I always heard it starting with:
"You have 300 bricks and you throw one as far as you can, how many do you have left?
299"
The elephant to the river is the same but this joke is told about someone else crossing the river instead. Finally it ends with:
"But… They still don’t make it across, why?
Because you threw a brick at them!"
There are a few people that I’m certain are just spamming nonsense posts for attention. It’s especially bad in political communities but even externally there’s no reason some people need to ask 5 variations of the same question over the course of 2 hours.
I’ve started being able to recognize if a post is going to be stupid based on who’s putting it up and honestly I really should just block them.