3 buttons that don’t actually do anything
Many everyday buttons, such as crosswalk and elevator buttons, may not function as expected. These so-called placebo buttons can create an illusion of control for users. In some cases, pressing them may not change outcomes, depending on timing and regulations.
- ▪In New York City, only about 100 of the 1,000 crosswalk buttons are functional.
- ▪The 'close door' button on elevators often does not work immediately due to ADA regulations.
- ▪Some office thermostats may be non-functional, with claims that a small percentage are fake.
Popular Science files mainly under science. We currently carry 121 of its stories.
Story provenance
Source · retrieval · rights · ranking — open for full record
inspect →
Attribution is not the same as permission. This drawer separates discovery metadata, excerpts, WeSearch-generated summaries, reuse status, and whether the publisher receives the visit. Nothing here claims a legal grant the publisher has not made.
Record
| Original publisher | Popular Science |
| Canonical URL | https://www.popsci.com/health/buttons-that-dont-do-anything/ |
| Publication time | Sun, 24 May 2026 08:03:00 -0400 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-05-24T12:07:32.400Z |
| Last seen | 2026-05-24T12:07:32.400Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | T6kJxSI0Yfql |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
Buttons can make you feel empowered, even if they don't actually do anything. Image: Chizhevskaya Ekaterina / Shutterstock Get the Popular Science daily newsletter💡 Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. Email address Sign up Thank you! Terms of Service and Privacy Policy. Have you ever pressed a crosswalk button and wondered if it actually does anything? You might be onto something. Called placebo buttons, controls that don’t do anything exist everywhere. Sometimes it’s because of accidents of history; sometimes they’re installed specifically to trick people into feeling an illusion of control. Either way, they’re hard to notice. Here are a few buttons you press every day that might not actually work.
…
Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Popular Science.
Discussion
0 commentsMore from Popular Science
