The Vegan Vault
Warning: even the pictures in this blog involve words and reading.
In 2015–2016, when I was an amateur Craigslist troll loser, I learned a lot about the humble act of fucking with innocent people on the internet. At the time, I was only balancing a couple college Kent State classes with an extremely part-time job at Jimmy John’s and an unnecessary Vyvanse prescription, so I had a disgusting amount of free time to practice the “art” of trolling strangers online.
Craigslist is essentially the lowest common denominator of ways to use the internet and it’s brimming with people who are just functional enough to navigate the web and type on a keyboard. Thus, it was a gold mine for deception artists losers like me, who were looking to grab the low hanging fruit and easily scratch the trolling itch.
I started out by scouring my local Craigslist posts for potential victims, but over time, that just wasn’t enough, so I expanded my boundaries and infiltrated new regions. Like a fiend, I was perusing the Craigslist listings of all the major (and non-major) U.S. metros, from Portland, Oregon to Portland, Maine and everything in between, from Kansas City, Missouri to Missouri City, Texas.
While it was common knowledge that Craigslist users were among the easiest people to fuck with on the world wide web (shoutout to the Don’t Even Reply guy), I came to find out through real-life experience and other cyber ventures that the funnest group of humans to mess with was the vegan community (the vocal, self-righteous minority). So, when it came to vegans who doubled as Craigslist users, well:
These were the type of ads that got my blood flowing like the Yangtze. Packed with red flags for remarkable reactions: oddly-placed exclamation points, aggressive demands with keywords like “we need” and “no exceptions,” and of course, overly-impassioned veganism. In these scenarios, I typically pretended to be a stupid, bigoted douche in an attempt to easily elicit high quality responses.
The majority of people I tried to text would either ignore me when they realized something was awry or simply didn’t provide me with post-worthy material, but every once in a while, someone would swallow the hook and stick with me till the very end:
In retrospect, this was more obnoxious than funny, but maybe that’s just because I’m immensely more mature than the fresh-faced 23-year-old boy who originally posted it.
It ended up going semi viral on Twitter and once it penetrated the vegan community’s timelines, I got my first taste of what it was like to offend a large group of people online and get bombarded with hateful replies and messages. It tasted like Eve’s apple. I wanted more.
This ad was a lot more pleasant and less demanding, but I couldn’t just ignore it.
No yes offense to Android users, but the infamous green text bubble popping up on my phone served as a telltale sign that I had a far greater chance of getting a bite.
In reality, the only loser of this conversation was me for walking around my apartment complex, plucking and collecting plant life like a complete dickhead.
As I advanced into adulthood and obtained a full-time job, I evolved into less of a loser and no longer had the energy or drive to engage in such tomfoolery. However, I would still occasionally initiate discussions in the various vegan Facebook groups that I must’ve massed joined during one of my amphetamine-aided all nighters. I even accidentally made some friends in the process:
This was actually a pretty wholesome response. Extraordinarily weird. But wholesome.