Internet Meme of the Week: Don’t Even Reply: E-mails from an Asshole
By Divya Gunasekaran, The Dartmouth Staff
Published on Monday, February 22, 2010
Many computer users often take advantage of the mask of anonymity that the Internet provides to show their true selves — or just be complete jerks. While it’s never fun to be locked in a message board battle or comments clash with such a person, watching it go down between others can be absolutely hilarious. This is exactly what DontEvenReply.com exploits for its readers’ amusement. The site features e-mail correspondence between the site’s creator — we’ll call him Mike — and the authors of various classified ads. The e-mails start out normal enough as Mike lures his target into the exchange, but he quickly steers the conversation into a bizarre and inappropriate direction. Whether Mike is sending pictures of guns poorly disguised by a box of tissues in response to an ad seeking concealable weapons or pretending to represent an amateur pornography company and offering to sponsor a little league team, the conversations usually end the same way: cursing and outrage. Pissing off others for personal amusement has never seemed so right.