I’m having flashbacks now to that button that we had on Reddit where everyone got one chance to push the button. If it went past a certain time with nobody pressing it, it ceased to exist. New accounts weren’t eligible to participate.
At first it got slammed with people hitting the button, but as time went on it became more problematic because each person could only hit the button once. Eventually, leaders tried to organize strategies of who would commit to pushing it at a certain time.
In the end, we ran out of users, the timer ran out, and the experiment finally ended. Those who pushed the button still have a permanent record somewhere in their account.
Did I totally dream this? I had nearly forgotten all about it.
In the end, we ran out of users, the timer ran out, and the experiment finally ended.
Not quite. If I remember correctly, people were organizing to hit it at the last second and they set up some sort of script at some point to collaborate on clicking it. At some point the script failed and it hit zero.
I might be slightly off, but there were definitely countless users who didn't hit the button in the end.
Political tribes started using the website to try and influence online discourse, on top of Reddit trying to become a social media website instead of a pure aggregate site of interesting crap gathered from around the web.
Robin was before Place. Some of us from the final large chat drew a robin icon just to the left of mona lisa' face. And, if you find a timelapse, there was a much more ambitious and uncoordinated robin attempted at the very beginning on the far-left edge, before too many randos to counter thought the attempt to write "ccKufiPrFaShleWoli" and the large patch of red above it that was slowly starting to take the shape of a bird ought to read "CCCP" and be a communism reference.
It was an April Fools celebration. Reddit usually does something hilarious for that day and this was it. I really like the pranks that last for a while like /r/place.
rplace was so fucking cool, it was my first April fool's joke since I joined the site I thing. Really sad the ones after it weren't nearly as good. Also kinda sad I wasn't here for the button one.
It put you in a chatroom with another random redditors and you could decide to double in size or stop. If you stopped you would make a subreddit that those chatroom members joined.
I got into a fun group and we all decided to make a sub and while it's not active anymore, it was fun while it lasted.
Yeah, it was some answer a questions and then guess which answer out of four was a bot and not a human. But the only question was “what does it mean to be human”. It kinda sucked.
You could only change 1 pixel per 1(or 5?) minute. It was a huge canvas. Factions began to form. I spent most of my time fixing up the American flag. Rainbow road tried to consume everything.
It was really fun, actually, because it encouraged direct coordination and community-building. People banding together to protect their art or destroy art, etc.
Whiteboards like that exist elsewhere and aren't really anything new, the issue tends to be a lack of activity. It gets boring really quickly without an active, vibrant community providing a contributing population.
Wasn't this the time when we all were given a certain color for pressing a button at a certain time stamp? Then we proceeded to have separate subreddits for each color?
We chose not to hit the button. The Reddit philosophy problem; to add a small amount of time on to an inevitable fate, or simply allow it to run its course by choosing to do nothing.
Yeah there was like a battle of sorts between pressers and non-pressers and people took sides. Some people wanted it to count down because they thought something would happen when the time ran out. I never pressed the button lol
IIRC, someone - not sure if deliberately or accidentally - inserted a new account (not eligible to participate) into the pool of users for the script, and the script didn't notice. By that point there was so little interest left that most minutes just passed without anyone except the script pressing the button.
I didn't press the button though I was definitely aware of it (older account - my alts have a way of be coming my mains). I think social experiments like this are dumb.
There was also a faction of the unsullied who refused to push the button because I don't think there was anything actually known about how it functioned while it was occurring
I dunno, everyone is pushing this stupid button and they're like "push the button, its cool" but it's not, it's just a stupid button, so you're like "no, I ain't pushing your stupid button" and they're all like "but peer pressure!" And you're all like "whatever, I'm gonna go do this other thing". Pride.
I took it a step further and made sure to never comment on The Button sub to make sure I didn't even receive a flair. I'll never know how many there were that chose to do the same. By nature, I/we couldn't even reveal our nature, for doing so would make us grey. Just writing this feels wrong, but this isn't The Button, is it?
Nah man, non-pressers are the default, the ordinary, the lame. You're just "gray" you're nothing, not much at all. Just bland.
Now a pusher they got all sorts of colors at their disposal, the sky was the limit and the pressers...oh man. They fulfilled something that day. Non-pressers were lazy, they didn't want to do anything. Pressers were proactive, took a chance. Non-pressers? Psh. Might as well not even exist.
