What is a RickRoll?

The basis

A Rick Roll, Rickroll, or Rick-Roll is an internet bait-and-switch prank involving a hyperlink that unexpectidly brings the user to the music video for Rick Astley’s 1987 song Never Gonna Give You Up. As an example, here’s a link to a delicious recipe for cookies.

Origin

There was a filter on the internet fourm 4chan that would change the word egg to duck. So if you tried to type egg, it was replaced with duck. If you typed eggman, it was replaced with duckman. Somebody tried to type eggroll, and the filter changed it to duckroll. Then somebody created this beautiful image of a duck on wheels.

Users then preceded to pull the bait & switch trick with the duckroll. For example, here’s a link to my Nana’s recipie for homemade bread. You can probobobly see the rest of the story from here. People started doing the same thing with Astley’s song. What is known as the sort of “official” start of rickrolling was one April 1st when YouTube booby trapped every video on the “fetured videos” page to lead to the song. Further reading here.

Examples

While I don’t feel like taking the time to embed or even copy/paste individual rickroll examples in here, here’s a few databases with quite a few rickrolls in them.

rickastley.rocks <– I recommend this one, and I’m tottaly not bias or anythingi’ve given up (haha) on this project

YouTube “Rick Rolls To Trick Poeople With” playlist

Protect yourself!

There’s this cool Chrome extension I found that shows a little Rick Astley head next to every link that could potentially be a rickroll, you can go download it here.

Additional reading

Is this just not enough info for you? There’s quite a bit of info about Rickrolling and what it is and some of the first uses of it over on the Wikipedia article. There’s also this amazing YouTube video that goes way too much into detail if you’re the kind of person who appriciates that sort of thing.