Have you pushed The Button yet? Who knows how long it will be an option … and why it’s spawning cults and cliques on Reddit

What is The Button? And will it ever not be pressed?

Over the last two weeks, social news site Reddit has slowly split apart into warring factions. The Followers of the Shade have their hearts torn in two by the Bluetherhood and the Emerald Council on a regular basis, but their true enemies are the Knights of the Button. All that anyone really agrees on is that no matter what name the purples call themselves – be it the Purple Conclave, Purple Struggle, or Purple Lounge – they’re to be pitied.

Let me back up.

The Button counts down…

On April Fool’s Day, the Reddit admins published a short blog post. “When this post is 10 minutes old, a button and timer will become active at /r/thebutton,” it explained.

“The timer will count down from 60 seconds. If the button is pressed the timer will reset to 60 seconds and continue counting down.

“You may only press the button once.”

It may have been posted on 1 April, but the post was telling the truth: the newly-formed subreddit did indeed hold a button, a timer, and a dynamic small pie chart. Users can only push the button if they’re logged in with an account created before 1 April 2015, and, true to Reddit’s word, they can only ever push the button once.

As I write, the button has been pushed 715,123 times.

No-one knows what happens when the timer hits zero; it hasn’t made it that far yet. The lowest time to be shown on the clock so far is 27 seconds, on Sunday 12th at 9:48am. Then, somebody hit the button.

Pushing the button.

There’s one further twist: once you do push the button, you’re forever marked with the time you pushed it at. If you’re an impatient presser who reset the timer at just 59 seconds, everyone will know; and if you’re one of the hallowed few who clicked when there was less than 30 seconds on the clock, everyone will know.

And not just thanks to an unobtrusive number. The user account is colour-coded into six bands: purple for those who press before the count hits 52, blue for those who press before 42, and so on, through green, yellow, orange and red. If you haven’t pressed yet, you’re given a grey badge, and if you registered after April 1st, you’re stuck with a white one forever.

Hence the factions. Because once you start labelling people, you start giving them identities to rally around. The Blues and Greens, both relatively sizeable groups who nonetheless possess a certain exclusivity, congregate in their own special sub-reddits. The Yellows are so rare that they don’t even really have a community, but the Reds – even though no one has actually managed to score a red badge – are kept afloat through a community of wannabes, the Red Guard. They’ve even got their own credo:

I submit myself to the Order of the Red, Long shall be our days and nights ahead, Although weary our watch, we shall not alter, No matter how arduous, we shall not falter, We shall stay the course of the rose-way instead, And receive the cherry fruits – stained in blood-red!

And then, more numerous than any individual group, are the greys – the users who have not pushed the button. Some are waiting for their chance to join one of the non-purple groups; some are torn with indecision. But the Followers of the Shade have made an explicit decision to never push the button.

There are more. The Knights of the Button aim to never let the timer hit zero, while the Destructionists want to “see the timer reach zero and the button destroyed”, and they don’t care how.

There is even the Holy0, who believe that “when the Great Timer reaches the Holy Number 0 all true believers will reach salvation and all those who don’t will be forced into an eternity in one of Coloured Hells”, and the Grey Hopeful who believe that “those who have pressed not The Button shall be rewarded with Gold in the After-Timer”.

It’s all very silly. And yet, it’s curiously fascinating. The same drive that leads to the creation of button-based religions and cliques also encouraged James Romeril to create a graphic visualizer of the button’s history, and Chris Stevens to start tracking the first time the button hit a record low count.

But hovering behind it all is the question of what will happen when the timer hits zero. Knowing Reddit, it will likely be gloriously anticlimactic, but that doesn’t stop the curiousity from being maddening. Turning to one last data visualisation might scratch the itch slightly.

According to Redditor ezeeetm’s Button Death Clock, at the current rate of participation, every active user on Reddit will have pushed the button in 222 days time. So come back on November 21 2015 – and until then, Don’t Push The Button.

• Reddit: can anyone clean up the mess behind ‘the front page of the internet’?