The button: social experiment driving Reddit crazy

http://www.vox.com/2015/4/10/8383165/reddit-button-explained

by prawn • 11 years ago

461 214 11 years ago

vox.com

babramovitch• 11 years ago

For anyone that's interested, I've made an open source Android app to watch the button.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.nebulights...

https://github.com/babramovitch/TheButton

deweerdt• 11 years ago

This post: http://np.reddit.com/r/thebutton/comments/31ltqd/read_this_b... is a good primer.

pgodzin• 11 years ago

Reddit would do well on the island of Lost

masterzora• 11 years ago

Or poorly in the Cold War.

switz• 11 years ago

It's a joke, right? I'm guessing that the timer resets itself with a "fake press" if it reaches a certain threshold.

Buge3• 11 years ago

It only resets when someone pushes it. It's been getting closer and closer to 0 as the days go by since it started. There are also bots waiting for it to get low so they can snag a low number.

dbbolton• 11 years ago

It only resets when someone pushes it.

Is there any code available to prove that?

raverbashing2• 11 years ago

Well, I've been trying to see how this works and I can't find anything

Network monitoring on the browser shows nothing (maybe an anti-debugging technique)

tcpdump shows an SSL connection to EC2

You really can't synchronise so many people (especially with connection latencies), I think there's some amount of faking in it.

Buge3• 11 years ago

There's even malware going around, causing people to push the button at early numbers.

franciscop2• 11 years ago

Say what to a community of hackers? :D

    setInterval(function(){
      var seconds = parseInt($("#thebutton-s-10s").html()) * 10
                  + parseInt($("#thebutton-s-1s").html());
      if (seconds > 15 && seconds < 20) {
        $("#thebutton").click();
        }
    }, 100);

pests7• 11 years ago

People had that running within an hour. The problem is temporary connectivity issues and so which makes you think its hit that low. There were efforts to track the lowest number seen so far but a common problem was getting artificially low just due to lag.

quick edit: Another top level reply to this post is saying something similar.

dack2• 11 years ago

Careful, if you lose the connection to the websocket you'll click inadvertently! Also, there's a global variable called "r.thebutton" which has info about the timer already - no need to parse out html elements :)

franciscop2• 11 years ago

Edited to take this into account. Now it will only click within an interval, from 15 to 20 seconds. In this way, if it was 0, undef, etc, it would not be clicked, thanks!

strathmeyer• 11 years ago

They detect 'cheaters' and flair people as such.

jacalata• 11 years ago

really? How would you detect a clientside script like this?

teraflop• 11 years ago

AFAIK "cheaters" are just people who used Javascript to defeat the client-side validation and try to click the button more than once. Those extra clicks get caught by additional server-side checks.

buttonaccount2• 11 years ago

How did the admin add interactive HTML to a subreddit? Is this possible for any subreddit, or was this something special organized by the company? The intro post doesn't seem to delve into those details.

pests7• 11 years ago

This was the company. It was for April 1st. There is more stuff added for this than meets the eye too, like automatic flair assignment.

gravity132• 11 years ago

It's actually pretty cool. Makes me wonder if they're working on abstracting it out so other subreddits can utilize tools like these as well.

buttonaccount2• 11 years ago

yes, exactly. could be some cool applications if they extended the platform.

will_hughes• 11 years ago

Admins (with the red [a] tag beside their name) are Reddit Staffers, mods (with the [m] tag beside their name) are just random redditors that moderate a subreddit.

(* = only shows up if they choose to exercise admin/mod powers when posting)

dack2• 11 years ago

Yeah, I had a little JS bookmarklet watching it for me for a few days, tracking the lowest number, ready to click when it got to 1 second. Of course, the websocket encountered an error at somepoint mistakenly registering an incorrect timer value and causing my script to click at 50-something seconds :(

gremlinsinc• 11 years ago

Yeah, so I created a reddit post --- to persuade Newbs to NOT press the button until < 25 to maybe give some of us a shot at a good number...and see what's out there! https://www.reddit.com/r/thebutton/comments/32eue3/hey_idiot... If you feel inclined vote it up, so it becomes #1 on the thread and first thing people read.

thecatspaw• 11 years ago

this isnt reddit, nor is it the correct place to promote your reddit thread.

