Once again the Internet has come together for a viral global cyber event - The Button. I am talking about (the) mysterious Lost-esque button on Reddit which became an Internet phenomenon. Reddit, the social news site, has an enormous web traffic. A button appeared on Reddit on April Fools day. It was accompanied by a simple timer. Whenever someone presses the button, the timer resets to 60 seconds, and starts counting down. Every user/account created before April 1st on Reddit had a single chance t0 press the button. This meant the number of possible clicks on the button were finite. If the timer hits zero and runs out, the game ends and the button would not respond to any more presses.

Users who pressed the button (‘pressers’) got a color flair depending on the exact timer value (0–60 seconds) when they pressed it.

The colors of the flair strongly resembles a rainbow, meaning a 52s–60s press would get you a violet flair whereas a 0s–12s press would earn you a red flair.

The purpose of the button has been widely debated in press. Was is it an experiment to check if we can wait for a minute ? Was it an art project? A way to show advertisers how engaged the user base is? An existential representation of life? Can it be a lesson in for public policy? Why is society so fascinated that they can’t wait to press it? Should we be worried about this? What does it all mean… especially when over ONE million netizens have pressed the Button; given seemingly zero associated reward incentive.

What can a pointless Button tell us about how our beliefs and ideological theories survive in today’s competitive environments? A lot, actually.

This post is not a revelation of the grand theory for the button — why it was born or what happened when it died. I doubt even the Reddit mods know that. Instead, I show that analyzing the click data provided by Reddit indicates that the evolution of community strategies around the button mimics aspects of biological evolution in competitive environments. User reaction, interaction and community formation around the fictive purpose of the button directly leads to this result.

The Button is massive psychological and social experiment, probably the biggest ever of its kind on the Internet. Insights we can extract from this data are useful in various scenarios, from gamification in your app to understanding how very simple rules can actively engage (even obsess) online communities.

For those who haven’t been following the entire story, several color-coded communities, coalitions and cults had mobilized on Reddit with specific missions for the Button. Overall these rivalries lay in a spectrum between: (1) prolong the life of the button or (2) expire the button as quickly as possible. Here are some of the button coalitions based on the pressed timer values (or color flair):

Button religions that became communities and collaborated on pressing the button to obtain specific flair colors. Since each user could press only once, they would belong to one of these communities based on the timer-value when you pressed the button. The followers of the shade refrained from pressing the button. The other button religions are indicative of their flair colors.

As the button presses dwindled there was murmur of the imminent Pressiah — the last person to press the button before the timer expires. Apparently, scientists on Reddit had warned that one of the bots could become the Pressiah, which is incredible to think what happens when a machine makes the final push. Was the Pressiah a bot?

Here are the three overarching questions surrounding the Button game:

(1) How long will the button survive? Why were estimates made from initial data so off, and why did it not survive the entire duration of what’s mathematically possible.

Why were estimates made from initial data so off, and why did it not survive the entire duration of what’s mathematically possible. (2) Why did ad hoc communities and coalitions form in the game ? Do redditors have a natural propensity to cooperate, or did the game design generate partial cooperation as an unintentional by product.

? Do redditors have a natural propensity to cooperate, or did the game design generate partial cooperation as an unintentional by product. (3) What was the impact of BOTS and ZOMBIES playing the game ? Because you know, every digital community has its share of bots who ‘engage’.

How much of the button is about impulse control, addiction, instant and delayed gratification?

To answer these questions, I will use the time series of button presses data released by Reddit, which essentially contains the <press_time> and <flair_received> for each of the ~1.008 Million presses. I do not have the user info related to each press. Remember, for the button to survive, it must receive at least one click per minute.

Life of the Button

There were many predictions as to how long the button would survive. (1) If we discount the fact that there are co-presses, that people are not always rational and there is only one universal strategy (to extend button life), then the mathematically ideal lifetime of the button is N*59, where N is the # of Reddit active user accounts created before April 1. This end-date would be a whopping 15 years, October 30, 2031 to be exact! (2) We know ~1M people pressed the button. In fact, even if all of the ~1 million pressers had decided to wait for a zero sec press, this button would have lived till March 1, 2017!

Other predictions tried to use a saturation model to extrapolate the clicks/minute on the button based on the initial data. The decay in the number of clicks predicted that the button would expire within 12.3 days, i.e. on April 13th. This exponential decay model went wrong because it failed to account for the other competing strategies from different flair coalitions.

In reality, the button lived from April 1 to June 5th and accumulated around ~1 M presses over its lifetime. However, almost 30% of the all clicks on the button occurred within the first 24 hours of inception.

We will call the population of redditors who pressed the button — ‘pressers’.

In fact, within two days 50% of the pressers had already clicked it. In a span of one fortnight since launch, 75% of pressers had a colored flair.

The button would still survive for another 50 days, contrary to the predictions. Just 10% of the pressers sustained it during the entire of the last month. This is simply staggering, because it hints at the possibility of strategic cooperation in a set of users who were not fundamentally amassed to cooperate. Without cooperation and formation of coalitions to pre-plan button presses, the life of the button would have expired significantly earlier.

When the button finally expired on June 5th, it was 65 days old. Here is a chart of how the different flair pressers clicked the button over time.