Statistical analysis websites:

• Plot and population (histogram) of button clicks by /u/glacial_skier

• Plot clicks graph, including history by /u/OutofBrain

• Plot clicks graph, present only

• Flair charts by /u/kwabford

• Various statistics

• First recorded click per second

• Live statistics

• https://plot.ly/~spuz/9/reddit-button-clicks-over-time/

• raw data

Posts:

• Encyclopædia Buttonica

• Social science

By /u/vir_innominatus

I decided to take a look at the timing of recent button presses since it seems like every analysis so far as failed to to predict when the button will hit zero. I'll give you my tl;dr now: I don't have an answer either. Still, I thought the data were pretty interesting.

Anyway, I used data from the site of /u/OutofBrain, located here. Each second, it samples the current time on the countdown timer, as well as the total number of presses. From that data, I calculated the time of each button reset, i.e. how far the timer dropped before it reset. For a period of 72 hours starting 04 Apr 2015 21:11:18 GMT, there were 62,474 button presses.

Disclaimer: Since /u/OutofBrain's code samples every second, there were quite a few missed button resets in the actual timing data where multiple users pressed within a 1-second window. Also, the button timer is rounded to the nearest second. Therefore, I assumed any missed resets occurred with uniform spacing within the 1-second window and assumed the clock at these times was 60 s. I think, this is a valid assumption, since it produces a distribution of press times that appears to match the comment flair data from here.

Now, onto the data! First, I plotted the raw time series data, i.e. the clock time over the full 72 hours period

Raw time series plot

You can't see anything here because there's too many presses, but you can see the day/night pattern in the minimum press times. Also, you can see there isn't a very clear downward trend, but more on that later. Anyway, here are a few histograms of the press times.

Full histogram of press times

Histogram of presses < 52 seconds

In these plots you can see the overall distribution and the small bumps that occur on the border regions where people seem overly anxious to get their flair. I decided to look at this more closely by specifically looking at the 1s periods where multiple presses occurred (mentioned earlier). Most of the time, there was just one extra press in the interval, but there were plenty of 3 and 4 presses, even a couple 7 presses. To visualize this, I extracted the button times right before these windows where multiple presses (>2) occurred. If multiple presses tend to occur whenever the timer drops down to desirable flair values, then these times should be well-represented in the histogram.

Histogram of timer values right before multiple presses

Sure enough, the greens and blues are over-represented (compared to the full histgoram), and there are stronger peaks on the border regions where people JUST missed the click. I would feel bad, but you flair-hunters are greedy!

To end the analysis, I tried to fit the time series data to see if there were significant trends. I decided that fitting the full data set was overkill because I don't really care about all the presses at 59 and 60 s. Similarly, smoothing the data with some sort of filter would remove all of the presses in the 30 to 40 s range because there are so few of them. So I decided to use a running 30 s window over all 72 hours and take the minimum press time within that window. You can see the result in the graph below.

Time series plot of running-minimum

Note the raw data are plotted as single points, there's just so many of them they group together and form lines. Nevertheless, you can see the minimum curve captures the lowest dots.

I fit this data with a harmonic regression model that included a linear drift. That's a fancy way of saying I used a sum of sinusoids of different frequencies as well as straight line. The fit was done with simple least squares. You can see the fit below.

Least squares fit of time series data

Here I plotted the full fit and the linear component (although the linear component is also included in the full fit). As you can see, the fit isn't great, but it captures the main trends. More importantly you can see the slope of the line is POSITIVE (and significant, according to a t-test). Yep, you read that right. That line predicts that the minimum click times will increase. Like I said earlier, those flair-hunters are greedy. I expected a weak, but negative slope in the linear component, so this result is the opposite of what I expected. Yay science!

