And so it ends.

After 1,008,316 presses and more than two months since it launched on April 1st, the button has ended. In this time a lot has happened. There were factions, religions, revolutions, weather forecasting,a prophet who renounced their status, and an allegiance with the undead to name a few. Confused? You can read up on the button here.

The most awe-inspiring part of the button was the creativity of the reddit community. We wanted to take a moment and celebrate some of the amazing things that you came up with as a result of a 60 second timer and a button.

Just a Second More, by /u/is_cookie

The button cared not who you were; all were judged for the time they pressed, regardless of fame:

It also became a source of real life change for some. It helped a redditor with MS get a motorized scooter so they could go on rides with their daughter, prompted one marriage, might have ended another, and helped tworedditors get sober.

Other than providing the simple rules in the announcement blog post, we tried to not interfere with the button wherever possible. The /r/thebutton community immediately began creating a detailed lore with myriad religions and factions, all spawning from the act of pressing or not.



Whose side are you on? by /u/Goombac

Some redditors took it upon themselves to document this lore so others might be educated about its intricacies—do you know the difference between a Red Guard and a Knight of the Button?

Button pressers and abstainers alike worked together to scrape as much data about the button as possible. Some incredible tools emerged to track button presses. Most notable was The Button Snitchby /u/treyjp based off initial work by /u/jamesrom. /u/Chr12t0pher created a website full of various button stats as well as /u/TheButtonStatsBot that kept everyone updated on the passing of significant button milestones. Special mention to /u/emtes for their work on the Button Stats API.

redditor /u/mncke created The Squire a browser extension that would coordinate presses between those who wished to sustain the button for as long as possible. He also created The Necromancer, a program that harnessed the presses of long dead ‘zombie’ accounts to prevent the coming of the after-timer. Ultimately, however, the undead proved to be unruly.



Zombie Knights by /u/Eramedhine

Despite this spirit of collaboration, there were some redditors who sought to mislead others into pressing erroneously. Most notably, /u/MrFunderthuck’s delicious ruse involved creating a chrome extension that purported to automatically press the button at a time of the owner’s choosing but instead hijacked their precious clicks.

/u/jophuds and /u/Drunken_Economist of the reddit data team looked into how redditors interacted with the button:

The crazed early days where 60% of eligible viewers would press the button quickly subsided. By the fourth day only 10% of viewers were pressing; after two weeks only 5% of viewers were pressing. This was the equilibrium for the button.

All devices fell to the button. Final counts showing 66% of presses from PCs – more than three times that of Mac. Cellular platforms were also lain to waste, 11% of presses coming via Android and 3% from iPhones.

The button brought all redditors with it regardless of their tenure. The distribution of year of account for 1 and 60 second flair shows little difference.



click image to enlarge

As promised, we’ve also released an anonymized list of timestamps for every button press. Check out the /r/redditdata post to get a hold of it. We can’t wait to see what the reddit community makes of this data set (looking at you /r/dataisbeautiful).

We’ve also open sourced thebutton github repo, for those who enjoy such things.

But who was the last redditor to press the button? “The pressiah,” as the /r/thebutton community decided they would be called, whose coming would signal freedom from tyranny or the end of existence, depending on who you asked. At 2015-06-05T21:49:53.069000, a humble user named/u/BigGoron pressed the button. It was never pressed again.

Thank you to everyone who took part in the button. It was a success only due to the creativity of the reddit community. Tune in to this week’s Upvoted podcast to hear an episode about the button.(Update: Listen to the episode below!) For those wishing to reminisce on the highs and lows of the button, check out /r/ButtonAftermath.

More incredible things emerged from the button than we could have anticipated. This blogpost is just a smattering—I encourage you to share your favorite button moments in the comments.

The experiment is over?