Reddit has a truly bizarre, totally fascinating and absorbing new subreddit called “The Button” that started on 1 April 2015. Comprising a timer counting down from 60 seconds and a button – It allegedly serves no purpose.
The Button
All users see the same button and every time someone pushes it, it resets to 60 seconds. Your reddit account is then classified by colour depending on the time displayed on the timer when you clicked the button. Purple is the easiest – i.e. anyone who clicks on it when it’s at 52 seconds or more. Red is the highest and is awarded to folk who grit it out until it’s under 10 seconds. The closest your click is to zero, the higher your status. But beware. Higher status infers a higher level of patience and boredom – you’ll see when you try it.
Nearly one million of reddit’s 174 million users have pushed the button so far. Nobody knows what will happen when the counter hits zero – it hasn’t yet. Many expect the button to die and are working together to make sure that doesn’t happen. To click you must have a reddit account that predates 1 April 2015 and you can only click once, so eventually there will be no one left to push it and it will run to zero.
Colour based communities have sprung up, such as the Purple Lounge, a club for the lowest ranking purple dotters. They have an anthem (a combined remix of Jimi Hendrix’s Purple Haze and Prince’s Purple Rain), a sacred drink (wine or a non-alcoholic grape Faygo option) and a creed, which includes purple supremacy – they are the largest group of pressers after all.
What started out as an April fool joke has become an interesting social experiment. Even the Brookings Institute has started to study the phenomenon and in a recent paper claims that “The Button” offers a window into the complexities of human behaviour and has lessons for public policy. Joshua Bleiberg and Darrell M. West observe that users have come together in a disorganised fashion to engage in the boring and pointless task of keeping a button alive. There is no obvious reward or common interest, however nearly one million people have already chipped in.
“The Button” phenomenon has some similarities to the Penguin watch project where volunteer users tag video stills of animals that are then used in research.
“The Button” shows that Internet users will take advantage of open data and use it to build applications – a growing number of apps involving the button have been developed. It also powerfully shows that people will work for things of little value, such as a coloured spot next to their profile. Joshua Bleiberg and Darrell M. West think public officials could harness this to serve the greater good.
What could such buttons be used for in Switzerland? Could the United Nations and its Geneva based agencies find something useful in this phenomenon?
If you have a reddit account, you can test your public worth here. But be warned you might be wasting your time.
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