2015·The platform era·unexpected
The Button
A button, a sixty-second timer, and two months of people refusing to let it run out.
You might remember it as r/thebutton
A trend people joined in with
This Moment began as something you played rather than watched. Originally published on Reddit.
- SourceNot an upload originally
- MediaNot held by ViralWorld
What this was
On April Fools' Day 2015 Reddit put up a button and a timer counting down from sixty seconds. Pressing it reset the timer. You could press it once, ever, and the colour of the flair you kept forever recorded how low the clock had got when you did. Nobody knew what would happen at zero. Over a million accounts pressed it, and the countdown was kept alive until 5 June.
It first appeared in 2015, during the platform era.
It produced, from nothing, a genuine belief system. Factions formed around whether to press: knights who pressed early to sustain it, followers of the shade of grey they had earned, and a group who never pressed at all and waited for the end. The BBC covered it as a study in mortality, which sounds absurd and is roughly accurate.
On 5 June 2015 the timer reached zero because nobody was left willing to press, and that was all that happened. It is the direct ancestor of r/place two years later, by the same creator, and of the whole genre of platform-run collective experiments.
More from 2015
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- Why You Always Lying 2015The platform era
- Charlie Charlie challenge 2015The platform era
- Finsta 2015The platform era
- Distracted boyfriend 2015The platform era
- The Dress 2015The platform era
The platform era
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- Storm Area 51 2019The platform era
- Renegade dance 2019The platform era
- The Most Mysterious Song on the Internet 2019The platform era
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- Kiki Challenge 2018The platform era
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Related
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Grouped by explicit relationships where evidence exists, and by shared theme otherwise.
Behind the recordWhere it came from
There is no original upload to identify: this Moment did not begin as one. ViralWorld holds no copy of it either — what it was, when it appeared and what people called it is the record.
Nothing here is claimed to be the first publication of this Moment, because the first publication was not an upload. This Moment began as something you played rather than watched. Originally published on Reddit.
Not established. This index only names a creator where the evidence supports it.
- What happens
- On April Fools' Day 2015 Reddit put up a button and a timer counting down from sixty seconds. Pressing it reset the timer. You could press it once, ever, and the colour of the flair you kept forever recorded how low the clock had got when you did. Nobody knew what would happen at zero. Over a million accounts pressed it, and the countdown was kept alive until 5 June.