Monday, June 08, 2015

Time's up - Reddit's mysterious button runs out on June 8

Reddit is a very popular social notworking website with quite an active community. Redditors are known to be very influential in online matters, frequently making major changes in polls and contests often to hilarious effect.



This April fools day(year 2015), Reddit made a button at /r/thebutton , whose true purpose was never revealed. What was disclosed, was that the button has a timer that counts down from 60 seconds to zero, and can be reset to 60 seconds by pressing the button.

BUT, the catch was, each user can press the button only once in their lifetime. AND, only those Redditors who joined before April fools 2015 could press the button. That meant, no new registrations could press the button. And eventually the timer would run out.

And so, it finally did run out - Today (8th, Jun, 2015). Which is a very long time, considering that it meant someone new was there to press the button every minute for the past 97,920 minutes.(approximately)

The Button created a bunch of different groups. Some would "religiously" press the button at the last few seconds to make sure it got the maximum extension. Some would press whenever. Some would "religiously" NOT press the button.

And some discovered that using the Konami code while pressing the button gave a Super Bonus.

As Reddit admin powerlanguage said

There were factionsreligionsrevolutionsweather forecasting,a prophet who renounced their status, and an allegiance with the undead to name a few. Confused? You can read up on the button here.

 The history of the button presses is available on GitHub : https://github.com/reddit/thebutton-data/
It runs into 1,008,316 presses over 2 months.

Here's a visualization of those button presses.


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