One Million Checkboxes Is Exactly What It Sounds Like

Last week, Nolen Royalty unleashed upon the world a website with a million empty check boxes.

Mr. Royalty, 32, a game developer in Brooklyn, created the site in a fit of inspiration and shared it on X last Wednesday with low expectations. “Basically anyone I described it to chuckled, at most,” he said.

Rows of unchecked squares sat tantalizingly against a pale gray background, an unexplored Minesweeper field. A visitor to the page checked one box. Then another. Each time a person checked a box, it was instantly filled in on everybody else’s screens, like a kind of collaborative grocery list accessible to anyone with a phone or computer.

Seven days later, more than 700,000 boxes have been filled in. The free website, called One Million Checkboxes, has become an unlikely hit and elicited oddly strong reactions: Users on X describe the project as “strangely compelling” and “torture for people with OCD.” A Washington Post newsletter called it “the most pointless website on the planet” — which it seemed to mean as a compliment.

Mr. Royalty has been frantically renting additional server space for about $60 a day to keep up with the site’s check-happy fans. He estimated that there have been at least 400,000 unique visitors, although that data is imperfect because the page has crashed several times under the weight of their enthusiasm.

By providing a blank slate to users, One Million Checkboxes has also cycled rapidly through the stages of internet maturity, serving as something of a microcosm of the joys and horrors of digital life.

First there was a period of exploration, in which users worked together to check as many boxes as they could. Next came creativity, as some began filling in boxes to illustrate hearts or, in more cases, crude drawings of male genitalia.