![]() ![]() “Just read it and pass it on and collect $1000 … I hope.” The bogus message was widely forwarded, which surely led to some disappointment from people who hoped to receive $1,000 for passing along what was essentially a chain letter.Īs people forwarded it to everybody they knew who had an e-mail address, they appended wishful commentary: “I’m acutely aware of this because my name was recently attached to a hoax e-mail message that was widely distributed.” The article continued: “Even more annoying than spam, in some respects, are hoaxes,” Gates wrote. It became such an annoyance to Gates personally that he posted an article condemning the email as a particularly egregious form of an internet phenomenon that had only recently been given a name: spam. The email was not only forwarded many, many thousands of times (despite no one’s ever receiving the promised $1,000), but inspired dozens of variants and copycat copypastas over time. ![]() Forward this to everyone you know and if it reaches 1000 people everyone on the list will receive $1000 at my expense. I am experimenting with this and I need your help. I have just written up an e-mail tracing program that traces everyone to whom this message is forwarded to. ![]() Nearly a decade later, on September 14th, 2018, Merriam Webster's Dictionary considered "copypasta" in their "Words We're Watching" series.One of the oldest specimens we’re aware of was an email, purportedly written by then-Microsoft CEO Bill Gates, offering $1,000 to everyone who forwarded it when the number of recipients surpassed a thousand. Attracting more than 78,000 users in less than 12 years, the subreddit allows users to share text to various copypasta templates. On September 9th, 2009, Redditor Null_Slate launched the /r/copypasta subreddit. User Elexus defined the term, "An amount of lengthy text that has been repeatedly copied from somewhere and pasted as a reply to an irrelevant subject." The post received more than 170 upvotes in less than 15 years. Urban Dictionary posted the earliest available usage of the term on April 20th, 2006. The origin of the term "copypasta" is unknown although, some report to seeing the term on Usenet and 4chan imageboards in 2006. In 1974, American computer scientist Larry Tesler, widely cited as the pioneer of "cut and paste" commands, first transferred the function into a computer text-editing software. This simple concept of "manually copying text from one place and pasting it elsewhere" has been in practice since the innovation of basic text-editing commands (copy/cut/paste) in the early 1980s and subsequent rise of spamming in the early 1990s. The term is an English portmanteau of "copy," "paste" and "pasta." Although it shares some characteristics with spam in the sense they're both unsolicited (and often considered a nuisance), copypastas are mainly spread through human operators whereas the latter is automatically generated by electronic messaging systems. Copypasta is internet slang for any block of text that gets copied and pasted over and over again, typically disseminated by individuals through online discussion forums and social networking sites. ![]()
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