Most of the online pieces about door close buttons I can find appear to be based solely on the 2016 NYTimes article and actually repeat the claim about the placebo affect more strongly than the NYTimes originally makes it. In other words, the "fact" that the door close button is a placebo seems to mostly just be a product of lazy journalists rewriting an NYTimes piece enough to not feel like plagiarists.
I hate that this has become the norm for journalism where only one person does any actual research, and then tons of other outlets paraphrase it and publish their own version. It devalues the work (why would you go through the trouble of actual research when you can just rip off someone else?), makes it difficult to tell where the story actually came from, and it pollutes the search space with dozens of copies of the same story each with slightly less connection to the original source material.
I hate that this has become the norm for journalism where only one person does any actual research, and then tons of other outlets paraphrase it and publish their own version. It devalues the work (why would you go through the trouble of actual research when you can just rip off someone else?), makes it difficult to tell where the story actually came from, and it pollutes the search space with dozens of copies of the same story each with slightly less connection to the original source material.
It's a lot like the XKCD wikipedia citation loop: https://xkcd.com/978/