AEW Grifters Killed the Wrestling Internet—and We Helped

A wrestler on AEW Dynamite runs toward the ropes and leaps, a daring, indescribable act of trust, foolishness and professional craft. His opponent is supposed to catch him on the floor. For a fraction of a second, they are not quite in the same place at the same time.

The wrestler crashes to the floor. The crowd lets out a groan, holding that breath until he gets up to his feet.

Nobody dies. Nobody is injured. The match continues. Three minutes later, almost everyone watching has forgotten it happened.

Online, however, the mistake has already undergone a complete forensic examination.

The clip is isolated, slowed down and posted before the wrestler has returned to the ring. Someone with a username that includes the word “botch” announces that it represents everything wrong with modern professional wrestling. Someone else explains that mistakes happen in every promotion and produces footage of a similar incident from SmackDown. A third person notes that the SmackDown incident was fundamentally different because the wrestlers involved understood psychology. A fourth person demands to know why anyone who hates AEW watches every Wednesday anyway. A fifth person posts a screenshot of the overnight rating, although the overnight rating has not yet happened—the show, after all, is still on.

Within ninety seconds, a slightly mistimed dive has become evidence in a sprawling civilizational trial involving Tony Khan, Triple H, Jim Cornette, television executives, declining birth rates, the creative bankruptcy of American entertainment and whether Harley Race would have tolerated any of this shit.

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The actual wrestling move is incidental. It is merely the body discovered at the beginning of the procedural.

Nobody online is reacting to wrestling anymore. They are reacting to the reaction to wrestling. You don’t even have to watch to participate.

This distinction explains almost everything about the modern internet wrestling community. A match is no longer permitted to exist as an isolated aesthetic experience. It cannot simply be exciting, boring, funny, excessive, sloppy or surprisingly good. Every match is now a proxy war over the existential validity of the corporation that presented it.

A Will Ospreay match is not a Will Ospreay match. It is a referendum on whether wrestling should prioritize athletic spectacle over simulated combat. A Roman Reigns promo is not a Roman Reigns promo. It is a loyalty oath concerning the patient brilliance of long-term storytelling. The Young Bucks are not two brothers performing professional wrestling. They are either postmodern geniuses dismantling the form from within or the final stage of a disease that began when Shawn Michaels discovered he could slap his thigh.

Nothing is small enough to remain small.

This is partly because wrestling fans have always been insane. That should be stipulated at the beginning. For decades, otherwise functional adults have spent substantial portions of their lives arguing about whether Hulk Hogan should have lost to Bret Hart in 1993, an event that did not happen during a championship reign that ended more than thirty years ago. Wrestling fandom has never required much encouragement to turn hypothetical booking into the Council of Nicaea.

But the modern ecosystem added something new. It attached a cash register to the arguments.

Once social-media platforms began monetizing engagement, bad wrestling opinions ceased to be merely bad opinions. They became inventory. Outrage became output. The most hysterical possible interpretation of a mundane event was no longer just emotionally satisfying; it was potentially profitable.

This created a new class of wrestling personality: the transactionally outraged.

The transactionally outraged person may genuinely dislike AEW, WWE or whichever promotion has been selected as the enemy. Sincerity is not required, but neither is dishonesty. What matters is that the emotion must be expressed in the form most likely to generate resistance. It cannot be enough to say that a segment did not work. The segment must expose a fundamental contempt for the audience. The promotion cannot merely have made a bad creative decision. It must be collapsing. The wrestler cannot have had an off night. He or she must be unsafe, selfish, untrained, exposed and personally responsible for the disappearance of the territories.

The ideal take is not the one most likely to be true. It is the one most likely to make 500 people furious enough to quote-post it.

If you can help pay your electric bill by convincing strangers that a standard Will Ospreay match constitutes an insult to the memory of Frank Gotch, you are no longer functioning primarily as a critic. You are an employee of the outrage economy. It is a low-yield blue-collar job performed from an ergonomic gaming chair. Some do it for money, some for mere likes and an iota of attention.

The product being manufactured is anger. The people screaming at you are not just the customer—they are also the raw material of your act. It would be brilliant if it wasn’t quite so awful.

The conventional understanding of wrestling Twitter is that two opposing armies are engaged in trench warfare. On one side are the professional cynics: podcasters, aggregators and aspiring personalities who treat every AEW production error as the Zapruder film. On the other side are the promotion’s most committed defenders, who spend Wednesday nights patrolling social media for ideological trespassers.

These people believe they hate each other.

They are mistaken.

The performative cynic and the hyper-defensive stan are not natural enemies. They are business partners who have never exchanged banking information. Each is indispensable to the other.

A podcaster who makes a living being theatrically appalled by Tony Khan’s booking requires an audience willing to respond with white-hot fury. Without that response, the original post disappears into the same digital void occupied by vacation photographs, earnest poetry and advertisements for independent wrestling shows in Indiana. The defenders supply the quote-posts, replies, screenshots and multi-day discourse that transform one inflammatory sentence into monetizable reach.

