Love Of The Game: An Inside Look At An Amateur Trolling Collective

No space on the internet is safe from trolling. Even back in the '90s, when the web was first introduced to the world, trolls already existed, seeming to crawl up out of the swamp right as internet forums were becoming a thing to spread lite misinformation and cause other users aggravation for no real reason but entertainment.

Warlording is one of the earliest forms of trolling documented today. This act sees users change their message signature to an unnecessarily large ASCII graphic, which makes it hard for other users to scroll past. Kind of like this:

Warlording took off on a number of Usenet forums for simply being entertaining. Reading through each individual long-form signature, often hiding tons of references and jokes within them, became a great time-waster, and striving to make the next great signature was a challenge. This shows how trolling spreads from one person to the next like a virus, often evolving and changing as it does, similar to how Rickrolling lead us to Stickbugging and then to Hey Stinky-ing.

It becomes a game to most, even if it causes some moderators a bit of grief. It's no wonder that in today's internet landscape trolling is inescapable. You'll see people making entire careers out of it, the best of them blurring the lines between what's real and fake, like Coppercab, Dax Flame and even Ava Louise, who started a rumor earlier this week about Kanye West and Jeffree Star hooking up. Trolling is often a great avenue towards clout, arguably the most important currency on the web, and users like this have perfected the act of transforming trolling from something you do just for fun into a legitimate growth tactic.

It goes without saying though, that there's a lot less tact in telling a lie about two big celebrities to hundreds of thousands of young followers on TikTok than there is to warlording or talking about Edward Scissorhands on live TV when asked about Edward Snowden.

Nevertheless, there are still trolls out there who are in it for the "art of the troll." Meet TomFootballBrady, one of the founding members of a small trolling collective responsible for a number of significant initiatives in the scene. We asked Tom how he started his career as a troll to get an insider's perspective.

"I was hanging with my friend who used Reddit occasionally, and he told me about seeing a bunch of disingenuous shitposts on r/Showerthoughts, and I suggested that we make both accounts for the sole purpose of creating stupid troll threads just for the sake of getting a reaction. It sounds kinda like a non-starter, and I thought that it wouldn't really go anywhere, but I hadn't realized how little a lot of people on Reddit are able to detect bait. Some are completely unable to discern trolling, so it actually took off really well from the start."

With this newfound realization ripe for the picking, he then created a Reddit account named "PatriotsTomBrady" and from there, embarked on his trolling career.

"I remember the first instance of a huge reaction to a post was one where I had made just a text post to r/Showerthoughts where I just said "The McRib is back, baby". Someone reposted it to r/lostredditors and it got thousands of upvotes in less than an hour and it sort of brought me an audience. I figured that at this point I should create a subreddit and Discord server for like-minded people. After a while of small-scale trolls, I figured that I should coordinate larger subreddit flooding efforts and get other more people into the group to help out. There are probably 12 people who are currently super invested in everything going on, but there are about 50 people who actively bait people and 200 total members of the Discord server."

On his Instagram page, Tom routinely posts screenshots of his latest trolling efforts. Most of these are ridiculous posts to various subreddits, like a post to /r/WWE asking whether he should skip church to watch wrestling reruns. Some are simple shitposts, like one to /r/neurology about white people needing to say "boom shakalaka" every 25 seconds that was swiftly removed by moderators.

While many of these trolling attempts don't get far past the launching pad, all of them involve a certain level of creativity and dedication to the art. You can tell Tom is just out here having a good time, and it's likely this approach to trolling that's allowed him to create such a thriving community, which has also provided him the chance to take on many larger-scale trolling initiatives, like a raid on /r/hotdogs, where his trolling managed to transcend annoyance and transform into something much bigger.

"The r/hotdogs story goes back a long way. I remember about a year or two ago, we started shitposting on r/hamburgers with pictures of poop burgers or the most disgusting looking inedible shit we could find. The mods weren't doing anything about it, no matter how much people reported us. They were just completely inactive. At some point, someone mentioned that we could use r/redditrequest (a subreddit owned by the site admins) to take ownership of a certain subreddit from inactive moderators. When we tried doing that, the top mod became active all of a sudden, and he banned all of us and completely revamped and redesigned the sub. We thought it was weird how he only cared about moderating his sub when his ownership of it was under threat.

We did some digging and found out that he owned a shit ton of subs, somewhere in the hundreds, and he was also friends with a bunch of people that modded hundreds of subreddits as well. We decided to post as much garbage as we could on as many of his subreddits that he publicly owned. He was a mod of r/BeforeNAfterAdoption and r/Missouri despite having absolutely no interest in either thing. After practically destroying a ton of his biggest subreddits, he got us all banned and explained in a comment that he was friends with the Reddit admins and could get practically anything he wanted. Being pissed at him for getting all of our accounts banned, and being pissed that the Reddit admins give hundreds of subs to people who are power-hungry but irresponsible just because they're friends or have money, we created a bunch of new accounts and decided to stay laser-focused on one of his subs, r/hotdogs. We waited long enough so that we knew he would have forgotten about us and stopped caring about modding his subs again.

