The Secret Inside One Million Checkboxes
Last year Nolen Royalty made a website called One Million Checkboxes, which presented to the user exactly what it claimed on the tin. The gimmick was that the million checkboxes were shared globally. If toggled checkbox 206,028 in my browser, you’d see checkbox 206,028 flip state in your browser. Totally pointless. Totally fun.
Here, Royalty tells the story of how the site was used by bot-writing teenage hackers:
Lots of people were mad about bots on OMCB. I’m not going to link
to anything here — I don’t want to direct negative attention at
anyone — but I got hundreds of messages about bots. The most
popular tweet about OMCB complained about bots. People … did not
like bots.
And I get it! The typical ways that folks — especially folks who
don’t program — bump into bots are things like ticket scalping
and restaurant reservation bots. Bots that feel selfish and unfair
and antisocial.
And there certainly was botting that you could call antisocial.
Folks wrote tiny javascript boxes to uncheck every box that they
could — I know this because they excitedly told me. […]
What this discord did was so cool — so surprising — so creative.
It reminded me of me — except they were 10 times the developer I
was then (and frankly, better developers than I am now). Getting
to watch it live — getting to provide some encouragement, to see
what they were doing and respond with praise and pride instead of
anger — was deeply meaningful to me. I still tear up when I think
about it.
Via Jason Kottke, who aptly observes that the way the hackers got in touch with Royalty “reminds me of the palimpsest (layered communication) that the aliens use to communicate with Earth in Carl Sagan’s Contact (and the 1997 movie).”
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Last year Nolen Royalty made a website called One Million Checkboxes, which presented to the user exactly what it claimed on the tin. The gimmick was that the million checkboxes were shared globally. If toggled checkbox 206,028 in my browser, you’d see checkbox 206,028 flip state in your browser. Totally pointless. Totally fun.
Here, Royalty tells the story of how the site was used by bot-writing teenage hackers:
Lots of people were mad about bots on OMCB. I’m not going to link
to anything here — I don’t want to direct negative attention at
anyone — but I got hundreds of messages about bots. The most
popular tweet about OMCB complained about bots. People … did not
like bots.
And I get it! The typical ways that folks — especially folks who
don’t program — bump into bots are things like ticket scalping
and restaurant reservation bots. Bots that feel selfish and unfair
and antisocial.
And there certainly was botting that you could call antisocial.
Folks wrote tiny javascript boxes to uncheck every box that they
could — I know this because they excitedly told me. […]
What this discord did was so cool — so surprising — so creative.
It reminded me of me — except they were 10 times the developer I
was then (and frankly, better developers than I am now). Getting
to watch it live — getting to provide some encouragement, to see
what they were doing and respond with praise and pride instead of
anger — was deeply meaningful to me. I still tear up when I think
about it.
Via Jason Kottke, who aptly observes that the way the hackers got in touch with Royalty “reminds me of the palimpsest (layered communication) that the aliens use to communicate with Earth in Carl Sagan’s Contact (and the 1997 movie).”