The button: the fascinating social experiment driving Reddit crazy

The button began its life as an April Fools' joke, but nearly two weeks later the community surrounding the Reddit social experiment is still going strong. On Friday morning, the community reached a new milestone, as users started earning coveted yellow flair.

The previous sentence probably didn't make much sense to you. To explain it, we have to start at the beginning. I promise it'll be interesting.

What is the button?

The button is a feature that the popular social media site Reddit introduced on April 1, 2015. It has its own subreddit at /r/thebutton.

The button looks like this:

The actual button is on the left. At the right is a counter, which starts at 60 seconds and counts down to zero. Every time a redditor pushes the button, the counter resets to 60 seconds and begins counting down again.

Only people who had Reddit accounts before April 1 are allowed to push the button. And each user only gets to push the button once.

What happens when the timer reaches zero?

No one (outside of Reddit staff) knows, because it's never happened. As I'm writing this on Tuesday afternoon, it's been pressed by more than 730,000 people. Because of the combined efforts of these people, the timer has never gotten below 27 seconds.

What's so interesting about this button that more than 700,000 people have wanted to press it?

The button is powered by two of the most powerful forces in human societies: status competition and boredom.

When users post messages on the /r/thebutton subreddit, a colored badge (called "flair" in Reddit-land) shows whether the user has pressed the button and if so, what time the counter showed at the time that user pressed it. If you've never pressed the button, you get a gray "non-presser" badge that looks like this:

People who have pressed the button get a flair that looks like this:

The color indicates how much time was left when you pressed the button — this user pushed the button at 31 seconds and has a coveted yellow badge as a result. If you were impatient and pressed the button with more than 52 seconds left, you get lame purple flair. People who pressed between 42 and 51 seconds get blue flair; 32 to 41 seconds gets green. You can only press the button once, so once you get a badge you're stuck with it for life.

These colored badges have created a virtual status hierarchy. Within the /r/thebutton community, lower numbers are more prestigious. Only a few people have had the patience and good luck to snag coveted yellow flair indicating a timer below 31 seconds. There are also believed to be orange and red flair for when the timer gets below 21 and 11 seconds, respectively, but no one has actually gotten this flair yet.

As I write this, there are a bunch of Reddit users wasting time on /r/thebutton in hopes of joining this elite group.

How rare are the lowest numbers?

You can see statistics about how many /r/thebutton posters have achieved each level here. Tens of thousands of lazy people have earned purple flair for times over 52 seconds. Thousands have earned blue or green flair for times between 32 and 51 seconds.

Only a few hundred posters have earned yellow flair, including 38 who pushed the button at 29 seconds, 9 who pushed it at 28 seconds, and just 3 who pushed at 27 seconds. (The actual number of button-pressers is higher for most of these categories, since only those who post a message on the site are counted.)

What happens on the /r/thebutton subreddit?

It's basically a place where people can brag about their low numbers and look down on people unfortunate enough to have higher ones. This being Reddit, people post silly pictures to illustrate how they're feeling about the competition. For example, when the first yellow flair started to show up, someone with a yellow badge posted this GIF under the title "How I feel right now":

People also post GIFs like this one to express the frustration of having another user press the button right before they were going to:

Have you pushed the button?

I thought you'd never ask. I pushed the button on Saturday morning at a time of 31 seconds, earning me some coveted yellow flair:

When I originally posted this story on Friday afternoon, I hadn't pushed the button yet, because getting yellow flair was too difficult. I captured about an hour of button press data around lunchtime on Friday (you can create your own chart here), and it looked like this:

You can see the problem: when the timer got into the 40s, someone almost always got greedy and pushed the button. The lower the timer got, the greater the temptation became to push it. As a result, the button only occasionally made it into green territory (32 to 41) and never fell into yellow territory below 31.

But my patience was rewarded. When I looked again around 8 am Eastern Time on Saturday, there were fewer people on the page, and so yellows were more common, allowing me to snag one.

If you want to get yellow (or even better, orange or red) flair, the key is to do it between 5 and 8 am Eastern Time (2 to 5 am Pacific). That seems to be the time when the fewest people are paying attention, so your odds of getting a low number are at their highest.

What's the future of the button?

As the experiment went on and interest in the button flagged, the timer's value got lower and people set new records. Someone first earned blue flair for a 51-second time on April 3, and green flair started showing up on April 4. People only started getting yellow flair on Friday.

But this week a surge of media interest has caused more people to visit the site. This chart, created by Reddit user Dendrimer14, shows the average rate of button presses between April 3 and April 14:

This shows that in the last couple of days, media attention has driven more people to the site, which has caused the button to be pushed more frequently. As a result, there have been no new records set since Sunday morning's record of 27 seconds.

This can't last forever, though. Sooner or later, interest will dwindle to the point where people can earn orange and then red flair, and then finally the timer might run out altogether. Estimates on how long this will take range from a few more days to many months.

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