How to play chain letter?
@Acer Oh, no, please don't. We got plagued by chainletters in the 90's, we don't need a repeat of that!
I have no idea about it. Do you know is there a museum/archive for a chain letter?
Can chain letters be used in political usages? Any examples?
@Acer This site actually seems to explain the concept of chain letters nicely: https://wikizero.com/www///Chain_letter
It usually plays on the gullibility of the people. An example of one that got emailed to me a few times by various friends (of whom I expected better) would be something like:
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Hello. Please forward this email to 15 friends. If you do not do it you will get bad luck!!!
Somebody hasn't forwarded this email and got hit by a car. He's now 6 weeks in the hospital. But somebody else who did forward this email won the lottery!!!!! This could be you too!!!!!!! Please get good luck by forwarding this email! Do not tempt fate!!!
This is not a joke!!!!!!!
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But it could be about any range of topics.
The problem is that if you have to send it to 15 others, and they too to 15 others.. and.. and.. and.. And you would eventually receive it 1000 times because people ran out of people to send to..
Yeah, email was pretty slow back then with this exponentional rise. :P
The solution is just to ignore this bullshit.
I don't think I've got a physical chain letter (via snail mail). Too much hassle, I suppose. Email is a nice low threshold for any gullible person to press 'forward' on nowadays.
I can easily imagine some structures with physical chain letters that's more like a ponzi scheme too.
I didn't expect the toxic one. I thought it could be peacefully or something that can let people understand the initiators' concern.
@Acer What do you mean? What toxic one?
You meant: You didn't know that a chain letter could be toxic?
A chain letter is pretty much spam. If you get 100s of chainletters a day, and then they go 'respond to all' to tell others to stop sending them those chain letters.. and those others 'respond to all' too (we didn't use BCC back then either, how foolish of us).. yeah, you got fantastic spam going on lol.
I'm glad that time's far behind me, and I hope it's not coming back. ;)
I thought chain letter is something serial not parallel/concurrent and with something meaningful that need a chain of people/letters to reach a certain target you cannot directly reach.
What you described is more supposed to be named like pyramid letter, tree letter, fission letter, or multicast letter in my mind.
@Acer That is what a chain letter is. It is called chain letter because it gets sent to the next X amount persons in a friend's list, and so on, and so on, friends of friends of friends. Ad infinitum.
But yes, it is basically a pyramid-scheme letter, indeed.
@Acer I did consider that it might be a joke coming from you, but considering that you did ask regularly about certain not-so-common English terms and phrases it could've been a legitimate question as well. :)
At the very least you learned something, which is a pretty good prank. ;)