PaulJulius• 11 years ago

Some code you can write in the console to click the button at a certain time:

    sec10s   = document.getElementById("thebutton-s-10s");
    sec1s    = document.getElementById("thebutton-s-1s");
    sec10ms  = document.getElementById("thebutton-s-10ms");
    sec100ms = document.getElementById("thebutton-s-100ms");
    button   = document.getElementById("thebutton");
    time = function() {
        return sec10s.innerHTML +
               sec1s.innerHTML; // +
               //sec10ms.innerHTML +
               //sec100ms.innerHTML;
    };
    
    pressAt = function(timeStr) {
        return function() {
            if (time() == timeStr) {
                button.click();
            }
        };
    };

    setInterval(pressAt("00"), 100);

But even with setInterval set to 1, this won't get called every millisecond, so you can't get accuracy to the second decimal point, not that there's really any need to. (It turns out setInterval has a minimum delay. setTimeout's minimum delay is 4ms and likely setInterval's minimum delay is the same.) Just set this up and leave your computer running for the next few months and you ought to get it eventually.

pests7• 11 years ago

Hint, check the global variable r.thebutton as alluded to elsewhere in thread.

zephiro309• 11 years ago

So, you created code to repeatedly press a button you can only press once?

TheDong• 11 years ago

No, to repeatedly check the time the button has and press it once at that time :)

The fact that it'll press it again if it hits that time again and do nothing is beside the point; there's no need to add complexity of exiting.

oh_sigh2• 11 years ago

What's the benefit of pressing it when it is near 0 seconds? You really want to be the last person to press it before the full 60 seconds expires.

RockyMcNuts• 11 years ago

you get nice reddit flair the later your press it :)

no way to program it to guarantee you are the last person to ever press it.

pests7• 11 years ago

How do you know what they really want? Take a closer look at the subreddit and things like an entire class system has developed over which number you get (if you've pressed at all.) Plus, who says the goal is to be the last person who clicks? Maybe the goal is to not click at all!

ThrustVectoring• 11 years ago

That's not the correct strategy for keeping the timer alive as long as possible. If everyone did that, then everyone would simultaneously press it the first time it almost-expires, and nobody would remain for the next time it nearly expires.

A better strategy is to pick a random time number that you wait until, biased towards the lower part of the range.

raldi• 11 years ago

Okay, now if you really want to impress me, pretend you work for reddit and write some code that would catch this kind of script and give it "cheater" flair.

natrius• 11 years ago

Monkeypatch setInterval/setTimeout to mark people as cheaters. The more dedicated cheaters will hit the button API outside of the browser, which is pretty hard to stop.

evan_• 11 years ago

  var cheaterFunc = function () {
    console.error('cheater!');
    // report cheater to server somehow...
  };

  $('*').each(function (i, el) {
    if (el instanceof Object) {
      Object.defineProperties(el, {
        innerHTML: {get: cheaterFunc},
        innerText: {get: cheaterFunc}
      });  
    }
  });

...and of course to defeat this, you could simply use a tampering proxy to prevent this javascript from making it to the browser.

(There are probably other ways to get the value of each digit with javascript, but you should be able to just add cheaterFunc to each of those. .childNode, change the style to use a custom font where each number has a different, predictable width and test .offsetWidth, etc.)

gravity132• 11 years ago

Use a canvas element to render the timer.

humanarity7• 11 years ago

People I think all these "cheater traps" are unimportant, because there's actually no "significant advantage" to using a robot. It isn't going to make you more likely to beat human players, only allow you to stay on there longer at lower cost to you.

This is because two things: 1) the userbase size, and 2) the userbase behaviour.

Because the userbase is so large, there's always going to be some people on there, meaning even with a robot you always have some competition.

