Now that you have read parts 1 and 2, let's move on to how readers feel about the flood of meming from their friends and why.
What They're Really Saying - Caroline's Rant
Chain Letters The Bane Of Lisa's Existence - Rant
Guilt-Trippers - Rant by BP and Ocean Elf
This forum thread about memes is short enough to post here.
Chain e mails
Pofarmer
Posted 3/7/2013 21:06 (#2949749)
Subject: Chain e mails
Anybody else automatically just delete them all?
milofarmer1
Posted 3/7/2013 21:13 (#2949776 -
Subject: Re: Chain e mails
Texas/New Mexico Stateline
Uh, yeah. Never once forwarded a chain email.
hinfarm
Posted 3/7/2013 22:19 (#2949992
Subject: Re: Chain e mails
Amherst WI
I get up to 4 a day from one friend. Im real close to setting him to junk mail.
Red/Green
Posted 3/8/2013 14:24 (#2951024
Subject: Re: Chain e mails
Elizabethtown,KY
+100
This article is about a former-boss who is addicted to sending chain letters, and how receiving them makes the writer feel.
There is a Disqus comment form on that page, but it seems to be closed. So, it is open on this link.
On Yahoo Answers I down-voted the comments that included anti-chains.
Recipients get annoyed with memes, their originators, and these top five and all of the following reasons.
1. Even if they are meant to stay between a few select people, prank letters, especially when posted on a social network, turn into viral pests. This is because your circle of friends also has their own circles of friends, which in turn, have their own circle of friends, so, if you start a hoax about yourself as missing or dying or whatever, and your friends might think it's funny, but somebody else who is listed as one of their friends but not listed as your friend, looks at this friend's profile and bulletins, and this stranger looking at your friend's profile, sees your missing/dying hoax and assumes it's for real, and compulsively passes it along to their friends, who pass it on to theirs.
2. Re-sharing hoax memes can even get innocent people in trouble for stirring up unnecessary panic and clogging up resources with junk. Case in point, the flashing headlight gang initiation hoax has fooled so many people, from the average person on the street to officials. People have become alarmed, didn't think to check it out on TruthOrFiction or Hoax-Slayer to make sure it was untrue before sending faxes and emails to many people at the corporate level. One person even got arrested for inducing panic. Ann Sibila sent fliers out, spreading a gang initiation hoax.
Sending offensive chain emails even from home computer to home computer can get you fired from your job, because these things always have a way of ending up on office computers.
3. Another danger of sharing memes is that every time they are spread, your info is at risk of being spread to potentially millions of complete strangers, including spammers. This holds true for social networks too, not just email. If you have your settings to private, but your meme-loving friend has theirs set to public, and you share a meme, that friend in turn, shares your status, and just like that, your name and profile link are made public. Invasive meme applications are designed to collect users and their information too. Facebook games and quiz apps are memes. So, the more memes you share, the more spam you will get, and the more spam you will cause your friends to get as well.
4. Reader/recipient feels Insulted and is disappointed by the gullibility of their friend who re-shared a meme with some hairbrained claim they're supposed to believe, like forwarding to (spamming) 5 people will get you a peck on the cheek and passing it on to (spamming) 10 people will get you an engagement ring and how you are a better friend if you repost a meme and that if you get it back 12 times you have 12 true friends!
That's absolute bull!
What friend believes that? What true friend thinks one is stupid enough to believe it as well?
5. Infuriated their friend would share chain letter threats for not forwarding an email, blog meme, Facebook wall post or whatever the medium. "If you don't forward this, I know you're not my friend." "If you don't pass this on, you'll never get kissed, never be hugged, never be loved, lose any friends you have now, and turn everything you touch into a block of tofu, a child will die, the god you believe in, whatever religion you keep, will be ashamed of you for denying him for refusing or forgetting to repost that meme!"
6. Readers know it's a hoax and don't like seeing their friends get manipulated into making the bad choice of sharing something that isn't true, especially when the memes are so obviously ridiculous that anyone with sense should know better. This includes all the sappy so-called "friendship" and "blessing" chain letters as much as the urban legends.
