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The Button (Reddit)

The Button (Reddit)
The Button
The Button
Started 1 April 2015
Ended 5 June 2015
Participants 1,008,316 accounts
URL www.reddit.com/r/thebutton

The Button was an online meta-game and social experiment that featured an online button and 60 second countdown timer that would reset each time the button was pressed. The experiment was hosted on the social networking website Reddit beginning on 1 April 2015 (April Fools' Day) and was active until 5 June 2015. The game was started by a Reddit administrator.

The Button garnered enthusiasm from Reddit users worldwide, attracting clicks from over one million unique user accounts. 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.

The Button's countdown timer reached zero several times due to technical issues, but on 5 June 2015, the countdown timer was shut off by an admin, ending the experiment.

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. The button could only be pressed once by each unique Reddit account created before the event started on 1 April. There was also a cumulative count of all unique users who had clicked the button since its launch. The Button was a light blue color.

All users received a small dot called a "flair" next to their username. Users who had not pressed the button had a grey 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. On the subreddit, users' times and the subsequent flair colors became status symbols.

The button was introduced on 1 April 2015 in a post to the official Reddit blog.

On 5 June 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). 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". Six minutes later, Reddit administrator and creator of the button "powerlanguage" announced the forum would be archived within ten minutes.


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