But the dependency runs both ways. The committed defender also needs the grifter.

Without the constant suggestion that AEW is on the verge of death, following the promotion would simply be a leisure activity. You would watch the program, enjoy some parts, dislike others and perhaps discuss it with friends. This is psychologically inadequate. The presence of an organized enemy elevates consumer preference into moral courage. You are protecting the very possibility of alternative professional wrestling against a hostile media apparatus determined to destroy it.

You are no longer watching a television show. You have an identity. You are part of a movement.

Every picture of an empty seat becomes disinformation. Every ratings decline requires context. Every unflattering report is traced back to its probable source, which is then praised or buried according to your preference. Every criticism carries the faint odor of sabotage.

This is fandom experienced as permanent counterintelligence.

Both sides therefore receive exactly what they need. The cynic receives engagement. The defender receives persecution. Together they operate a closed-loop emotional refinery in which everyone feels angry, important and strangely alive.

The relationship resembles professional wrestling more than either side would care to admit. The heel insults the audience. The audience pays to see the heel punished. The heel interprets the payment as evidence that the insult worked and returns the following week with a louder one.

The critical difference is that old wrestling understood the exchange was supposed to end with catharsis. Bruno Sammartino eventually punched the villain and pinned him in the middle of the ring. Dusty Rhodes eventually drew blood. The fan went home believing the universe had been temporarily restored to order.

Online wrestling discourse never delivers the blowoff.

There is no cage match. There is no loser-leaves-town stipulation. There is only another episode, another rating and another opportunity to interpret a mildly disappointing quarter-hour as the fall of Saigon.

The Monday Night War at least involved two wrestling companies attempting to produce television people wanted to watch. Its degraded reenactment consists largely of fans examining spreadsheets on behalf of corporations that do not employ them.

Eventually, some fans attempted to escape.

They left Twitter—or X, although calling it X still feels like agreeing to participate in a divorced man’s rebrand—and migrated toward smaller platforms such as Bluesky. The goal was reasonable. They wanted to discuss wrestling without being ambushed by monetized hostility. They were tired of feeding people who had learned to convert their irritation into impressions.

For a while, the new environment felt healthier. The most exhausting actors had either remained behind or had not yet developed sufficient incentive to follow. Sure, people posted screenshots to argue with their rivals in abstentia—but they also posted about matches they enjoyed. Conversations occurred without everyone immediately demanding proof of ideological consistency.

Then a different pathology emerged.

When a community defines itself primarily in opposition to negativity, criticism begins to resemble insult. The acceptable range of opinion does not merely narrow. It becomes non-existent, replaced with a hive mind.

A match cannot be pretty good. “Pretty good” is what the enemy says before posting a screenshot of the attendance. A storyline cannot be losing momentum. That is concern trolling. A wrestler cannot be overexposed, miscast or simply having a bad year. Such observations might provide ammunition to people who do not deserve ammunition.

The result is performative positivity: the obligation to experience every competent wrestling match as a landmark achievement in human expression.

A wrestler executes a complicated sequence and the match is immediately described as cinema. A reasonably effective television angle is Shakespearean. A bloody main event has changed the business forever, even though the business was also changed forever the previous Wednesday and will apparently require revolutionizing again next week.

The language of enthusiasm becomes so inflated that ordinary pleasure is treated as betrayal.

This is not happiness. It is a defense mechanism.

The tragedy is that the safe space becomes intellectually unsafe in a different way. It protects fans from obvious antagonists while making them increasingly suspicious of anyone capable of expressing ambivalence or even liking some things more than others.

This is how you arrive at the tyranny of forced joy: an environment where everyone is free to share an opinion, provided the opinion is that the last pay-per-view was somewhere between “incredible” and “a generation-defining masterwork.”

The hostility has not disappeared. It has merely changed uniforms.

On Twitter, dissent is punished through ridicule and pile-ons. In the aggressively positive enclave, dissent is punished through moral suspicion. You are not accused of being wrong. You are accused of creating unsafe conditions for enjoyment.

This sounds ridiculous because it is ridiculous.

It is also understandable.

Many AEW fans spent years watching every setback converted into content by people openly rooting for the company’s failure. They saw injuries treated as punchlines, attendance problems celebrated and ordinary creative mistakes used to argue that the entire enterprise had been fraudulent from the beginning. It is natural that some became defensive.

But understandable behavior can still become destructive. A bunker protects people from bombardment. It is also a terrible place to build a window.

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The most significant casualty of this war is not civility. Wrestling fans have survived without civility for as long as wrestling fans have existed.

The casualty is curiosity.

When everyone is presumed to be operating in bad faith, abstract thought becomes impossible. You cannot ask a question without first proving you have the moral right to ask it. You cannot entertain an alternative without being accused of endorsing it. “What if?” is no longer an invitation to experiment. It is treated as the first stage of a rhetorical trap.