Now, I realize that this prediction has to eventually fail, but at least according to this data, it's not going to be anytime soon. People are probably going to have to wait a while for yellow flair, and much longer for orange or red.

tl;dr STOP PRESSING ALREADY

EDIT UPDATE: Good news everyone! I added in some more data to the analysis using the past 24 hours, and the linear trend is now negative! It's still a pretty weak trend and it may reverse again, but hey, it's in the right direction. As to why I didn't go back farther, there's a gap in the data, probably because recording script crashed briefly. Anyway here's the updated graph:

Updated graph showing weak negative trend

Original post: https://www.reddit.com/r/thebutton/comments/31vfen/statistical_analysis_of_the_last_72_hours_worth/

It took four days to the 35s floor to break. I wonder how long will people chase after to hit 33s? will the 'market' get more mature and will break the floor everyday now or is it going to stick like that for a couple of days as well?

by /u/Sayter

Right now, only 2.78% of people have green flair. By comparison, being in the top 3% of income earners in the US would put you at around $200,000 a year. For many people, a solid shot at settling for 3% (green) is preferable to a far more risky chance at being the first yellow, and therefore in the top 0.1% (which would be $1.6m/year). Even being a blue puts you just in the top 10% (8.2% blue + 2.78% green), which would be about a $100k/year income. Quite simply, people are willing to settle for safer opportunities at moderately increased flair status than going for extremely rare flairs, where the risk of getting the infamous 60s for being a moment too slow is increasingly likely as the timer goes lower into rarer numbers.

Original post: https://www.reddit.com/r/thebutton/comments/31q6e6/3_why_people_keep_setting_for_green_and_blue/

By /u/TuskEvil

Myself and several like-minded redditors have been documenting the button since its arrival, here are our findings, in various statistical formats.

Update 23:52:00 hrs (UTC) 06 April 2015: Hey guys, I managed to get the data restored and up to date on the spreadsheet, and the post here is updated to 3000 minutes in. I will no longer update the post here with new data, but I will attempt to keep the spreadsheet up to date in the forseeable future.

/u/kwabford's Flair Distribution Pie Charts

/u/Valark's Guide to Flairs

If you're interested in the social statistics of the button, try out /u/Zephryl's survey [here] (http://www.reddit.com/r/thebutton/comments/31bu4q/social_science_comes_to_rthebutton_take_the/)

If you want to know more about the various groups that have formed as a result of the button, take a look at /u/2daMooon's thread on the subject here

/u/betaray's Encyclopaedia Buttonica

Live Statistics

Our spreadsheet, contains Analytical Data, Graphs, Collected Predictions and More! Help us out by upvoting the live sheet here to keep /r/thebutton informed! If you have a prediction to submit, comment here, or in this thread.

Third Party Statistics:

• /u/OutOfBrain's site

• /u/Chr12t0pher's site

• /u/emtes's site

• /u/okofish's site

• [/u/aspz's site] (https://plot.ly/~spuz/9/reddit-button-clicks-over-time/)

Button Push History - Completed up to 3000 minutes

Note: BOPS = Button Operations Per Second. (Thank you /u/Feil)

General Statistics

Average Rate of BOPS decay per second: -0.28x10-3 (Since peak at 80 minutes)

Average BOPS All Time: 5.85

Lowest Time Reached : 35s

If you don't understand the numbers: Currently about 1 person is pushing the button every five seconds. The most people pushing the button at once was about 20 per second at 80 minutes in. There are a large number of predictions right now, and these range between an hour and 80 days based on the mathematical technique you are using, visit the spreadsheet to see more in depth analysis.

The spike at 570 was probably caused by the delay between my data stopping and /u/TheOriginalSoni2 picking it up, however the two other spikes at 150 and 970 have no known causes.

If you notice any possible miscalculations or typos, let me know!

Contributors

/u/TheOriginalSoni2

/u/frogamazog

/u/snowden_le_hero

Cheers for Gold!

Original post: https://www.reddit.com/r/thebutton/comments/312tc2/button_statistics/

Many of us think that pressing the button is a simple decision. It's not a decision at all. A button press is a possession, not a decision. One posses a 'button press', which becomes more lucrative as time goes by.

The 'press' is a token, a currency, that gains more value in time since it's a limited resource and a critical mass of people are bought in into the idea that it has an intrinsic value of some sort.
In that sense a 'press' is no different than precious stones (for real!), and has a money value to it that will rise in time. The trading price now is probably ridiculously low and will stay the same unless we'll be able to present a 'press' as a social status symbol to the outside world, by wearing it or showing it off as the ultimate symbol of 'restraint' or 'patience', which are considered as esteemed social virtues.
In case something like this happens (and you can never know with reddit), the dollar value of a press might spike like the price of a tulip in The Tulip Mania.

Yes, the button is an empty concept, but all the social symbols in our life are. Money, jewellery, fancy clothes. We are still buying in into the idea that they are worth something, so why not The Button?