Amid an array of legal troubles, including an indictment on federal racketeering and firearms charges last month, Brooklyn rapper 6ix9ine became one of the music industry’s biggest success stories this year: He scored his first Top 5 hit, hundreds of millions of streams, collaborations with Nicki Minaj and Kanye West. Key to his rise was his dark mastery of garnering attention online.

Trolling is such a lifestyle for 6ix9ine that he has a routine. Watch him on camera enough times and a pattern emerges. First, a videographer presses record. Second, 6ix9ine announces his location. Next comes the taunt. “I got 15 burgers here, giving back to [the] community, ’cause you know these other Chicago rappers don’t give back,” he crowed on Instagram after walking out of a Windy City diner in June. The clips conclude with cash hitting the ground, ascending into the air, or being sorted. 6ix9ine’s rainbow plaits are a red herring; variety isn’t his signature.

Anyone who’s ever watched a Smack DVD, browsed WorldStarHipHop, or scrolled through Vine knows how hackneyed 6ix9ine’s flexing is. In the past, his antics likely would have sunken to the depths of the content ocean only to be occasionally salvaged for a meme or joke. But because he’s so reviled, his willingness to relentlessly finesse that hate—to troll—gives him a constant edge.

6ix9ine feeds almost exclusively on his notoriety, and it has been his strategy since his arrival. Before he was goading rappers, he was uploading noxious videos of underaged sex acts, actions that led him to plead guilty to using a child in a sexual performance in 2015. Since then, as his records have charted, he’s celebrated his continued visibility as if it were a goal in itself. He’s far from the first rapper with a Billboard obsession, but he might be the first rapper to have no other motivation. 6ix9ine’s persona is essentially a Vine loop of DJ Khaled saying “They don’t want you to win,” but with rainbow emojis.

And he wasn’t the only rap star to bank on agitation above all else throughout 2018. From Kanye’s “free thinking” to Nicki Minaj’s Queen Radio to king troll Eminem’s gaslighting of hip-hop writ large, trolling is becoming the go-to strategy for getting noticed. In pursuit of a constant, captive audience, rappers are tweaking their personas and their music to keep the curtain drawn indefinitely. This shift feels like both an adaptation to the streaming era and an indictment of it.

Trolling is a rap tradition. In the late ’90s, Eminem mocked white Americans’ contempt for rap by making the most puerile music he could think of—“Hi kids, do you like violence?”—and went on to become the biggest rapper in history. 50 Cent’s debut single “How to Rob” pestered New York media into overreacting; everyone who responded gave 50 far more legitimacy than the song could have alone. Soulja Boy countered Ice-T’s grizzled grandstanding (“Soulja Boy... single handedly killed hip-hop”) with insolent web humor (“You were born before the internet was created. How the fuck did you even find me?”). Peevishly smirking into his webcam, Soulja spoke as if he were being beamed in from a dimension in which Ice-T didn’t exist.