I RickRolled 25,000 People.

If there were an island, named RickRollia, inhabited by wouldbe rickrollers, I would be the king of that island. If there were a
“lifetime achievement” award, or perhaps a “living legacy” trophy for RickRolling, I would win it. And, perhaps, they would rename it to the Russ Jones RickRolled Award of Excellence, which they would then give out in the future to those who aspire to my torchbearing greatness.

Why do you I say this? What have I done to deserve such RickRolling glory? I rickrolled Reddit.

If you are not familiar with reddit, it is much like Digg.com, only it doesn’t suck. Reddit allows you to vote up or down on stories submitted by their users. Stories are then “promoted” to the first page if they receive a large enough number of up votes.  If a story hits the front page, it is destined to get tens of thousands of visitors. Alexa ranks it as the 1,163 most popular site on the web, reaching millions of people monthly.

So, I post the following headline: “Rick Astley (of RickRolld Fame) Requests Youtube Remove Videos”, an all-to-familiar pattern of artists demanding YouTube to remove their precious copyrighted materials. But, of course, the link was tohttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f2b1D5w82yU&s=rss

Within a few hours, it was one of the top stories on Reddit, as users one-after-the-other were duped into visiting the Rick Astley music video.

So, how did I do?

According to spez, the amazing site administrator who is ridiculously helpful for a site this large, let me know that…

“5928 clicks from logged-in users.
I’m guessing that’s about 10% of the total.”

I thought 50,000+ views was a little ambitious, so I checked the actual YouTube numbers. Approximately 25,000 views between the time at which the story went live and this morning, when it finally dropped off the front page.

So, for the record, I rickrolled 25,000 people.

I win.

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