The Button
You might remember it as r/thebutton
The archive has not found a surviving copy.
2015·The platform era·unexpected
A button on Reddit beside a sixty-second countdown, which reset to sixty whenever anybody pressed it. Each account could press once.
At a glanceThe facts
- Remembered as
- r/thebutton
- Spread in
- 2015
- Began as
- Something you played
- Format
- Phenomenon
- Made by
- Josh Wardle, at Reddit
- Where it started
- Origin
- Not an upload originally
- Available
- Not held by ViralWorld
What this wasThe story
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.
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.
Why it matteredWhat changed
More than a million presses were logged, and those who pressed and those who refused formed rival groups. It ran for sixty-five days before the clock reached zero.
What it createdWhat came out of it
- Each presser got a coloured badge for how low they let the clock run: purple for pressing at once, red for the last eleven seconds.1
- A group calling itself the Knights of the Button used spare accounts to stop the timer reaching zero.1
Why it is here: something the internet still knows by name · it got out of its own corner of the internet fast · still being watched and quoted years later
This began as something you played rather than watched. Originally published on Reddit.
Where it came fromWhat we know
There is no original upload to identify: this did not begin as one. There is no copy of it here either — what it was, when it appeared and what people called it is what this page can tell you.
Nothing here is claimed to be the first publication of this Moment, because the first publication was not an upload. This 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.
SourcesWhat was read
Sources last read on . That date is about the history on this page. Whether the media still plays is checked separately and can change any day. How ViralWorld documents things