Show HN: Don't click this button – testing the internet's patience

[tomasff]

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

[rishikeshs]

Haha 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/

[tomasff]

This 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

[HenryBemis]

I'll be honest... I used my OP Auto Clicker and gave it 'a few clicks'...

[tomasff]

Thank you for clicking!

[phoenixreader]

Cool site! You’d find this wiki a fun read: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Button_(Reddit)

[tomasff]

Thanks! 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/

[ternera]

"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]

Yeah, 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]

Someone here is going to automate it.

[tomasff]

Yeah 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