Rick Astley getting rickrolled was Reddit's most upvoted post in 2020
Listen, if the Rick get rickrolled, people are going to love it. Reddit has proof.
According to the tech platform's Year in Review report, its most upvoted post of the year was a post from Rick Astley, singer of the now-infamous tune "Never Gonna Give You Up." The post itself is kind of unremarkable, if neat. It's an old photo of Astley riding a bike.
The real reason this post was so popular was because a comment from a clever Redditor with the username theMalleableDuck. They responded to the post with a brilliant rickroll — you know, linking to "Never Gonna Give You Up" under false pretenses — designed to rickroll Astley himself.
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"I think I might cry!!! It’s actually you," theMalleableDuck wrote. "I met you at a backstage event when I was 12. Seriously a big fan. I’ve seen you in concert five times."
I'm sure you can guess where that link leads. And it worked. Astley responded with the clap emoji and later wrote, "u/theMalleableDuck I salute you!"
The post, overall, received nearly 418,000 upvotes.
Reddit's 2020 Year in Review report also touched on the all-consuming topics of the year: COVID and the election. Two of the three most awarded posts of 2020, for instance, dealt with politics.
Reddit noted that this post on Joe Biden winning the 2020 election received the most awards with 10,044, followed by a megathread of all the different news outlets calling the race at 7,913 awards. In third, because this is Reddit after all, was a Star Wars prequel meme about General Grievous.
Overall, Reddit said people used the platform quite a bit in 2020.
According to Reddit, in 2020, it saw a total of 303.4 million posts (up 52.4 percent compared with last year), 2 billion comments (up 18.6 percent), and 49.2 billion upvotes (up 53.8 percent).
Tim Marcin is an Associate Editor on the culture team at Mashable, where he mostly digs into the weird parts of the internet. You'll also see some coverage of memes, tech, sports, trends, and the occasional hot take. You can find him on Bluesky (sometimes), Instagram (infrequently), or eating Buffalo wings (as often as possible).