So the only thing a robot will allow you to do is potentially have better reaction times than a human, however, this is also invalid when you consider that it's likely people are not trying "hit" a particular countdown number they're "aiming for" but rather simply pressing the button when their "threshold" for waiting any longer is exceeded.

Wit enough people this is probably well modelled by a random process, with clicks coming essentially randomly over time with some weighting to increase the closer you get to zero. So even a "reflex reaction" is not going to outbeat a horde of random clickers. The robot is really only competing with itself, how fast can it check and how fast can it click after determining the person it's working for's risk/reward utility threshold has been crossed?

So having a robot to play for you is not going to allow you to cheat, only to spend your time dong something more constructive for humanity than clicking a button :)

Maybe I'm missing something here, and I still don't see a way to cheat that actually has significant chance of beating others ! :)

zamalek• 11 years ago

Inside the click handler for the button use `new Error().stack`. You should be able to determine if it's a legitimate event from the stack trace.

Ultimately, though, someone could just use HTTP instead of monkeying about with scripting in the browser. You could only deter this by serving up a new JS file every day that has a new way to e.g. calculate a checksum on the button click. Ultimately people are going to find a way to cheat no matter what you do. If this is a social experiment that is a result, too.

Mahn• 11 years ago

There isn't much you can do if the "cheating" happens client side, because the cheater has complete control there. At most you can obfuscate it by e.g. rendering the button in a canvas element and/or including a checksum and change the js files frequently like people here mention, but again, that will be just obfuscation, not real security.

humanarity7• 11 years ago

Whatever your interval duration is you'll get a "reflex speed" of average double that: Shannon-Nyquist sampling theorem. So if you want to play at a 100ms reaction speed sample every 50ms or less.

4ms caps your max reflex time at, say, 10ms. Or about 16x faster than your average human [https://www.biology.usu.edu/files/uploads/Courses/Biology%20...]

I'm no expert in sampling. Any bona fide experts want to weigh in? That works ! :)

3pt14159• 11 years ago

You will lose as soon as your web socket breaks.

pharke• 11 years ago

You can also just listen to the websocket that they are using to update the button (this is without being logged in):

var buttonSocket = new WebSocket("wss://wss.redditmedia.com/thebutton?h=3b85664277e270cfd024faee2cc021a359a8af73&e=1429012932");

buttonSocket.onmessage = function (event) { console.log(event.data); }

data is just plain json in the form {"type": "ticking", "payload": {"participants_text": "715,197", "tick_mac": "e2dc885fe4836cad86f9cd7670645871e11401f4", "seconds_left": 50.0, "now_str": "2015-04-13-12-33-44"}}

That lets you know what the seconds are on the server and you can calculate your own ms (it looks like they do it client side too), just remember that timeouts are not guaranteed to fire exactly at the time you set since it's a single thread. Maybe a webworker could come in handy here but the event triggerd by a message would still be subject to delay if something else wanted to run. requestAnimationFrame is another place you could look or if you can scrape together the details you need to send the button press you could run something in node with more accurate timing.

ultimape2• 11 years ago

Protip, you can hijack jsperf's java ns timer by loading the code in via a data://field to avoid cross-site script loading flags.

jamesrom2• 11 years ago

The bar chart is from http://jamesrom.github.io/

Whoever made it must be a pretty cool dude.

salusinarduis• 11 years ago

Out of curiosity could you share some stats on that page? Unique hits, demographics, etc?

kimcheekumquat2• 11 years ago

Thanks jamesrom for the graph.

Here is a website for /r/thebutton stats

http://button.cstevens.me/

Here's a google doc of current record holders:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1v7RV0R9Q133W2QAJSAEq...

Raw data:

http://hookrace.net/thebutton.txt

monk_e_boy3• 11 years ago

I spend a few minutes watching the /r/thebutton (non presser) every now and then. My SO said WTF are you doing. I replied that watching the timer was just a valid form of entertainment as watching TV or playing the sims. She gaffawed. Boredom plays a big part in lots of interesting online 'games'? Art thingies? Social experiments? April fools?

