This paper deals with ‘Wutreden’ (rants) as an invective genre in digital media. It is argued that the generic aspects of rants are not due to the formal and functional features of the speech events alone, but should be described as the result of the practices of doing genre. Digital media with its affordances to recontextualization and serialization allow to reframe disparate speech events as instances of one generic scheme. As a result, the emerging concept of rants as a genre enables the production of new instances. In order to grasp this genre in the making, a discursive concept of genre is needed, which then can also be applied to other invective genres such as shitstorms and hate facts.