The worst page on the internet begins innocently enough. A small button beckons the user to “Click me”.
When they do, the game begins. The player’s score, or “stimulation”, appears in the middle of the screen, and goes up with every subsequent click. These points can then be used to buy new features for the page – a CNN-style news ticker with questionable headlines (“Child star steals hearts, faces prison”), a Gmail inbox, a true-crime podcast that plays in the background, a day-trading platform, and more.
Atlantic