What is Popcat and why is it trending?

Currently, #popcat is topping the trending list on Twitter with 376K tweets so far, but what exactly is it? Popcat.click is a competitive clicker web game with the simple premise of getting the most clicks. The leaderboard is separated by countries and the netizens of the top countries are all reaching for the #1 spot.

As of right now, the website has gotten a total of 58 billion clicks and Taiwan is leading with 15 billion, with Malaysia trailing behind at second place with 9.6 billion clicks.

Netizens from across the world are creating memes about the website, many of them creating parallels between the competitive patriotism of the Olympics with this game.

How do you play Popcat?

To participate, all you need to do is go to the website and click away! It works on any device with a web browser, including computers and smartphones. On your smartphone, tapping the screen will score you a point. Meanwhile, on the computer, any clicks on your mouse or even the keyboard. Spamming keys on the keyboard seems to be one of the fastest way to rack up points, but is there anything faster?

The website does not seem to have a ban against auto-clickers, so using one is fair game.

After just running an auto-clicker for a couple seconds, I could collect over 9,000 points. This did take a lot of time for the website to process, as it had to play the popping sound effect many times before revealing the gathered points. To catch up to Taiwan’s number one spot, Malaysia might need to resort to drastic measures like this, although Thailand might take the throne soon as they are now getting 183k pops per second.

The website was made by some computer scientists from the University of Sheffield: Joshua Rainbow, Edward Halls, and Freddy Heppell. Starting the project in December of 2020, it went viral in April of 2021 and is getting another resurgence this week gathering millions of visits on the page.

The image of the popping cat isn’t new. It started back in October 2020 when Twitter user @XavierBFB posted images of his cat Oatmeal to a Discord server, leading to a chain of edits that resulted in the popping cat meme we have today.

We didn’t get any gold medals in the Olympic games this year, so let’s team up as a country and aim for gold right now!

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