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2009·Early YouTube

Three Wolf Moon

A t-shirt with three wolves on it, and the Amazon reviews that turned it into a bestseller.

A post

The story

What this was

A post classified under wildlife.

It first appeared in 2009, during early YouTube.

It is the origin of the ironic Amazon review as a form, and one of the first demonstrations that a review section could be occupied and turned into a collaborative comic text. The shirt went from obscurity to the top of Amazon's apparel chart on the strength of jokes about it, which is a commercial outcome nobody had a model for.

The joke-review genre it started is now a permanent fixture of every retail platform, applied to gallon jugs of milk, uranium ore and banana slicers. The shirt itself remains in print and its designer has said she finds the whole thing bewildering.

You were there

More from 2009

The same internet

Early YouTube

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Grouped by explicit relationships where evidence exists, and by shared theme otherwise.

Behind the record

Where it came from

There is no original to identify: this spread through many separate posts at once rather than from a first one. ViralWorld holds no copy of it either — what it was, when it spread and what people called it is the record.

Nothing here is claimed to be the first version of this, because research established there was not one — it appeared in many places at once.

Not established. This index only names a creator where the evidence supports it.

What happens
A post classified under wildlife.
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