Rick roll is hardly early internet.

Source, im old

2007 wasn’t early internet lol.

Early internet’s most famous meme was probably either hamster dance or dancing baby. All Your Base wasn’t long after.

Just for a bit of context I was “surfing the internet” in 1994 via Gopher, an early alternative to the web as we know it now and I used it primarily to find and download apps stored on computers connected to the internet.

In 1995 I was using the Mosaic browser and later Netscape to surf the World Wide Web mostly via webrings that were individual webpages that had links to other wepages of similar content linked to them.

I don’t recall and am not aware of anything that would resemble a meme from that time? This is a year or so before Dancing Baby which is usually considered the first viral video and even then that was originally shared via email forwards.

Youtube isn’t the early internet friend.

“You wouldn’t get this from any other guy” is less wholesome and more incel, TBF.

That was not early internet.

Lol dude what the fuck? That is not early Internet. That’s a good decade and a half past early Internet.

I remember a different internet. I thought the most viral stuff was a guy shoving a glass jar into his ass which then broke. And we all nervously laughed as he pulled glass out of his now pissing bloody sphincter. Or two girls puking and shitting into a cup which they drink. Or cake farts. Lemon parties. Goatse. Or just ddos random sites something something fire some space lazer ion cannon thing occupy!

Like many other commenters, I wouldn’t consider rickrolling to be “early internet.” First of all it’s a mutation of the duckroll meme, and dates as late as 2007. Trogdor predates rickrolling by 5 years.

But, I do have to say, I appreciate the rickroll as the internet’s official prank. Tricking someone into watching a slightly cheesy but inoffensive music video to an actually pretty good song about being a faithful lover is pretty okay.