#oneaday Day 308: Chain Letter

It's weird how stupid things tend to go in cycles.

Earlier today, it occurred to me that some of the pointless nonsense that happens on Twitter is essentially an evolution of the good old "chain letter" that was a thing back when people first started getting email addresses — and which was sent through the actual post before we all got electronic and hyper-connected.

If you're unfamiliar, a chain letter is simply something designed to be copied and shared as much as possible. In the "good old" days, it made use of emotionally manipulative tactics or superstition to guilt or scare the recipient into passing it on to other people; these days they tend to carry with them the promise of online social capital, colloquially referred to in the ever-evolving vernacular of the Internet as "clout" these days.

In the email days, chain letters typically involved some sort of urban myth "you won't believe this" story — the Buzzfeed bullshit of its day — followed by some sort of exhortation to pass this on to [x] number of friends or [y] unpleasant thing will happen to you. Today, on Twitter, the latter part tends to be missing, but instead the content itself is usually designed to be emotionally manipulative in some way, usually using completely arbitrary criteria to sort people into categories.

The most popular types right now are the "what does your birth month/star sign say about you" variety, where the composer of the tweet makes up some sort of arbitrary descriptor for every month/star sign, then encourages people to quote-tweet it and pass it around. The result is usually a timeline filled with people going "omg, I'm October I can't believe I'm bad in bed" or "yes, this is correct, I'm December, I don't like Sword Art Online".

There's an argument to be made that this sort of thing on Twitter is inherently less harmful than the email chain letters of yore in that they're obviously stupid and in most cases aren't attempting to spread misinformation; contrast with the endless "virus warning" emails most of us probably got back in the early 2000s, which were all, without fail, completely fabricated in an attempt to induce panic in those less computer-literate.

But there are also arguments to be made that this sort of thing is feeding Twitter's algorithms and causing it to consider certain types of content to be "higher quality" under its own opaque criteria, and thus more likely to be pushed into people's feeds or otherwise promoted. As it happens, this is the same argument as to why you shouldn't argue with people in quote tweets; rather than making yourself look like the heroic type standing up to the idiot with the wrong opinion, you're just providing said idiot with that all-important "engagement", which tells Twitter's bots behind the scenes that idiot's posts are "important" and should be promoted more.

Social media was much more fun before all this "algorithm" nonsense. Remember when Twitter and Facebook were simple chronological lists of things that people you actually knew had posted, and actual decent conversations happened?

Hmm, I'm not 100% sure that last bit ever happened… perhaps I imagined it all!