On Nov. 3, 2013, a little-known website called ViralNova posted a story under the headline, "This Recently Married Man Just Realized Marriage Is Not For Him. You Have To Read What He Wrote." As of today, it has been liked 973,000 times on Facebook. An unrelated BuzzFeed post published on the same day has racked up 286,000 likes, which correlated with about 3,700,000 total views. This would suggest that the ViralNova post has been viewed over 12,000,000 times. It was a monster hit. The story is both jarringly new and eerily familiar. It is published on a site that clearly mimics the style, down to the font, of Upworthy, a new, wildly successful media company that specializes in packaging political and social advocacy videos in ways likely to get them shared on Facebook. (Sample headline: "What He Has To Say About Your Favorite Products And Brands Should Do More Than Worry You.") Slightly older internet users will recognize something old and essential about these ultra-sharable, context-free packets of emotion: They are, in all ways but technically, email chain letters. Consider how natural this looks: Fwd: Fwd: Fwd: This recently married man just realized marriage is not for him. You HAVE to read what he wrote The "body" of this post belies its roots: It's a first-person, life-affirming letter from a man you don't know but feel like you could; the font even changes to and from bold. Readers are given the courtesy of a source link, though it falsely claims to lead you to the "original" version of the text, which is a notional upgrade from the chain-letter days. At the end, rather than implore its readers to forward the message to their friends — at least 10, lest something bad happen — ViralNova asks its audience a couple questions: "Do you agree with him? Disagree? Share it on Facebook below." Email chain letters thrived, and continued to thrive, for being compelling. But they were influenced by — and allowed to flourish within — a total lack of any meaningful context. The internet of the early '90s was a far-flung digital destination that was, for most users, hardly integrated with real life. And within that internet, email was more isolated yet: It was a discrete, dark back channel where information decayed as fast as it spread, where facts, claims, and their sources are at rest in a state of separation.

Snopes was the answer to chain-letter internet, where sentimental, truthy forwards were flanked and often overtaken by messages of a more sinister variety: the "Vince Foster's Friend and CONFIDANTE Speaks OUT FOR THE FIRST TIME!! Please Pass This On" types of messages, which took advantage of email's relative isolation from the world, and distrust in media, to spread appealing falsehoods. If my inbox is any indication, however, these particular types of chain letters have fallen to the wayside. Why? Email is now as much a part of the internet as search, which tends to be fatal to the conspiratorial style of chain letter, which now must be exceptionally sensational to warrant a "what the media has been hiding" angle. Likewise for the get-rich-quick chain letters, which have been replaced with hypertargeted fraud, or phishing.