7. People are incensed at the sick minds out there that apparently can't find anything better to do with their time than make up particularly sick lies, add heaping helpings of scary photoshopped pictures, guilt-trips, threats, combinations of these, and send them out in order to see how far the malicious hoax spreads and get a huge belly-laugh at the emotional expense of others. This is particularly dirty considering how vulnerable and naive some people are, so, they are very easy prey for the anonymous trolling cowards who start and re-start these memes.
8. People feel embarrassed their friends bought into some ridiculous meme, and insulted that anyone thought they would be silly enough to believe in it as well.
9. They feel disrespected and/or abandoned by "friends" who: keep spreading memes despite numerous requests to stop,
B. Couldn't be bothered to take that extra minute and send them a personal "Hi, how's it going?", opting to send them a bogus warning, email survey, stale joke, false celebrity essay, story or quote, political or religious rant, sappy tear-jerking story or stale fluffy chain letter that's about as real and personal as a TV commercial instead.
This tells the recipient: "I will gladly take orders from a chain letter than honour your requests or our friendship. You are not as important to me as chain letters." At 01-25-2012 12:23 AM, MaggieToo posted a topic called Chain Letter Emails on a forum, but there were no responses, and it was a good post, so it is shown just below: "I'm sick of getting these. It is mostly from one person, and I have told her many times I don't want to get them. I don't know how many times I should have to tell her to not send them to me. Is there a way to block a person from my email? Grrrr"
10. When people discover after debunking a few re-shares that their meme-addicted "friends" are no longer interested in staying in touch with them, but continue spread memes to other people and forums, they have come to the cold, hard, sad realization that chain letter spam is more important to these "friends" than they are.
11. The recipient or reader feels they are being preached at, put down, judged and coerced. If one sees so many memes telling them what friendship is and what a hug is and what a smile is and how meaningful it is to have friends, well gosh, one must be considered by the memers as a pretty inept person to need all these sappy sermon-like emails/social network status/wall/timeline posts, whatever medium they take, and pretty stupid to believe that by spamming social networks and people's inboxes with this fake tripe one is "spreading around the love and blessings and friendship" please!
12. The memer does not appear to practice what their favorite type of chain letter proclaims or preaches.
13. People are just plain sick of seeing the same old memes turning up again and again on web forums, blogs, and social networks, in addition to their private inboxes.
Hello guys
by: Kcool
I had to change my first phone number because I gave it to this girl at school who sends a bunch of that stupid things called "Chain letters". And you can't imagine how much that angered me. Every morning, I woke up feeling popular with about 8 text messages... then I'd check... chainletterchainletterchainletterchainletterchainletterchainletterchainletter... Mommy loves you!
Then I'd be like wtf? and I'd loose faith in humanity(which I've never had).
So then I changed my number. But this particular morning, I woke up at the wonderful hour of 5 AM with a text message alert... YOU WILL HAVE THE BEST DAY IN YOUR LIFE... Of course, I called the person back, surprised at what kind of idiot wakes up at 5 AM on a no school day... So yeah, at least my mum is lucky I didn't decide to smash my phone against the wall instead.
So please, all of you who send chain letters, do humanity a favour... AND FVCKING STOP THAT! It's on quibblo, it's on FaceBook,it's on text, email and soon will be on TV -.- Seriously, chain letters can't get more obnoxious... "Send to five people or else Jason from Friday 13 will appear in your house tonight"
Yes... um Chain letters are almost as annoying as likewh0res, but at least those stay on FaceBook, they haven't reached Quibblo... Also happens with my comment box... how do you think I feel when I see a new comment on my profile? Then I see it's a chain letter... Then if you were the one who sent it, expect me with a chainSAW in yoru house tonightNo, not for a sleepover
And chain letters are so fake! How can you people believe them?"If you don't send this to 600 people in 6 hours, your mum will turn to a dinosaur" Yeah someday someone will make one like that, and I bet a lot of teenagers wil be sending around this message claiming that if you don't resend that your mum will turn to a dino. Anyways, who wouldn't like to have a dino-mum? I mean, we already have teens, so why not dinosaurs?
