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

onebutton.click

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

#1

Post by 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

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

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

#5

Post by tomasff »

ternera wrote: post #3

"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.

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

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

#6

Post by tomasff »

sixothree wrote: post #4

Someone here is going to automate it.

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

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

#8

Post by tomasff »

phoenixreader wrote: post #7

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

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/

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

#10

Post by HenryBemis »

tomasff wrote: post #6
sixothree wrote: post #4

Someone here is going to automate it.

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

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 :)

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