- 2 days ago In a news article yesterday evening, Washington Post reporter Tracy Jan — who covers “the intersection between race and the economy” — managed to pack an impressive number of left-wing.
- The latest tweets from @menatwank.
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This piece is part of an ongoing series exploring what it means to be a woman on the internet.
On Twitter, a place where a lot of bad things happen, there's a mostly harmless but decidedly annoying phenomenon. A lot of people, mostly women, have noticed that one or two men always, no matter what, reply to their tweets.
Manchester Evening News - Covering central and Greater Manchester, including news from Oldham, Rochdale and Glossop. The latest tweets from @Menmasturbation.
Big C Men Twitter
These men are colloquially known as 'reply guys.' While no reply guy is the same — each reply guy is annoying in his own way — there are a few common qualities to watch out for. In general, reply guys tend to have few followers. Their responses are overly familiar, as if they know the person they're targeting, though they usually don't. They also tend to reply to only women; the most prolific reply guys fill the role for dozens of women trying to tweet in peace.
Welcome to Twitter ladies. A married man, who mainly follows, and interacts with only women, will be assigned to you shortly
— Shit. Head. (@THE_shitface) February 12, 2019
It's usually pretty easy to ID a reply guy. The sheer volume of responses is a reliable indicator. But there's still some literature on the subject. In a 2018piece for McSweeney's, for instance, Emlyn Crenshaw wrote an extremely funny Reply Guy Constitution, which focuses above all else on men's commitment to 'weigh in on women's thoughts at every possible opportunity.'
And two scientists, @shrewshrew (who asked to be referred to by her Twitter handle only) and Scott Barolo, created the Twitter account @9ReplyGuys based on the experiences of women in STEM.
'We came up with the idea of the 9 Reply Guys after noticing that the kinds of tweets and comments make to women on Twitter (and in real life) follow really predictable patterns,' @shrewshrew explained via Twitter DM.
Cruising For Men Twitter
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'It's annoying because Reply Guys always think they've made some brilliant contribution, but it's the same nonsense any woman, person of color, or LGBTQ person has experienced hundreds of times,' she said.
The account divides reply guys into nine subcategories, each based on a reply guy behavior the two observed in the wild. The Gaslighter, for example, is devoted to minimizing women's experiences, and the Cookie Manster is basically the poster child for #NotAllMen.
All nine have one thing in common, though, as @shrewshrew pointed out: 'Their goal is to control the conversation.'
#WomeninSTEM get a lot of “Reply Guys” who repeat the same unhelpful comments.@shrewshrew and I (a woman & a man in science) have attempted to catalog those replies, to save us all the trouble of writing new responses every time.
presenting THE NINE TYPES OF REPLY GUYS
(1/n) pic.twitter.com/0ewNRJloLu
— Scott Barolo (@sbarolo) September 3, 2018
Reply guys aren't just lurking on STEM grounds, either. Petrana Radulovic, a reporter at Polygon, had a reply guy experience that was truly, deeply weird.
'I had this fella who followed me because I had Cookie Monster in my profile pic and he just kept replying to everything I posted trying to get me to talk about Muppets,' she explained over Twitter DM.
Like most reply guys, he was relentless. Eventually, Radulovic muted him. Notably, though, she never blocked him.
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'I have that internalized female niceness where I can't make anyone mad,' she said. 'I [also] fear men's retaliation and muting will keep 'em quiet, but they'll never know.' (Users aren't notified that they've been muted.)
'Muting will keep 'em quiet, but they'll never know.'
Another user, who asked to remain anonymous, said she's noticed several reply guys in her mentions. Unlike Radulovic's reply guy, her reply guys respond to each tweet individually. 'It's always regarding the content of [my] tweets, contextual,' she said. But it still happens like clockwork.
She's also chosen to mute instead of block. None of her reply guys are 'consistent harassers,' she said.
Still, reply guy behavior can escalate quickly — which is why a lot of women choose not to block the offenders. I once had a reply guy whose comments started off innocuous, then steadily became more frequent — and more suggestive — when I stopped liking his replies. Eventually, he also found me on Instagram and Facebook, where he continued to engage with the vast majority of my posts.
SEE ALSO: Why is everyone on Twitter talking about towels?
I didn't block him, though. I didn't want to make him angry. One never knows how far a man will go to make a woman's life hell.
hey i’m the guy who replies to your every tweet trying to one-up your jokes. i have 97 followers and while there’s nothing technically wrong with my facial hair, it’s not the facial hair any reasonable person would pick for this face shape. someday soon i’ll call you a cunt
Hot Men Twitter
— rax king (@RaxKingIsDead) February 17, 2019
But what makes a reply guy reply in the first place? It's been suggested — including in a piece from Raw Story — that the reply guy phenomenon is an instance of benevolent sexism.
