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

[rishikeshs]

Check out this mosaic as well: 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

[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

[HenryBemis]

I 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]

Haha 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.