The one I go back to over and over is Cookie Clicker (orteil.dashnet.org/cookieclicker/) any time I feel like getting a watch that counts my steps or a Tesco Club Card or any other gamification device -- I play the master of gamification. Or I watch the button, 13 days in and 55, 54, 53, click! Idiot, 59, 58, 57, 56, 55, click! Idiot, 59, 58, 57....

kimcheekumquat2• 11 years ago

Ever since /r/thebutton reached HN we noticed 3 times the number of clicks we normally have around this time.

prawn2• 11 years ago

Agree that Cookie Clicker is absolutely fascinating. Two of us in the office, busy and capable people, became competitive bandits for Cookie Clicker. It makes for an almost perfect study in drip-feeding content/upgrades no matter how pointless and mundane.

Hints to me that the Great Filter could well be addictive and selfish behaviour transfixing the instinctive and basic aspects of our minds.

justifier• 11 years ago

if you like clicker games check out CERN's particle clicker:

http://particle-clicker.web.cern.ch/particle-clicker/

as you click away you accrue data and grant money

the data publishes real scientific discoveries as if you were the researcher and the grant money buys you grad students to click for you

zkhalique6• 11 years ago

Wasn't there something posted on HN like 1-2 years ago which basically did the same thing ... it was counting down to zero and someone had to press it to keep it going?

thret3• 11 years ago

You may be thinking of those penny auctions, where there was a timer that would refresh whenever there was a higher bid?

fit2rule• 11 years ago

I was just now watching this graph instead of the reddit page (its a little more intriguing for some reason) and I just about flipped out of my chair when out of the corner of my eye I started noticing an orange, then red, then blue bar .. did your backend server lose the websocket, or something, just now? Because frankly that was one of the most exciting things that has happened to me on the Internet in the last 24 hours .. ;)

tokenizerrr3• 11 years ago

It connects directly to the reddit websocket. It's more likely your own connection failed.

jamesrom2• 11 years ago

It connects directly to the reddit's websocket... What you saw was the app not handling onclose/onerror... Which I'll get around to implementing one day.

nickysielicki2• 11 years ago

Honestly this just highlights some of the negative things about the internet to me.

prawn2• 11 years ago

I find it intriguing. Like a quick experiment that you could expand upon and turn into a broader social game, or a unique auction methodology.

Kiro2• 11 years ago

I feel the complete opposite.

nickysielicki2• 11 years ago

What positive elements of the internet does this highlight?

wanda• 11 years ago

It doesn't highlight anything negative about the internet to me, though I fear for the future of our species.

Nonsensical activity on which I won't be wasting any more time than the 2 minutes I spent reading about it.

monk_e_boy3• 11 years ago

Life is a nonsensical activity. 90% of startups are a nonsensical activity, that's why investors spread the money around, 1 in 10 make it? The people in those other 9 companies may as well be watching the button ;)

It highlights the difference between hackernews and reddit. People here are highly motivated and have a goal (fame and fortune). Reddit users are highly motivated, but don't have that goal (entertain me!)

sfjailbird• 11 years ago

I agree. How sad that some people have to invent these idiotic memes to fill up their time.

Gigablah• 11 years ago

Meanwhile you're wasting time on Hacker News.

malka• 11 years ago

You know, that's what we always do : fill our lives with meaningless stuff to occupy ourselves until it's over.

patejam• 11 years ago

And now this will drive traffic to the subreddit and continue to slow down the progress to 0. :(

rokhayakebe• 11 years ago

Lost. All over again. Will the island disappear?

droidist2• 11 years ago

4 8 15 16 23 42

imron• 11 years ago

coveted yellow flair

Until of course orange and red start to appear.

tsomctl2• 11 years ago

How long until we find out what happens when it reaches 0? Let's be pessimistic and assume that everyone wants to click it. There were 3.4 active accounts on Reddit last month. 700000 have clicked it so far, so there are 2.7 remaining. Assuming an upper bound of clicking it at 1 second remaining, we get ((2700000 users) * (59 seconds/user))/((60 s/min) (60 min/h) (24 h/day)) = 1843 days, or a little more than 5 years. Of course, it will be less than this. I'm not sure what the distribution of click times is, and it will definitely change as more people have clicked.

