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On Reddit, 'The Button' is stressing people out
Rather than do something big and elaborate for April Fools' Day, Reddit did something altogether more insidious for its annual prank: The Button, a social experiment that calls for every one of the millions of Reddit users worldwide to work together.
It's going about as well as you would expect.
The way The Button works is super simple. A button is paired with a countdown timer for 60 seconds. Anybody on Reddit who has an account made before Wednesday can push the button once and once only. If the button gets pushed even once, the countdown timer goes back to 60 seconds. For everybody. Globally.
Your browser does not support the video tag. Reddit This is The Button.
Nobody knows what happens when it hits zero, either good or bad (or nothing at all).
The deadlock is not least because of a dedicated cadre of users (read: monsters) who purposely go back to click it when it starts to get anywhere, exemplified by my Facebook friend here:
(Matt Weinberger)
Push? Don't push? It's stressing people out, as evidenced by the action in the associated subreddit, /r/thebutton.
(Matt Weinberger)
The purple blobs show whether users have used up their press. As you can see, some people think pushing is the right thing to do, while others don't. Consensus has yet to be reached, and Reddit users are getting nowhere fast.
At press time, about 320,000 Reddit visitors had participated. Given that the site gets billions of views per month and Reddit accounts are free, there are potentially millions of people waiting in the wings for their opportunity to push the button.
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