The Button

» see reddit.com/r/thebutton as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

On April Fools' Day 2015 Reddit put up a button and a timer counting down from sixty seconds. Pressing the button reset the timer. Every account registered before that day could press once, ever, and no account created afterward could press at all. Nothing anywhere explained what would happen if the timer reached zero.

That was the entire design and it held a million people for two months. The rules were small enough to fit in a sentence and left enough room underneath for a functioning society to grow in, which is not a thing you can plan. Reddit's own admins did not know what they had until the subreddit filled up with theology.

Josh Wardle built it, under the username powerlanguage. Six years later, out of Reddit and working on something for one other person, he made Wordle, and anyone who saw The Button first recognized the hand immediately: one move a day, the same puzzle for everyone, no purchasable advantage, no way to catch up if you arrived late. He has a specific talent for scarcity as a design material.

The eligibility cutoff is the part that made it feel real. Whether you were in or out had already been decided by an account creation date you set years earlier for unrelated reasons, and there was no appeal and no signup. Latecomers got a white dot and a view of other people's game.

~ the dossier ~

~ the colors ~

Your press was permanently recorded as a colored dot next to your username, keyed to how low the timer was when you hit it. The spectrum ran from purple at the top of the minute down through red in the last eleven seconds, and it could never be changed, because there was only ever one press. Gray meant you had not pressed. White meant you were not allowed to.

Reddit had accidentally issued a caste marker to a million people and made it immutable. Red flair was rare and therefore prestigious, since getting one meant sitting on a countdown waiting for it to nearly expire and gambling that no one else would flinch first. Purple flair meant you had pressed straight away, which was either cowardice or piety depending on which subreddit thread you asked in.

~ the religions ~

The groups that formed took their identity from the dot. The Emerald Council organized around green flair and The Violet Hand around purple. Among the grays, the ones who had never pressed, the Followers of the Shade held that clicking was sinful, while the Grey Hopeful waited for the timer to expire in the belief that watching it happen would be rewarded.

The best of them were the Knights of The Button, grays who had decided the timer must never reach zero. Refusing to press themselves was not negotiable, so they built an algorithm and ran it across thousands of throwaway accounts, pressing automatically whenever the clock dropped low. They kept the button alive with machines while keeping their own hands clean, and the whole apparatus existed to defend a rule that Reddit had never actually stated.

~ the last press ~

On 5 June 2015 at 21:49:53 UTC an account called BigGoron pressed the button for the last time. Nobody pressed after that, the sixty seconds ran out, and the subreddit named BigGoron the Pressiah, which was the closest thing anyone got to a prize.

At zero, the button was replaced by a message saying the experiment was over. There was no reveal and no prize and no explanation, because there had never been anything behind it. The count stopped at 1,008,316 presses, the dots stayed next to a million usernames, and the subreddit is still there in read-only form with everyone's color still showing.

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