The Button (Reddit)
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| Started | April 1, 2015 |
|---|---|
| Ended | June 5, 2015[1] |
| Participants | 1,008,316 accounts[2] |
| URL | http://www.reddit.com/r/thebutton |
The Button was a meta-game and social experiment hosted by Reddit that featured an online button and countdown timer that would reset each time the button was pressed. The experiment was hosted on the social networking website Reddit beginning on April 1, 2015 (April Fools' Day) and was active until June 5, 2015. The game was started by a Reddit administrator.[3]
The Button garnered enthusiasm from Reddit users worldwide,[4] attracting clicks from over one million unique user accounts.[2][5] Various websites, browser extensions, and mobile applications were created for tracking the live statistics of the Button and enabling users to visit the Button when the timer dropped below a certain threshold.[6]
The Button's countdown timer reached zero several times due to technical issues, but on June 5, 2015, the countdown timer reached zero in the absence of any issue, and so the experiment officially ended.
Overview
The specific Reddit community (subreddit) for the Button had the standard Reddit appearance but with a molly-guarded button next to a 60-second countdown timer at the top of the page. When the button was clicked, the countdown would reset.[7] The button could only be pressed once by each Reddit account, and only accounts that were created before the event started on April 1 were allowed to press it.[8] There was also a cumulative count of all unique users who had clicked the button since its launch.[9]
All users received a small dot called a "flair" next to their username. Users who had not pressed the button had a gray dot, and users who had pressed it had a dot colored based on the state of the timer when the button was pressed. When hovering the cursor over this colored dot, the time in seconds on the counter when the user clicked the button would be displayed.[10]
| Time clicked | Color |
|---|---|
| 60s–52s | Purple |
| 51s–42s | Blue |
| 41s–32s | Green |
| 31s–22s | Yellow |
| 21s–12s | Orange |
| 11s–0s | Red |
| Did not click | Gray |
| Not able to click | White |
History
The button was introduced on April 1, 2015 in a post to the official Reddit blog.[11]
On June 5, 2015, at 21:49:53 UTC, a person with reddit username "BigGoron" became the last user to press the button (dubbed "The Pressiah" by the community).[12] Sixty seconds later, the countdown timer reached zero and ended 2 months and 4 days after it had begun. The button was deactivated, and overlaid with the text "the experiment is over".[13] Six minutes later, Reddit administrator and creator of the button "powerlanguage" announced the forum would be archived within ten minutes.[14]
According to an unofficial stats page for The Button, the experiment ended with 1,008,316 logged button clicks.[2]
Technical issues
The Button experienced technical issues which caused it to reach zero despite users pressing it in time. This occurred multiple times and was attributed to database errors by reddit's administrators. The outages caused community discontentment and some speculation that the subreddit was being gamed by the administrators.[15][16] Although The Button was revived within a day of the outages, the administrators of reddit considered closing the The Button experiment early.[17]
Groups
The "purples" are users who pressed the button within 0 and 8 seconds of the timer resetting, often without realizing that they could not press it more than once. This was the most common flair and was considered shameful by many.
The "reds" are users who pressed the button within 0 and 11 seconds of the timer ending. A notable user from this flair was user "mncke" who developed the Chrome plugin "Squire", which would automatically press the button just before the timer ended. He also collected Reddit accounts eligible to press the button through donations, and used them in an automated system that would press the button if the timer would otherwise have ended, exploiting a bug that made it technically possible to press the button up to three seconds after the timer reached zero. The accounts used in this system were called "zombies".
The "grays" were users who opted not to press the button at all. This was the second most common flair. A subgroup of this flair was "The Assassins of the Button", who mainly worked towards sabotaging the red flairs efforts of prolonging the buttons timer for as long as possible. They allegedly did this by means of undercover agents in the red flair. One such attempt was to donate an account to the zombie program, and then change its password so that the zombie program would fail to save the button. The attempt failed, and user "mncke" answered by changing the password of the zombie users after the donation, only to change it back after clicking the button.
References
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