Most Women Ignore Their "Reply Guys." Then There Are These People.

In May, Sydney Leathers confessed to her tens of thousands of Twitter followers that she was smitten. Where'd she meet the guy? Not on a dating app, or through friends, but in the last place she ever expected to find a real connection: her mentions. "Still can't believe I fell in love with one of my reply guys. Apparently, things had progressed since December, when she last posted about him: "I had sex with someone who started as my reply guy and I hope this doesn't inspire confidence in the rest of you because frankly your replies are not that good," she wrote. Leathers is a writer, adult performer, and startup employee whose name you may recognize from her part in the Anthony Weiner sexting scandal--this wasn't exactly her first brush with online flirtation. But it was her first time falling for a reply guy, or someone who was, effectively, a fan. The term "reply guy" emerged on Twitter about five years ago to describe the behavior of a certain subset of people, usually with very few social media followers of their own, who stake out space in the mentions of prominent users. They can be counted on to reply promptly and frequently to the tweets of whomever they've chosen as their object of devotion, and they often seek attention by nitpicking, mansplaining, joke one-upping, and harassing them. Because of this, reply guys--who can also be girls, or people of any gender--are generally understood to be pathetic creatures, without a chance in hell of getting said person to like their replies, much less return their affections. So the revelation that this gambit actually worked for someone is … pretty noteworthy. Reply guy success stories may be happening more than we realize. Abby, a 25-year-old in Brooklyn who runs a meme page on Instagram with several thousand followers, told me that she got frisky with one of her reply guys last year. "I'm not the only person that I know that has hooked up with reply guys," she said. "It's not as uncommon as you might think." Now, Leathers' Twitter feed is a monument to her relationship, by turns adorable and lewd. "This definitely caught me by surprise," she told me. "But it's been the best, happiest relationship I've had." To attain this goal, a reply guy's first challenge is to stand out from the crowd. The meme account Abby is the admin for is about politics, so she likes when a guy can show not just that he's hot, but that they share a political sensibility. "I have to be attracted to them," she said. "And they have to have some sort of compelling thing to say." "I feel like I've never more than mildly acknowledged a reply guy before now," she said. "I generally don't even follow them back." But when her now-boyfriend started responding to her tweets last year after discovering her through a winding path that involved the singer of the band Eve 6, she took notice. "I'd seen him reply to my stuff a few times.