Why exactly do these things live still?

I'm not surprised. Chain letters and the variants that it has spawned to in some way inspire a series of unoriginal emails/chat sessions have blown up on the internet. We can't even filter them out as spam, because people we know are now sending them to us. And every once in a while, that someone we know sends us something newsworthy, important or relevant which we would otherwise miss by simply deleting everything.

It has a few differences, but the main source I'm noting that endures and sustains popularity (meaning re-forwarding power) is the quiz show variety. A series of disjointed, even irrelevant, questions, designed in someway to elicit information on someone and their secretive nature or habit. These were ok, when they first began circulating..like say. .8 or 10 years ago. They were amusing for the random sequences of objective data that they could collect. But now they come all the time. And they ask a number of questions which imply certain things, but do not clarify (and thus lack any objectivity or purpose). They are not without value, if one was engaged in either marketing/polling/mass speed dating. But otherwise, I'm not sure that gathering such data on people we don't talk to IRL has much value. If we really suspected from the various bits and pieces of someone's messages and insights that they were a decent human being, perhaps we could be asking direct and insightful questions of our own to determine the value and potential of this rare fellow to be a kindred spirit, unique for their attributes in our personal galaxy of friendships.

Are they amusing? Perhaps. If someone took the time to write one out that was generating embarassing private information or a funny story here or there. Are they pointless? You bet. Do we fill them out and send them on? In droves. We've grown smart enough to realize that those ridiculous 'counter' emails do nothing (well.. some of us) and we've grown smart enough to realize that chain letters are fake. But the concept of the forwarded quiz is a new breed. And it is time this mutant took a fall back to reality.