The re-evolution of email chains: Why social thrives on simplicity

The year is 2003. Your Yahoo inbox jingles at you with a new message, subject “FW:FW:FW: Send this to 10 people or bad luck for 7 years”. A random classmate has CC’d you along with everyone else they have in their address book. Inside is a horrifying tale of urban legend. Dutifully, you click “FWD” and send it on to another 10 people.

The early social internet was a largely silly place, with MySpace and AOL offering bright colours and personalised fonts. Emojis were created by teens trying to be cool and different, and relationship updates and cringey status posts were social currency.

Today, in place of typo’d song lyrics, we have a “share” option on Spotify that will post directly to your Instagram Story. Instead of typing TT_TT or xD, we have thousands of pre-set emojis on their own keyboard (and a whole movie about them to boot). The impulses are the same, but the tools have proliferated and professionalised. These platforms have become host to a whole new genre of entertainment, but authenticity, and a feeling of things being truly personal, has been lost beneath all the polish and promotion on the major feeds. 

That authenticity has instead moved elsewhere. Discord channels now do what Facebook Groups did in 2010. ‘Close Friends’ stories on Instagram in 2025 are akin to the feed in 2015. 2003’s chain mail has been rebirthed as WhatsApp groups: I was recently added to a gimmicky 612-person channel where the challenge is only to post specific photos of drinks. I was added by a friend, who was added by a friend, and in turn I added a few friends as well – the ghost of that old Yahoo email sound haunting the process as I did so. And if you go back even further, all these tools just replaced the same behaviours happening in the post, the pub, and the local paper.  For all the digital innovation, it seems we have just come full circle.

The key takeaway is twofold. The first is that while formats may change, what we do with them largely does not. Teenagers messing about with guitars in a garage has moved to them doing it in bedrooms and through Stitches on TikTok. Chain mail moved from paper to email to WhatsApp.

The second is a bigger lesson for the future of social. Audiences will watch entertaining content when it is offered to them – but when they want to interact with each other, sometimes simplicity (and a degree of privacy) is best.

We have all the tools we could ever possibly desire, and many we do not. “Enough!” screams the overwhelmed millennial, buried in a digital retelling of the 'one grain of rice' fable we never asked for. In an increasingly complicated digital world dominated by complex algorithms and AI proliferation, the most memorable interactions can be in something as basic as a mass WhatsApp group.