The duckroll: 4chan's bait-and-switch prototype

2006

4chan founder Christopher 'moot' Poole installed a word filter replacing 'egg' with 'duck', turning 'eggroll' into 'duckroll'. Users posted deceptive links promising something interesting that instead delivered an image of a mallard duck fitted with truck-tire wheels. The earliest archived duckroll thread dates to December 2006. Every structural element of the rickroll is already present: the false promise, the anticlimactic payoff, the shared in-joke.