Healthy fandom depends on what might be called Schrödinger’s Booking: the capacity to hold two conflicting ideas about wrestling at the same time.

A performer can be brilliant and trapped in a bad storyline. A company can be producing good television while making damaging long-term decisions. A match can be technically spectacular and emotionally empty. A wrestler you dislike can make a persuasive point. A wrestler you love can be full of shit.

These ideas do not invalidate each other. They coexist until evidence, time or personal preference causes one to become more important.

But tribal discourse cannot tolerate ambiguity. It requires every statement to resolve instantly into allegiance.

Consider the seemingly ordinary sentence: “I love this performer, but this storyline is dying on the vine.”

In a functioning conversation, this creates several possibilities. Why is the story failing? Is the wrestler miscast? Has the booking become repetitive? Is the crowd reacting differently than expected? Could a change in presentation revive it?

In the modern ecosystem, the sentence triggers a background check.

Do you actually love the performer? Have you criticized this promotion before? Why did you not make a similar point when WWE did something comparable? Are you repeating a podcast talking point? Do you secretly want the company to fail? Why are all your replies from the same six accounts? What did you say about the Continental Classic in 2023?

The match disappears. The storyline disappears. The subject of the conversation becomes the speaker’s presumed intention.

Every interaction is an interrogation conducted by people searching for the hidden camera.

This is partly a consequence of repeated exposure to obvious bad faith. If someone spends four years insisting that every AEW television show is the worst episode ever produced, it is reasonable to stop treating each new complaint as an independent critical judgment. Patterns matter. Motives exist.

But the habit spreads. Eventually, nobody is allowed to possess an uncomplicated thought. Every opinion is examined for concealed ideological machinery.

This destroys the thought experiment because thought experiments require temporary vulnerability. You must be able to consider an idea without marrying it. You must be able to say, “I’m not sure this is true, but let’s follow its course for a minute.”

The result is a culture that produces endless takes but very few thoughts.

A take is a conclusion designed for distribution. A thought is a process that may lead somewhere embarrassing or even wrong. Thoughts require uncertainty. Takes require branding.

The wrestling fan once asked, “Wouldn’t it be interesting if…?”

The wrestling content producer asks, “Which version of this opinion will perform?”

Increasingly, the ordinary fan does too.

It would be comforting to blame all of this on grifters, platform owners and podcasters making thumbnails in which Tony Khan’s eyes have been replaced by flames. They deserve their share of blame. The algorithm rewards the most exhausting people in every community and then presents their success as evidence that the community wanted them all along.

But the ecosystem cannot function without us.

We supply the outrage. We perform the free publicity. We search for the most offensive possible interpretation of a post, carry it onto another platform and place it before an entirely new audience. We insist we are correcting misinformation while ensuring the misinformation receives ten times more circulation than it would have achieved on its own.

We keep touching the electric fence and then write posts demanding to know why someone keeps electrifying it.

The internet wrestling community is not unique. Wrestling is simply louder and weirder than most other cultural communities, which makes its structural decay easier to observe. Political reporting underwent the same transformation. So did film criticism, video-game discourse and nearly every other field where identity became fused with consumer preference.

Every object becomes a symbol. Every preference becomes an affiliation. Every disagreement becomes evidence of corruption.

Wrestling merely adds its own surreal details and an inclination to imitate the bombastic personalities on television. The combatants are arguing about monopoly power and television distribution while using profile pictures of men in sequined robes pretending to be nature boys.

The form works by convincing the audience that emotional investment is a kind of action. And for decades, that investment had somewhere to go, towards the ring and the characters.

The internet redirected that impulse from wrestlers to promotions.

The fan is no longer simply asked to cheer. The fan is asked to manage the brand.

We monitor ratings. We study attendance maps. We argue about rights fees. We explain why the quarterly financial report is being misinterpreted. We defend executives who would have us escorted from the building if we appeared at corporate headquarters and asked to use the bathroom.

This is exhausting work, made more exhausting by the fact that nobody assigned it and nobody is getting paid.

The grifter at least receives a check.

The rest of us sit in our living rooms staring at one screen while holding another, defending billionaires who do not know we exist from professional antagonists who only want our clicks. We spend the match preparing our response to the response. We anticipate the bad-faith argument before it arrives. We compose the rebuttal while the wrestler is still climbing the turnbuckle.

Then the table breaks.

For a second, something real happens. A human body falls through wood. The crowd makes a noise that cannot be reduced to a demographic. We feel the involuntary thrill that brought us here in the first place.

But the moment passes quickly.

We reach for the phone.

There is work to do.

Jonathan Snowden is a long-time combat sports journalist. His books include Total MMA, Shooters and Shamrock: The World’s Most Dangerous Man. His work has appeared in USA Today, Bleacher Report, Fox Sports and The Ringer. Subscribe to this newsletter to keep up with his latest work.