As with other types of benevolent sexism, like catcalling disguised as 'compliments' and paternalistic pseudo-concern, reply guy behavior can quickly grow frightening if the man doesn't feel his target is giving him the attention he deserves. (Feeling entitled to women's energy has, of course, been a longstanding problem for cis men.)
If you're a woman on the internet, there's a high chance you find none of this surprising. But what should you do if you suddenly find a reply guy in your mentions?
Today on Maury: My Son’s a Reply Guy
— alec (@tort_tweets) February 10, 2019
Of course, how you choose to deal with a reply guy depends on your specific circumstances. If you think you've got a shot at shooing them away, you could hit them with one of @9ReplyGuys's descriptions. You could reply, if you want. (Don't pretend you don't love a good dunk.) If you feel unsafe or if you don't want to see their garbage anymore, you could mute or block. It's your feed. They're the interloper, not you.
And if they get too annoying, you can always commiserate with ... thousands of other people on the internet. I'm sure they'd be thrilled to hear from someone who is not a reply guy.
Twitter has attracted tremendous attention from the media and celebrities, but there is much uncertainty about Twitter’s purpose. Is Twitter a communications service for friends and groups, a means of expressing yourself freely, or simply a marketing tool?
We examined the activity of a random sample of 300,000 Twitter users in May 2009 to find out how people are using the service. We then compared our findings to activity on other social networks and online content production venues. Our findings are very surprising.
Of our sample (300,542 users, collected in May 2009), 80% are followed by or follow at least one user. By comparison, only 60 to 65% of other online social networks’ members had at least one friend (when these networks were at a similar level of development). This suggests that actual users (as opposed to the media at large) understand how Twitter works.
Although men and women follow a similar number of Twitter users, men have 15% more followers than women. Men also have more reciprocated relationships, in which two users follow each other. This “follower split” suggests that women are driven less by followers than men, or have more stringent thresholds for reciprocating relationships. This is intriguing, especially given that females hold a slight majority on Twitter: we found that men comprise 45% of Twitter users, while women represent 55%. To get this figure, we cross-referenced users’ “real names” against a database of 40,000 strongly gendered names.
Even more interesting is who follows whom. We found that an average man is almost twice more likely to follow another man than a woman. Similarly, an average woman is 25% more likely to follow a man than a woman. Finally, an average man is 40% more likely to be followed by another man than by a woman. These results cannot be explained by different tweeting activity – both men and women tweet at the same rate.
These results are stunning given what previous research has found in the context of online social networks. On a typical online social network, most of the activity is focused around women – men follow content produced by women they do and do not know, and women follow content produced by women they knowi. Generally, men receive comparatively little attention from other men or from women. We wonder to what extent this pattern of results arises because men and women find the content produced by other men on Twitter more compelling than on a typical social network, and men find the content produced by women less compelling (because of a lack of photo sharing, detailed biographies, etc.).
Twitter’s usage patterns are also very different from a typical on-line social network. A typical Twitter user contributes very rarely. Among Twitter users, the median number of lifetime tweets per user is one. This translates into over half of Twitter users tweeting less than once every 74 days.
At the same time there is a small contingent of users who are very active. Specifically, the top 10% of prolific Twitter users accounted for over 90% of tweets. On a typical online social network, the top 10% of users account for 30% of all production. To put Twitter in perspective, consider an unlikely analogue – Wikipedia. There, the top 15% of the most prolific editors account for 90% of Wikipedia’s edits ii. In other words, the pattern of contributions on Twitter is more concentrated among the few top users than is the case on Wikipedia, even though Wikipedia is clearly not a communications tool. This implies that Twitter’s resembles more of a one-way, one-to-many publishing service more than a two-way, peer-to-peer communication network.
Bill Heil is a graduating MBA student at Harvard Business School, and will start at Adobe Systems as a Product Manager in the fall. Mikolaj Jan Piskorski is an Assistant Professor of Strategy at HBS who teaches a Second Year elective entitled Competing with Social Networks. Bill undertook research for parts of this article in the context of that class.
i Piskorski, Mikolaj Jan. “Networks as covers: Evidence from an on-line social network.” Working Paper, Harvard Business School.
ii Piskorski, Mikolaj Jan and Andreea Gorbatai, “Social structure of collaboration on Wikipedia.” Working Paper, Harvard Business School.