This seems similar to "The Old Reddit Switch-a-roo" (http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/the-old-reddit-switch-a-roo?fu...)

A couple years ago someone on reddit managed to draw a tree-trace of the switch-a-roo

>> My favorite bit of trolling, from 2004, was the "I don't usually link to blonde jokes, because they are sexist, but this one was really funny..." Such a very clever bit of trolling.

Off topic, but back in college I was sitting in a big lecture hall next to a guy who felt compelled to tell me a few blonde jokes. I gave a concerned look and pointed to the blonde woman sitting quietly right in front of us and he responded "Oh, don't worry, she won't be offended til Thursday". Thus ended the conversation.

That's what all the click bait advertisements you see at the bottom of articles do.

Not exactly. Those ads are functional. They eventually link to something, typically something they want to sell to you. And they don't go in a circle. Instead, the clickbait ads want to get you to go to a specific website. In the original "I don't usually link to blonde jokes, because they are sexist" if you clicked enough times you eventually came back to the website where you started. If you were very, very stupid, then that is when you realized that there was no blonde joke. The joke was on you. But I would guess that most people realized there was no blonde joke after they had clicked on maybe a dozen links or so.

Tricky. Also a bit weird.

> That joke really only worked in the blogosphere of 2000-2006, the era when the blogosphere was at its peak. I am not sure how anyone could recreate that joke now.

Are you kidding? I see people living through that joke all the time, it's Facebook -> Buzzfeed -> Mashable -> Vice -> names I don't know, promising you funny images, hot celebs, and OMG you won't believe what they look like now.

They never deliver, because they don't have to: before you get to number 26 and see how unbelievable it is, something (promising something) even more shocking has popped up in a banner ad, and you've clicked on.

I responded in a different sub-thread, but again, I would say this isn't quite the same, because the links don't go in a circle. In the original "I don't usually link to blonde jokes, because they are sexist..." if you clicked the link enough times, you eventually came back to the website where you started. And then you knew the joke was on you.

> I am not sure how anyone could recreate that joke now.

I've seen something similar in a series of tweet responses expressing shock, outrage, glee, surprise - any emotion, really - that only ever replies to more of the same.

I've seen it done with a giant quote-tweet chain where each user adds a single outrage-y adjective, so 'Awful ...' quoting 'Disgusting ...' quoting 'Appalling ...' quoting etc.

I had vast amounts of fun starting from popehat wading in going back through the QTs looking at the social graph as I went deeper down the rabbit hole.

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