So you want to write for Rantlister?
Maybe. You’re at least reading this page, which is a good start.
Rantlister has been around since the early 2000s, back when seemingly everybody had their own website, message board, blog, rant page, or some other little corner of the internet where they posted whatever was on their mind. You didn’t need thousands of followers or a carefully cultivated personal brand. You just needed something to say and enough motivation to sit down and write it.
A lot of that internet is gone now. Most of the old sites disappeared years ago, social media swallowed up much of what replaced them, and publishing something online now seems to involve algorithms, engagement, subscriber counts, SEO, and whatever else somebody decided writers are supposed to care about.
We’re not really interested in any of that.
What we are interested in is finding people who want to write.
What We Publish
Rants are obviously welcome. It would be pretty stupid for a site called Rantlister to stop publishing rants.
But we’re not limiting ourselves to 800 words about bad drivers, annoying coworkers, or why your neighbor’s dog won’t shut the fuck up at three in the morning. We’re also interested in humor, opinion, personal stories, essays, commentary, internet culture, pop culture, lists, weird observations, obscure interests, and anything else that feels like it belongs here.
The subject isn’t as important as whether the thing is actually interesting to read.
You can be serious, funny, angry, sarcastic, ridiculous, or some combination of all of those. You can disagree with other writers on the site. You can write about something none of us know anything about.
Just give us something with a voice.
You Don’t Have to Be a Professional Writer
We really don’t care whether you’ve ever been paid to write anything before.
You don’t need a journalism degree, an MFA, a huge social media following, or a portfolio full of articles from publications we’ve heard of. Some of the people who wrote for Rantlister back in the day were just random people from the internet who liked writing stuff, and there’s no reason the modern version of the site should suddenly start pretending it’s The New Yorker.
If you have published work somewhere else, great. Send us a link so we can get an idea of how you write.
If you haven’t, that’s fine too. Everybody has to publish their first article somewhere.
We’re also not expecting perfection. If you screw up a comma or write a sentence that could have been worded better, the world will keep turning. We can fix minor mistakes.
What we can’t fix is an article with absolutely no personality.
iRant or Contributor?
There are two basic ways to write for Rantlister.
iRant
If you have one thing you want to get off your chest, that’s what iRant is for.
Write your rant, send it in, and if we like it, we’ll publish it. You can submit under your real name, a screen name, or some ridiculous fake name you invented specifically for the article.
There’s no commitment beyond that.
If that’s the only thing you ever send us, fine. If you come back six months later because something else pissed you off, that’s fine too.
Contributors
If you want to write more than the occasional iRant, we’re also looking for regular Rantlister contributors.
Contributors get a consistent byline and author profile, and they aren’t limited to the rant format. You can still rant as much as you want, but you can also write humor, commentary, essays, stories, reviews, lists, or whatever else makes sense for the site.
There’s no publishing quota.
We’re not going to email you every month demanding to know where your article is. If you write three things this month and nothing for the next four months, whatever. We’d rather publish something you actually wanted to write than have you force out an article because you thought you owed us one.
Names, Pseudonyms, and Writing Elsewhere
You don’t have to use your real name.
Rantlister has a long history of screen names and pseudonyms, so requiring everybody to publish under the name on their driver’s license would be kind of ridiculous. Use your real name if you want. Use a pen name if you want.
If you become a regular contributor, we just ask that you stick with the same name so readers know who they’re reading.
You’re also free to write elsewhere.
Have your own website? Great. Write on Medium? Fine. Have a Substack? Send us the link. Contribute to another publication? We don’t care.
For original pieces, we generally want Rantlister to be the first place that publishes them. After that, the work is still yours and you can republish it elsewhere. We may also accept reprints or syndicated work when it makes sense.
If there’s ever anything unusual about the arrangement for a particular article, we’ll work that out with you beforehand instead of hiding it in twelve pages of legal bullshit.
A Note About AI
Yes, it’s 2026, so apparently we need this section.
Don’t send us AI-generated articles and pretend you wrote them.
We’re not going to run every submission through fourteen AI detectors and interrogate you because a computer thinks you used the word “furthermore” too many times. Those tools are unreliable anyway.
But if you dump a prompt into an AI chatbot, copy whatever comes out, and submit it as your own writing, we’re not interested.
Rantlister is supposed to be a place for people to say things.
Having a machine do the saying for you kind of defeats the purpose.
What We Don’t Want
We’re pretty open about subject matter, but there are some things we’re not looking for.
Don’t send us plagiarism. Don’t send us advertising disguised as an article. Don’t send us SEO sludge written solely to cram backlinks onto the site. Don’t send us something that creates an obvious legal problem and expect us to sort it out for you.
And obviously, submitting something doesn’t guarantee we’ll publish it.
We reserve the right to reject things that don’t fit the site, need more work than we can reasonably put into them, or simply aren’t very good.
We’ll make normal editorial changes for spelling, grammar, formatting, and readability. If something needs major changes, we’ll talk to you instead of quietly rewriting half the article and sticking your name back on it.
Do We Pay Contributors?
Not right now.
Rantlister is independently funded and does not currently generate meaningful revenue.
We’d like to eventually pay contributors, but we’re not going to pretend we’re doing that now, and we’re definitely not going to insult you by calling “exposure” a form of payment.
At the moment, this is for people who enjoy writing and want somewhere else to publish their work.
If Rantlister starts making actual money, contributor compensation is something we want to revisit.
Why We’re Doing This
For a long time, Rantlister mostly existed as an archive of something that used to be.
That archive still matters. Preserving the old material and the history behind it is one of the reasons the site is still here.
But we don’t want Rantlister to be a museum forever.
We want new people writing new things alongside everything that came before it. We want the site to feel alive again, even if that means rebuilding it slowly, one writer and one article at a time.
So if you’ve been writing on your own and nobody reads it, send us something.
If you used to write years ago and have been thinking about starting again, send us something.
If you’ve never published a damn thing in your life but you have a rant, story, opinion, or idea that you think people might enjoy reading, send us something.
Worst thing we can do is say no.
Knowing us though, we might actually publish it.
Become a Rantlister Contributor
Interested? Fill this out and tell us what you’d like to write.