So, I’ve been digging into the weird genealogy of the first real internet meme – the Rickroll – and I’ve found some pretty twisted backstory that’s worth a second look. Care to hear how a glitch turned into a worldwide prank?

Okay, listen up. The first real Rickroll didn’t come from a genius prankster planning to embarrass millions. It started as a dumb error in a 2007 forum thread on a Russian image board. Someone had copied a link to a video of a woman dancing, not realizing the embedded code was wrong – the HTML had a misspelt attribute, so the browser tried to load a fallback source. That fallback was a 1977 song clip: “Never Gonna Give You Up.” The video rendered because of a glitch in the player’s buffering algorithm, so instead of the dance video the entire thread froze on the Rick Astley track. A few users hit “play” by accident and found themselves listening to a cheesy 80s pop hit while scrolling through unrelated content. They were annoyed at first, but when they saw the absurdity of a dead forum thread suddenly echoing a hit song, they started sharing the link as a joke. A new tag appeared: #rickroll. As the tag spread to other boards, the same glitch – a broken fallback in the player – would inadvertently play the Astley clip whenever a link failed. It was a cascade: the more people shared it, the more the glitch became a meme. By 2008, when a video on YouTube went viral for just the same reason, the entire internet had been tricked into a 40‑second loop of “Never Gonna Give You Up.” So yes, a tiny coding mistake turned a random dance clip into the biggest prank in digital history.