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Show HN: Don't click this button – testing the internet's patience
This weekend I was looking for a side project to play around with Go so I built a simple web experiment to test the self control of the internet: it has a single button, a live click counter, and a timer. I want to see how long the internet can collectively resist clicking it.
The backend is a very simple Go binary with Go's std http server, web sockets, a WAL-style log of clicks, plain CSS and Comic Sans.
Inspired by Silicon Valley's (HBO series) Bro app, OneMillionCheckBoxes and Cookie Clicker
- banana_dick_10 2y ago[dead]
- ternera 2y ago"The maximum time without being clicked was 2 hours" This is interesting. You must have shared it with quite a lot of people if it went such a short amount of time without being clicked.
- tomasff 2y agoYeah, I did not expect it to be that short . Not shared with many people apart from some friends and here in HN, so I was expecting a few hours more. Haven't looked much at the traffic/clicks history yet but curious to see activity over time since this started
- sixothree 2y agoSomeone here is going to automate it.
- tomasff 2y agoYeah hahah, I suspect a lot of the clicks have already been automated, when I went to sleep it was at around ~4k clicks and in the morning it had gone up to 140k clicks Curious to see how much load/clicks the hacky Go code will handle
- HenryBemis 2y agoI was thinking about your logging/storage. If for every click you log action/IP/date/time/etc, 100-200 bytes of text and I gave you about 1000 clicks with my auto-clicker in a couple of minutes, and if 10-20 people like me do this and leave it running while we watch LotR-extended, could we hurt your storage? At 100ms per click, 1sec = 10 clicks, 600 per min, 36000 per hour, x4 h for LotR-Ext = 144k x 200 bytes x 20 people = 576,000,000 bytes, nope we won't hurt your storage if you log 200 bytes per click :)
- tomasff 2y agoHaha nice point of reference (LotR) - I ended up not storing user-agent/ip etc, only 8 bytes for the timestamp. I was initially going to dump the clicks on sqlite but it felt a bit OTT, so I just keep appending the 8 bytes to the end of a file. I regret not keeping more details, would make for an interesting an analysis and as you said unlikely to hurt storage unless more people were clicking.
- phoenixreader 2y agoCool site! You’d find this wiki a fun read: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Button_(Reddit) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Button_(Reddit)
- tomasff 2y agoThanks! Thank you for sharing this, TIL about The Button - looks much cooler and interactive, wish I'd thought of this haha. After making this I also learned about the Global Caps lock: https://eieio.games/blog/the-global-capslock-key/ https://eieio.games/blog/the-global-capslock-key/
- HenryBemis 2y agoI'll be honest... I used my OP Auto Clicker and gave it 'a few clicks'...
- tomasff 2y agoThank you for clicking!
- rishikeshs 2y agoHaha great implementation! I also have a similar one on my blog called: Useless Button[1]. This one is implemented with CF Workers as the backend. This button has been clicked 2475 times for no reason. [1]https://rishikeshs.com/button/ https://rishikeshs.com/button/
- tomasff 2y agoThis is really cool, now I'm tempted to add some kind of interactive element like this to my website. reminds me of the 2000s internet online user/views counters
- rishikeshs 2y agoCheck out this mosaic as well: https://rishikeshs.com/mosaic/ https://rishikeshs.com/mosaic/ I'm mesmerised by how many people take time to click all these! :D It has been updated by people from: AE, IT, FR, US, IN, BE, GB, AU, PL, MX, DK, BR, JP, DE, CH, IL, SK, ES, SE, CA, NL, AR, NZ, PF, IS, CO, CL, GE, PT, RO, FI, PH, CZ