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Edit Admin
While I agree that button is a horrible way to silence users, and invoking gc() may do nothing, the only other possibility is benign. I've seen many other buttons that actually had a harmful effect --- corrupting data, for instance --- so I fail to see how this is "worse than useless".
Edit Admin
These days I'd find it difficult to restrain a simple, but probably difficult to answer and equally-probably job-shortening, question:
Edit Admin
I remember a story from a long ago job where people complained about how slow the application was, so they implemented a hurry up button. It made people feel more in control. It did nothing.
Admin
Ah yes, the mirrors-make-lifts-go-faster thing.
If you put mirrors by your lifts, so that someone waiting for the lift can use the mirror to adjust their makeup, or their tie, or their hair, or take a selfie, you find that you get fewer complaints about how slow the lifts are.
Edit Admin
The "hurry up" button gives an illusion(1) of control, whereas the mirror in the lift gives me something to do with my time so I don't notice how slow the lift is.
(1) It's an illusion rather than real control because the button doesn't, in fact, do anything at all.
Admin
I always thought they had mirrors to make them appear bigger. For some people, the realisation you're in a 6-foot square box tends to mess with their psychological wellbeing, so the mirrors trick them into thinking it's a bigger space.
Admin
Not in the lifts, but by them so it gives people something to do while they're waiting for them to arrive. Distraction.
Edit Admin
Wasn't there an airport where people complained that the bags took too long to get to baggage claim so they just made the hallway wind longer through the building so that people had to walk a longer distance so they weren't standing around waiting?
Admin
"It did nothing."
I would have at least had it change the spinny gif to a faster one to complete the illusion.
Admin
During my "career" in data recovery, lots of work came in from people who faithfully clicked on a "Repair files" button that essentially damaged the remains of usable file data as well as filesystem metadata, making recovery needlessly complicated (and sometimes even impossible). That button should have been named "WRECK MY IMPORTANT BUSINESS DATA NOW!"...