SO yes, I hope I've educated in some way those of you who send chain letters, next time you'll send one think of the person who's day you will ruin by waking them up at 5 AM(thank you very much, person who did that to me). I'm now done ranting. Have a nice day!
Some recipients have simply had it up to here with getting forwards that have nothing at all to do directly with the sender in question, that have already been received several times from other sources within as many days and turn out to be another round of that awful heart-wrending tear-jerker story about that unbelievably altruistic fictional dead kid who reached out to his equally fictitious mom from Heaven with invisible ink or that girl dead from one of those drunk-driving incidents, and the petition is bogus and not even from MADD to begin with.
From a blog that is no longer updated is a short but expressive post on the problems memes cause.
Please don’t send me chain letters in my ask, even the ones that are meant to be uplifting/motivational/esteem boosting.
All they do is stress me out and make me feel a not-so-lovely combination of annoyance over getting a chain letter, guilt for not passing it on when someone I follow might actually WANT it, and self loathing that probably the only unprompted ‘you are loved’ type message I’ll receive in my ask is an unpersonalized copy/paste deal from someone who only sent it because I happened to be a certain number on their dash.
I know you mean well, but please don’t. Just skip me if you feel the need to pass those on.
# CHAIN LETTERS # ASKBOX # CHAIN ASKS # THIS IS NOT A PLEA FOR PEOPLE TO SAY NICE THINGS IN MY DASH # I'M HONESTLY NOT IN THE KIND OF HEADSPACE WHERE I COULD TAKE THAT RIGHT NOW
jackwidowss-blog liked this
absentlyabbie said: I too grit my teeth on these. I usually just thank the person and let it die the death it deserves in my askbox, or ignore it altogether.
In addition, these memes:
- Are always going on about how you or your best friend could die or telling some other sad tale, along with heavy doses of attempted guilt-tripping into forwarding the chain further.
Is that any way to treat a friend?
- Imposing belief systems the recipient doesn't share, or does not require a lecture on, so feels condescended to.
These memes are often stories that are so far-fetched and prejudicial they've had the truth stretched out of them.
- Making the recipient feel as if they are being judged and told off for not having the right attitude about life, being told that somehow their own feelings and experiences are somehow invalid and unimportant and wrong, because somebody who has it worse off is infinitely happy all the time.
- Are always some kind of deliberately modified heart-yanker.
Not to mention many were ripped off their original sources and embellished out the wazoo in an attempt to get the recipient's emotions to explode and short-circuit into a sharing spree/ forwarding frenzy.
Some of us are on to this scheme and seriously don't appreciate it!
Please, Consider this very carefully.
We are having a good day and we don't want it marred by yet another story involving cancer, bullying and suicide, or how some kid totally pwned an adult or two or twenty, or - shall I go on? Likewise, we may be having an average to not so great day and really don't want to be told it's our own faults for feeling less than bubbly because the unbelievable guy in that inspirational forward says "we choose our emotions." This goes particularly flat when one can't help getting sickened by another brutal viral clout over the emotions.
14. People are fed up to here with honest to goodness fun personal conversations and notes back and forth degenerating as friends seem to think that because we are emailing or doing social network posts/messages now, we would like to receive or read memes from them!
So, it all too soon goes from smiling at the sight of emails from these friends, or their names showing up in the social network news-feeds, to groans, frowns, rolling eyes, and sometimes all out scowls depending on how grievous the latest meme is that they re-shared; and how many times people continued replicating the spammy memes when repeatedly asked and eventually told to cut it out.
15. The excuses for replicating memes only add to the annoyance.. This goes particularly sour when the memer actually knows what they're spreading is a hoax, but still thinks it's a good way to serve as or jumpstart communication. Knowingly spreading hoaxes is nothing short of irresponsible. There's bound to be a few people who actually believe what they're reading, and so, spread the hoax even further.
No one wants another's recycled junk, and that's exactly what memes are.
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