Why does everybody hate rick astley

This looks too The background and having the camera move just feels off. Like the Mandela effect or how uncanny valley of something. The floor is this content.

Actually, this is impressive. Log In Submit. Log In. Via Revideo. Our new weekly series What The Heck Is … exists to shed light on the strange unexplained acronyms and unfamiliar buzzwords that creep into our everyday lives. This Saturday it will be Rick Astley's birthday. Hopefully, most of you know the Rickroll well.

Rick rolling started around on online bulletin boards like 4chan and Reddit, where users would post a link that unexpectedly directed other users to a video of Rick Astley's "Never Gonna Give You Up". Hence, Rickrolling.

It's supposedly an evolution of an earlier prank called duckrolling where people were unexpectedly send to a image of a duck on wheels accompanied by "The Picard Song" by DarkMateria. One of the classic comedy principles is misdirection. A story is built up, sending you down one train of thought before the punchline hits and gives you the opposite. The result? Considering YouTube only counts a view after 30 seconds, this would suggest billions more have hit back almost immediately on the video in a rick-roll-rage.

Users of 4chan, an anonymous and somewhat adult website, began the rick-roll before Rockstar Games released trailers for Grand Theft Auto IV. The online world was eagerly waiting and fingers were able to click faster than minds could process. And click they did. The reasons why are embedded in understanding the new currency that we deal in — certainly in the information industries, and especially journalism.

That currency is the hyperlink, a pointer to somewhere on the internet that holds some information that someone else might find useful. Like any currency, it can be debased, and lose its value. But in the link economy, when everyone's passing around links, every person is their own central bank, determining the value of their own currency.

And at the risk of sounding po-faced, I have to say that the practice of rickrolling puts you onto the slippery slope. You go into a form of debt.

Once you start rickrolling people, and more importantly get a reputation for it, you're heading towards being the Zimbabwean dollar in the link economy: it doesn't matter how many you offer, people just aren't going to buy them. Doing that is dangerous just when we're putting more and more of ourselves out in the open through social networks.

If your Facebook page's principal URL said "click here for more about me! That you liked a practical joke, perhaps. This could be useful for them to know. But they wouldn't have learnt anything about you, apart from that fact.