What is a Rickroll?
A Rickroll is a link which supposedly leads to something interesting and relevant to the conversation at hand, but actually lands the unwary user on a video of Rick Astley singing his 1980s hit “Never Gonna Give You Up.” Someone who clicks on such a link is said to have been “Rickrolled,” and there are numerous derivatives of the Rickroll, all of which feature ludicrous songs. This Internet meme exploded in 2007, and became large enough to be featured in the mainstream media on several occasions. There is some debate as to the origins of the Rickroll. Obviously, Internet users have been pranking each other with bogus links since long before the Rickroll came into prominence, and several Internet communities claim to have refined the Rickroll. The most likely culprit behind the mainstream Rickroll is 4chan, an image sharing community which originally created the duckroll, a link which sent users to an animated image of a rolling wooden duck, or a photoshopped picture of a duck with whee
For those of you who haven’t yet encountered the Internet phenomenon known as the Rickroll, here’s the Wikipedia entry: Rickroll Rickrolling is an Internet meme involving Rick Astley’s music video for his song “Never Gonna Give You Up”. In a Rickroll, a person provides a link they claim is relevant to the topic at hand which actually takes the user to the Astley video. It can also mean playing the song loudly in public in order to be disruptive. The practice began as a variant of an earlier prank called duckrolling, in which a link to a popular celebrity or news item would instead lead to a photoshopped picture of a duck with wheels. By May 2007, the practice had become widespread, and it eventually began to garner some coverage in the mainstream media. More… More below the fold.
