Reddit's "The Button" game has ended, with the social experiment gaining a total of 1,008,316 presses after over two months since it launched on April 1.
The Button was accessible as a subreddit to Reddit users that created an account before April 1. Upon visiting the /r/thebutton subreddit, users saw a sliding lock covering a blue button on the left, a visual timer in the middle represented by a black circle with a growing gray wedge and a 4-digit countdown on the right beginning from 60.00 seconds.
When a user opens the lock to access the button, they can then press it. Once a user does, the timer is reset and the circle becomes fully dark again. The blue button is then replaced by a gray rectangle, and the lock does not reappear for the user.
As such, Reddit users can only press the button once. And, as the social experiment continued, that was simply it for many users.
However, users that stayed in the subreddit discovered something else, and that is the fact that those who posted a comment on /r/thebutton will see a flair appear right beside their username. Some Reddit users figured out through reading through the CSS code which assigns flair that different colors of flair were given according to long they waited until they press the button.
Thus, the Buttonverse was born, with the many Reddit users being divided into different groups according to colors, beliefs and opinions. Lore, factions and even religions were born from the social experiment, divided across a total of 185 other subreddits dedicated to each one of them.
However, the most amazing thing that was seen from the Reddit community due to The Button was its creativity. Aside from the collaboration that was done to create the Buttonverse, some Reddit users also developed tools to learn more about The Button, while some purposely misled other users to press it erroneously.
In the early days of The Button, 60 percent of the users that saw it and were eligible to press it did so. After day four, the percentage was down to 10 percent, and two weeks after, the figure dropped further to 5 percent. Statistics also revealed that 66 percent of the presses were made on PCs, which was triple the percentage for Mac users.
The last Reddit user to press The Button goes by the name of BigGoron, who is now called "The pressiah" as the community has decided to name him.
"More incredible things emerged from the button than we could have anticipated," wrote Reddit on the blog post announcing the end of The Button, along with an encouragement for users to keep sharing their favorite moments regarding the project.
