April 15, 2015 at 21:40Mysterious button on reddit still working
On April 1, 2015 at 09:00 a social experiment began on reddit: a form with a countdown timer and a button that restarted the timer appeared in one of the subreddits . 10 minutes after the appearance of subreddit, the form became more active. The button can be pressed, or not pressed, but over the past two weeks the timer has not reached zero, and the number of participants in the experiment has reached 750,000. You can click the button only once and only if the user account was created before April 1.
During this time, a whole community of people has formed around the mystery of the button, comprehensively analyzing its state and divided into several different groups. Some of the users consider the participants' attention to be religious and analyzegroups of people in a social context. For example, the “ Knights of the Button ” see their mission in that the countdown lasts as long as possible, sacrificing, if necessary, their status of “not using”, if they see that the timer is close to zero. On the contrary, the “ Button Assassins ” set out to infiltrate the Knights community and let the timer end the countdown. People who indifferently observe the experiment call themselves “Scientists” or “Historians”.
Some users have created special mobile applications that allow you to see the status of the button and intervene in its state. Three open source Android apps are now available , some of which lookvery professional. In addition, you can download several types of extensions for Chrome or Firefox, which also allow you to see what is happening with the button at the moment. In several web applications, such as this (Node.js, the D3 library is used to build graphs), you can conveniently observe the button life on the graph:
From the graph (the timer restarts on the ordinate axis), it can be seen that the counter almost does not drop below 30 seconds. There is a rating of the top 100 users who were able to observe “extremely” low values - someone / u / snakehawk37 saw someone press a button when it reached level 27. A second statistics is also collected, which can be viewedin this large text file.
There is a legend in the community about a special Konami code that can be entered from the keyboard and watch the unusual behavior of the button. It is believed that people who know the code are lucky:
Some people believe that the button will work forever.
During this time, a whole community of people has formed around the mystery of the button, comprehensively analyzing its state and divided into several different groups. Some of the users consider the participants' attention to be religious and analyzegroups of people in a social context. For example, the “ Knights of the Button ” see their mission in that the countdown lasts as long as possible, sacrificing, if necessary, their status of “not using”, if they see that the timer is close to zero. On the contrary, the “ Button Assassins ” set out to infiltrate the Knights community and let the timer end the countdown. People who indifferently observe the experiment call themselves “Scientists” or “Historians”.
Some users have created special mobile applications that allow you to see the status of the button and intervene in its state. Three open source Android apps are now available , some of which lookvery professional. In addition, you can download several types of extensions for Chrome or Firefox, which also allow you to see what is happening with the button at the moment. In several web applications, such as this (Node.js, the D3 library is used to build graphs), you can conveniently observe the button life on the graph:
From the graph (the timer restarts on the ordinate axis), it can be seen that the counter almost does not drop below 30 seconds. There is a rating of the top 100 users who were able to observe “extremely” low values - someone / u / snakehawk37 saw someone press a button when it reached level 27. A second statistics is also collected, which can be viewedin this large text file.
There is a legend in the community about a special Konami code that can be entered from the keyboard and watch the unusual behavior of the button. It is believed that people who know the code are lucky:
Some people believe that the button will work forever.