The biggest split emerged between those who had pushed, and those who had not: the “filthy pressers” versus those who would never do such a thing.

Sure enough, that’s what happened at the Button. Until the button is pushed, the flair is grey.Īnd once you start labelling people, it’s only a short step to them taking the labels seriously. Depending on what time was showing on the clock when a particular account gave in and clicked, a specific “flair” would be assigned: purple if pushed in the first eight seconds, then blue if pushed in the next 10, the green, yellow, orange and finally red. Rapidly, a small but intensely devoted community built up around the social experiment, based largely on one other facet of the button. Users could only push the button if they were logged in with an account created before 1 April 2015, and, true to Reddit’s word, they could only ever push the button once.

The post was factual: the newly formed subreddit did indeed hold a button, a timer, and a dynamic pie chart.

If the button is pressed the timer will reset to 60 seconds and continue counting down. “The timer will count down from 60 seconds. “When this post is 10 minutes old, a button and timer will become active at /r/thebutton,” it explained.

On that day, the site’s admins published a short blog post. So now we know you’re ready, get yourself over to Beano.For the uninitiated, the button began as an April Fools’ Day prank on the social news site Reddit. Yes, that’s right – is the HOME OF PRANKING and by pressing the button you’ve passed the FIRST PRANK TEST and shown you’re ready for more! More pranks. So, you pressed the big red button, didn’t you? We told you NOT to press the button!īUT… actually we’re kinda glad you did, because you’ve just proved yourself to be EXACTLY the sort of person we’re looking for… because we want to find all the pranksters out there!

The red button prank