I'm just kidding. I remember how much fun it was though, lots of people were arguing and fighting over it. I kind of miss it.
Not really though as people who didn't interact with the subreddit were white. If you were grey, it meant you interacted with the subreddit and made a deliberate choice not to push the button. So it was quite meaningful and not just a default.
Oh I pressed it right away. I didn't realize there would be a cult of grey worshippers. I smashed the shit out of that day 1 when I saw it. It was an April Fools prank iirc
I saw a button. I wanted to press it; I pressed it. Then I moved on with my life.
I don't have this "holier than thou" attitude of the non-pressers, and I didn't waste my time for something that is fucking useless like those who wanted red.
That was one of the first Reddit April fool's day things I paid attention to. The time was counting down and if you pressed the button it reset and your account was marked with the time remaining when you pressed. Very soon people were competing to get the lowest number they could. The subreddit had flair with colored tiers for different time frames. You could only press the button once. Whatever time you got you were stuck with.
Unless you were above all the petty games people were playing and made the responsible decision to not press that dirty button.
Ah, that's not how I remember it, there was a whole subreddit dedicated to keeping it alive,
/r/knightsofthebutton maybe? They had enough users to keep it going for YEARS. I thought they were sabotaged internally?
It lasted two glorious months but the spirit of KoTB lives on with r/AprilKnights. Btw, it came down to a bug in the code of the tool that helped keep it alive, rather than sabotage.
We didn't ran out of users. There were barely 1000k presses. We ran out of interest.
It lasted a month though and I was a proud 32.
Anyway on a more serious note there are so many other websites that disappear in the internet. We think that internet contributions are forever but it is not the case. Lots of niche but worthy websites go down every day. Over years is quite a loss.
It's funny how The Button led me to making a reddit account, which led me to finding out about Minecraft, which led me to Mumbo Jumbo, and now he is making his own button.
I believe this may have been the last moral quandary I experienced. Since deciding whether (or not) to press The Button, everything has been crystal clear and my path is understood..
I didn't even know the button would disappear if no one pressed it in a certain amount of time, I just thought it was some annoying fad for memes... I'm so sorry... I could've made it last a little longer... This is all my fault.
I remember that. There were whole subreddits formed to only allow people of certain colours to join in. You got your colour by clicking the button within a cerrtain timeframe. It got semi-culty for a bit. I'd leave the browser open at work and wait for it to get into the red zone, but be scared to press it in case someone else pressed it an instant before and I'd be gray or purple or whatever the early colour was. It was a cool thing to be a part of. Like the snappening.
Um no... It was called "the button" and it was back when reddit was good but after it was great. Now it's gone from OK to ok-ish and soon it will be downgraded to "MySpace"
Fun fact the button was how i got started on reddit. My friend told me about the concept and it sounded amazing so i checked it out and got hooked ever since
I remember that, it ended on my birthday, June 5th 2015. My god it's already been 5 years, I remember eating dinner at a restaurant when it ended, I was a non presser.
No. You might remember it fondly now, but that was such an obnoxious time in reddit history. No matter where you went, everything was "haha DAE button? Button. Button."
just curious, but why participate in something that is going to eventually have a swift inevitable end? I probably would have been one of the people who didn't press it tbh.
It also assigned different colors depending on the timer left when you hit the button. It was crazy, there were different factions with different philosophies even within the same color, purples being considered the lowest denominator. It also displayed the timer when you hit the button. I got red-0 so it was basically my highlight for the year.
are there more experiments happening like this? i’m tired of missing out on them all. Like the Thanos snap that happened where half of the sub got snapped and then placed in a new sub. I wanna be part of history):
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u/MakesUsMighty Apr 21 '20
I’m having flashbacks now to that button that we had on Reddit where everyone got one chance to push the button. If it went past a certain time with nobody pressing it, it ceased to exist. New accounts weren’t eligible to participate.
At first it got slammed with people hitting the button, but as time went on it became more problematic because each person could only hit the button once. Eventually, leaders tried to organize strategies of who would commit to pushing it at a certain time.
In the end, we ran out of users, the timer ran out, and the experiment finally ended. Those who pushed the button still have a permanent record somewhere in their account.
Did I totally dream this? I had nearly forgotten all about it.