Reading some of these I think that many people have the same usage-pattern as I do, ie go to some aggregator site like HN and open a bunch of articles in one sw

Reading some of these I think that many people have the same usage-pattern as I do, ie go to some aggregator site like HN and open a bunch of articles in one sweep and then read them. So what happened was that the site opened in a tab, people didn't get to it immediately so when they got around to it the timer had fired and they were rickrolled.