There's a Long Wait to Check Out the 'Most Exclusive Website'

It's human nature to want instant gratification‚ which is probably in part why the Internet is so popular. Not only is our access to information seemingly limitless, it's often instantaneous, too. When it's not—if, say, our connection happens to be slow—we quickly grow critical of what constitutes being worth the wait. And yet, a new website is proving that arbitrary exclusivity and long lines can lend even unknown destinations a certain cachet.

MostExclusiveWebsite.com lives up to its URL. It allows only one visitor at time, for 60-second increments; at the end of your minute, you're booted from the site. At the time of writing this, there were more than 44,000 people in virtual line as ticket number #168952—someone by the name of "matheus"— was currently enjoying whatever mysteries lie beyond the perpetual 30-second countdown clock.

The site was launched in March of this year by Justin Foley as a way of experimenting with the open source web framework Meteor.

"The Internet is kind of designed to be open and accessible, and when you put a site up, you want as many people as possible to connect to it. So, what if I did something that was the antithesis of that?" he told the Daily Dot.

At first, no one really took notice. Foley posted it on Reddit's r/Funny, but with wait times hovering around a mere minute, the point of the experience was moot. Recently, however, it found new life on Reddit's r/InternetIsBeautiful after being ranked number one on a list of "10 Completely Useless Websites" by blog Johnny Lists. And now 782739 minutes (and counting) have collectively been spent waiting. The average user spends 20 minutes waiting on the site (or, let's be honest, browsing other tabs without ticketed entry); the longest wait time Foley has heard of is six hours, which even he doesn't recommend. 

"I'm not sure anything on the Internet is worth six hours of waiting," he quipped.

What did that particular user find after those six hours? You could search around on the wait-free Internet for spoilers, but it's just not the same as taking a ticket and getting in line.

[h/t Daily Dot]