99% of us forgot about it on April 2
reddit’s not particularly good for much, but one of the more enjoyable things it’s done recently was its April Fools “joke,” the Button.
The button had a countdown timer lasting for 60 seconds, and when it hit zero the game was over. Simple enough. But the twist was just evil; if anyone with a reddit account before April 1 pressed the button, the timer would be reset, meaning the Internet had to work together to not click it.
If your account was made after April 1 2015 you could not push the button. If your account was made before April 1 2015, you could push the button only once and would be forever branded with a colour denoting how low the timer was when you pressed it.
People got really involved with this, creating teams and graphs and theories all about how to get this button unpressed for 60 seconds. Well, after two months and four days (on June 5), we finally won.
The button was clicked 1,008,316 times, and considering everyone with an eligible account could only press the button once, that’s a lot of people. The subreddit the game is hosted on is to be archived, for future generations to learn from how into utterly stupid shit we can get.
And now it’s over, dear friends. We can all walk out into the sun for the first time in months as the free people we truly are, happy in the knowledge no one clicked a button on the Internet. Huzzah.
Oh, and if you were wondering, absolutely nothing happened when it ended. Still, I’m sure lore will pop up around the final button presser.
