselves pleasantly interacting with someone while lip dubbing to an audio of someone saying, "Hey, look at you. You look like a cool dude. I like your shoes, and Jesus loves you, too." Many of the videos have a Christian slant and claim that ragebaiting is a sin.

Origin

On June 23rd, 2025, TikToker^[1] @williwillcode poted a video sharing a "new joybaiting method" where he says that he's "coining" the term "joybaiting" rather than "kindbaiting," as he had used in his prior TikTok^[2] video, to describe the act of "baiting" someone into feeling joy. In the video, he shares the idea of checking in on friends who look sad as the new method of joybaiting. The video gained over 320,000 views in two months.

Spread

On August 3rd, 2025, TikToker^[3] @chibforchange posted a video captioned "The average church camp experience" in which the TikToker reacts with joy as several voices, meant to be church camp attendees, hyping him up play over music, garnering over 259,000 views in just under two weeks.

Over the next few days, TikTokers began using the audio from @chibforchange's video to represent joybaiting. For example, on August 8th, TikToker^[4] @josiahuwildn posted a video to the sound captioned, "Since Ragebait got patched joybaiting is my new thing," tagging it "#joybaiting," garnering over a million views in six days.

On August 11th, TikToker^[5] @ob.win_tv posted a video lip dubbing to the sound under the caption, "Start joybaiting since rage baiting a sin," garnering over 1.8 million views in three days.

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References