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A Short History of the Internet Doing One Thing Together

By Rehan Sayyed, SRT Corporates · Published

Click With The World is one button and one number. It belongs to a small tradition: web pages where the only thing to do is the thing everyone else is doing. Here are five of them, in order.

2005: The Million Dollar Homepage

Alex Tew, a 21-year-old student from Wiltshire in England, put a single page online on 26 August 2005. It was a grid of 1,000 by 1,000 pixels, for sale at one US dollar each. Pixels were sold in blocks of 10 by 10, so the smallest purchase cost $100. Buyers filled their blocks with tiny images linking to their own sites.

The final 1,000 pixels were put up for auction on 1 January 2006, and the winning bid was $38,100. In five months the page grossed $1,037,100.

Nobody worked together on it. But it showed that one shared page, the same for every visitor, could hold the attention of strangers around the world.

2014: Twitch Plays Pokémon

On 12 February 2014 an anonymous Australian programmer started a live stream of the game Pokémon Red with one change: nobody held the controller. Viewers typed button names into the chat, and a script turned those messages into the game's inputs.

Thousands of people pressing different buttons at once should not be able to finish a game. They finished it on 1 March 2014, after more than 16 days of continuous play. Simultaneous participation peaked at 121,000, the stream drew 55 million views, and Twitch estimated that more than 1.16 million people took part. Guinness World Records lists it for the most users entering commands in a live-streamed video game, at 1,165,140.

2015: The Button

On 1 April 2015 Reddit showed its users a button beside a 60-second countdown. Whenever anyone pressed the button, the countdown reset for everyone. Each account created before that day could press exactly once.

Pressing earned a coloured mark that recorded how close to zero the timer had been at that moment. Since everyone had one press, the only real choice was when to use it, or whether to use it at all.

The experiment ended on 5 June 2015, the first time the timer reached zero with nobody pressing. It logged 1,008,316 presses.

2017: r/place

Two years later, again on April Fools' Day, Reddit opened a blank canvas of 1,000 by 1,000 pixels. Any user could colour one pixel, then had to wait between 5 and 20 minutes before colouring another. One person could do almost nothing alone, so people organised.

More than a million users placed about 16 million pixels, and over 90,000 were still watching or editing when it closed after about three days. The canvas returned on 1 April 2022 for three and a half days and grew to 2,000 by 2,000 pixels; that time more than 10.5 million users made 160 million changes. It ran again from 20 July 2023.

2024: One Million Checkboxes

On 26 June 2024 Nolen Royalty, an American software engineer, launched a page he had built in two days. It held one million checkboxes. Anyone could tick or untick any of them, and everyone saw the same boxes change as others clicked.

It ran for two weeks and recorded 650 million checks and unchecks. In July 2024 Royalty estimated that 400,000 different people had visited. He also found that teenagers were leaving each other hidden messages, written in binary across rows of boxes.

What these have in common

Reading the five side by side, a few things repeat:

Where a click counter fits

Click With The World is the plainest version of the idea. The action is a click and the shared state is a single number. There is no canvas to fill and no countdown.

It adds two things. Each click is credited to a country, so there is a leaderboard as well as a total. And the total passes fixed milestones, from 1,000 up to 100,000,000, with the date of each first crossing kept.

The limit is small but real: one click adds exactly one, with a short pause before the next. How that is enforced is covered in How One Shared Number Stays Honest.

Sources

All read on 8 October 2026.