April Fool’s Day is upon us again, and along with this are some truly stupid April Fool’s jokes. Chief among them was YouTube’s replacement of its featured videos with ones that actually link to Rick Astley’s Never Gonna Give You Up, a common Internet meme known as "rickrolling". Now characterize me as an old codger, but I have to say that rickrolling is one of the stupidest Internet memes I have ever come across. I really don’t see what’s so funny about this. Maybe I’m missing something? It’s been done many times over, even in xkcd cartoons, but really folks, it’s not funny, and it should just be put to rest.
I’ll tell you what I found really funny: the folks over at Atlassian who announced the JIRA Solver. Some of you may recall that Cenqua (now a wholly owned subsidiary of Atlassian) presented both the PairOn extreme-programming chair and the Commentator automated code-commenter (commentator?) on 1 April 2005, both of which were a riot. Now that’s creative… perpetuating a lame Internet meme is not.
rickrolling is fun – if only just to laugh at people's reaction!
Bah humbug!