About a year ago, a bunch of us gathered together to just inundate the entire subreddit with that picture of Joey Salads with his dick in a hotdog bun for about two days straight. Absolutely no response from the mods for about 48 hours. There were hundreds of posts, and about a thousand people in total left the subreddit. When he came back to the mess, he blocked all of us and demoted every single subreddit moderator who wasn't actively cleaning up our damage. There are a couple of other instances of us raiding a subreddit owned by an inactive mod who coincidentally owns hundreds of subs that are of the same magnitude as this, like how we raided r/skyscrapers with a picture of the Lincoln Cathedral for no reason whatsoever."

We asked Tom if he went into this raid with the intention to revamp the sub and get the mods reinvested in it, or if he just did it for the love of the troll.

"At the time, my only objective was really getting on the nerves of that one mod, but in hindsight, I think I was doing the subreddits a favor, as they're all more heavily moderated now and the designs have been completely updated. In a way, I have gotten kinda gotten a bunch of subreddits to get their shit together unintentionally. Because of us, r/Showerthoughts now has a minimum comment karma requirement for posting, as we used to just create dozens and dozens of alts just for the sake of posting random dumb shit there. You also aren't allowed to post pictures of the Lincoln Cathedral to r/skyscrapers anymore, but I guess that could be interpreted as a downside."

While it may not have been his intention, Tom has taken a devious art like trolling and turned it into something with a purpose, using it to kick inactive moderators into gear on multiple subreddits. Of course, that doesn't mean every trolling initiative he takes part in is so valiant. Arguably, Tom's most successful troll is something known as the Whooky Sack, a fairly underground meme that was recently shared by Instagram meme page salad.snake, where it hit nearly 50,000 likes and saw a number of reposts.

"I'm not actually the one who came up with it, that was the now banned u/fortnitebruh37, but my post to the Kanye subreddit talking about lyrics referencing Kanye's whooky sack in 'My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy' created a pretty huge wave after @salad.snake posted it. I have spoken to Salad a few times in the past, he's actually in our Discord server, but he came across the post himself and had no idea it was me. The whooky sack gag has been lingering in the underground for a while now, and seeing it blow up in the way that it has just made me happy."

He then went on to describe his surprising role in making the Bingus cat meme from November 2020.

"If not that, then maybe the whole Bingus the cat meme. We basically turned r/ambien from a drug discussion community to a shitpost sub through a systematic effort to post a lot of troll-y garbage under the radar of the mods. It worked, and because of that, some dude posted the "AAHHHHHHHH. hi bingus" thing on the sub and it took off from there. It's now pretty much a mainstream meme now. What's funny is that we successfully Reddit requested r/bingus to make it our hub subreddit long before the Bingus cat was ever a thing. We just thought the word "bingus" was funny. At the time, the sub only had like 70 members, none of whom were active, and now it has over 4,000. Since I'm still a mod of the sub, I'm not sure if I should leave it alone or use it to my advantage for stuff in the future."

"I've burned through a dozen accounts, probably. It has a lot to do with the fact that Reddit will ban every account that has been logged onto a device if that device has logged on to a single banned account. So once one of my accounts are banned, so are my alts. I think Reddit might have implemented that policy because of us just creating new accounts over and over and over to do the same thing. I remember how we had an open-source account, where everyone in the server had access to the username and password. It got banned, and so did all of us within two days."

Many wannabe trolls would have given up after having so many accounts deleted, but not Tom. Tom has an undying love of the game and stands as proof that you miss 100 percent of the shots you don't take. You'll never make them all, but you have to try. We asked Tom if he's ever regretted any of his trolling attempts, or if any have ever gone too far.

"Personally, I don't think I've yet done anything that would warrant serious regret. At worst, I've probably just put a few people in a bad mood or made some moderator's job harder. There have been a few instances of things getting serious for other people in the group, though. I recall someone posting some dumbshit to r/Showerthoughts, and a woman commented "I-is this supposed to be a joke?" only for him to turn back around and comment the exact same question on one of her posts where she was asking for professional advice over intense pain that she experienced after receiving a caudal steroid epidural injection. For whatever reason, his comment received 13 fucking awards, and this was back when all awards costed money to give. She deleted her account, so I fear that people probably harassed her or something in PMs saying "I-is this supposed to be a joke?" She was like a 32-year-old nurse and not just some NEET, which makes it a little more awkward. Admittedly, it was funny."

Trolling comes with consequences, especially when performed on a large scale, and those consequences go both ways. The guerilla troll loses his accounts and therefore struggles to build clout, receives blocking and text-lashings, and has to live with fact that they've probably hurt some feelings over the web. The victims have to live with the troll, and the potential backlash they might receive from being in the position of "the fool."

Love it or hate it, it's the way of the internet, and nothing is black and white. Tom shows us that trolling comes with setbacks and benefits, but at the end of the day, it's all just a game we're forced to take sides in at one time or another as either the troll or the trolled. TomFootballBrady has chosen his side, and he doesn't care who knows it.

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