It started out as an April Fool’s joke on Reddit, but “the button” has become an international obsession.
My 12-year-old daughter gave me the following information about the game:
- Anyone who has been a registered user of Reddit since before April 1, 2015 can play.
- At the top of the page there’s a button and a 60-second countdown timer.
- You can press the button whenever you want.
- When you press the button, the counter resets to sixty seconds.
- Once you push the button, you are locked out from from pushing it again.
- If you press the button, you are awarded a “flair” in the form of a colored dot that appears next to your Reddit name.
- The color of the flair indicates the amount of time on the countdown timer when you pushed the button.
- If you mouse over the flair you can see the number of seconds when you pressed the button.
- So far, over 600,000 players have pressed the button.
- Approximately 90% of the button pushers have a purple flair (which means they pressed the button when the countdown timer was between 60-51 seconds).
- Approximately 7% have a blue flair (50-41 seconds). The first blue flair was achieved on April 3rd.
- Approximately 3% have a green flair (40-31 seconds). The first green flair was achieved on April 4th.
- 0% have yellow, orange, or red flairs.
- If you have a gray flair that means you have not clicked the button or are not eligible to play the game.
James Rom has created an interesting realtime chart that shows button presses and the countdown time when the buttons were pushed (screenshot above).
“At 1 second”
