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from the push,-pull,-swipe,-turn-and-Pong dept.
Late for work in Manhattan, you push the crosswalk button and curse silently at the slowness of the signal change. You finally get a green light, cross the street, arrive at the office, get in the elevator and hit the close door (>|<) button to speed things along. Getting out on your target floor, you find that hurrying has you a bit hot under the collar, so you reach for the thermostat to turn up the air conditioning.
Each of these seemingly disconnected everyday buttons you pressed may have something in common: it is quite possible that none of them did a thing to influence the world around you. Any perceived impact may simply have been imaginary, a placebo effect giving you the illusion of control.
In the early 2000s, New York City transportation officials finally admitted what many had suspected: the majority of crosswalk buttons in the city are completely disconnected from the traffic light system. Thousands of these initially worked to request a signal change but most no longer do anything, even if their signage suggests otherwise.
[...] Today, a combination of carefully orchestrated automation and higher traffic has made most of these buttons obsolete. Citywide, there are around 100 crosswalk buttons that still work in NYC but close to 1,000 more that do nothing at all. So why not take them down? Removing the remaining nonfunctional buttons would cost the city millions, a potential waste of already limited funds for civic infrastructure.
More examples are quoted in linked article, and some suggestions how tech can make our lives more pleasant while waiting - Pong anyone?.
-- submitted from IRC
(Score: 5, Funny) by Leebert on Tuesday August 23 2016, @07:52PM
So... kind of like the "Deactivate your account" button on Facebook?
(Score: 5, Interesting) by JNCF on Tuesday August 23 2016, @09:12PM
I once had somebody give me the advice that before investing the time to fully implement some features in a web app I should put in buttons that just report back to the server that a user tried to use them... and do nothing else. Then I would know which features people are trying to use, and I could implement those ones without wasting time on the others. Contextually, it sounded like advice that he had been following himself.
He didn't work for facebook, though the story would be better if he had.
(Score: 4, Disagree) by tibman on Tuesday August 23 2016, @10:05PM
Woah, hope that spam mod was a mis-click. Because he isn't wrong. Plenty of services "delete" your account and don't actually delete anything. It is known.
SN won't survive on lurkers alone. Write comments.
(Score: 3, Funny) by JNCF on Tuesday August 23 2016, @10:16PM
And even if he was wrong, it wouldn't be spam (unless he was a shill for MySpace, perhaps). Spam has a very specific meaning.
(Score: 3, Informative) by NCommander on Wednesday August 24 2016, @01:53AM
I reversed the spam moderation. The modder looks like they made a misclick; they don't have a history of downvoting good posts so I didn't modban them temporary.
Still always moving