Common Sense, Where Art Thou?
How many times have you seen an email / message / IM of this sort -
Yahoo / Orkut / $service_provider has reached the maximum number of accounts and is deleting old accounts. However, there is this cool magical way of preserving yours. Just forward this message to everyone on your list. To send this message to everyone do this …
or one of its several variants.
It takes one bored joker to start a chain like that and it spreads like wild fire. If people thought about it for a second, they wouldn’t continue the rumour, but that doesn’t ever happen. I’ve stopped getting irked when I get those messages, instead, I wonder how the person who sent it to me could fall for such a prank. I’m sure everyone who’s used one of the “community” services / IM has received such a message more than once. After a while, if a person continued to forward those messages, that would mean they genuinely believe that their account was rescued the last time they forwarded the message.
Its not just lonely teenagers that join in the madness. I receive majority of these messages from smart, highly educated folks, not so insignificant number of them work for big software companies.
It’d be a good endeavour to do some analysis of human behaviour using this. Let me see, I need to select one of those services, put in a beacon somewhere, and watch as the action unfolds. I’m gonna do this one of these weekends when I’m feeling particularly evil.
General 