Sayter• 11 years ago

3,410,682 (from reddit.com/about) is the number of logged in accounts yesterday, not last month.

avinassh• 11 years ago

This number also includes accounts registered after April 1st, but they are not eligibe to press The Button.

dvh• 11 years ago

time = always laplace

tsomctl2• 11 years ago

What, the Laplace transform could somehow be used to solve this?

unreal37• 11 years ago

From what I'm seeing, it rarely dips below 50 seconds. So taking an average time, it could be less than a year.

Also, assuming that if it hits 0, the game is over. So it could be over in a week or two once the focus dies down.

whtthfgg• 11 years ago

It well below 50 before you all found it :(

buro9• 11 years ago

Interesting... is this actually run by Reddit?

I guess you could use the data from this to determine how the network functions. It's depth, breadth, how quickly messages propagate through the network, who the influencers are and so forth.

Edit: Watching /r/button is interesting... almost makes me wish I had a Reddit account, but there would seem to be no point now as I wouldn't be permitted to push the button.

ddebernardy• 11 years ago

Great growth hack. eBay auctions for button-virgin Reddit accounts have begun to show up:

http://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_odkw=reddit+button&_nkw=redd...

rplnt2• 11 years ago

So it's selling for about a dollar it seems.

It might be a good purchase if the account was active before this. You know, for "marketing".

shaurz2• 11 years ago

LOL really. I've got a few old accounts hanging around I could sell to some suckers.

rplnt2• 11 years ago

How does this work when reddit is down? I probably don't know a more unreliable site than reddit is, so this must have happened plenty of times since April 1st.

slowmotiony• 11 years ago

That's because it's bullshit. Reddit goes down all the time.

eterm• 11 years ago

A particular server goes down (well, gives you a busy message), the whole of reddit doesn't "go down".

Also this uses websockets to different servers outside of the normal content servers.

andrey-g• 11 years ago

Allegedly it has happened and the button was reset.

krzrak• 11 years ago

Ideal recipe for "how to keep dumb person busy" ;)

ikeboy• 11 years ago

Just call 401-285-0696

audessuscest• 11 years ago

"But as more people join the community, more will push the button, delaying the day of reckoning."

Wrong. Because : "Only accounts created before 2015-04-01 can press the button"

It's not a growth hack...

tomerv• 11 years ago

I think that by "community", the author meant the subreddit community of people interested in the button. There are many people with reddit accounts that are still unaware of the button.

qria• 11 years ago

The community it's referring to may mean 'r/thebutton', not the whole reddit itself.

WA• 11 years ago

In Ludum Dare 27 (I think), someone made exactly this game. A game with a collective effort to keep "the patient" alive. One player had to press space every 10 seconds or the patient dies. Although every player was allowed to press multiple times.

I think the patient survived for 24 hours or so, which is quite remarkable for the smaller audience. If I remember correctly, this little game even made it into some German online newspaper (probably Spiegel Online).

Unfortunately, I couldn't find the game for reference.

shultays• 11 years ago

She only died because server died if I remember correctly

calibwam• 11 years ago

If I remember correctly, the patient "died" after the game got too much press, and the server crashed. Instead of rerunning the game, they called it a success. Couldn't find it either, but I did not look too long.

zedadex4• 11 years ago

If I remember correctly, the patient "died" after the game got too much press

This is both "ironic if you're taking it at face value" and a pretty good pun.

unimpressive• 11 years ago

I spent a fair number of minutes looking for you but couldn't find it, for what it's worth I remember this game too.

usea• 11 years ago

A few months ago I was trying to remember the name of this game. It took me over an hour of searching, but I eventually found it. It's called IMPETUS. Here is a post-portem on the author's site [1], and the original Ludum Dare post [2].

The two games are a little different, but they're similar. In Impetus, everybody cooperates to continue pressing the button, but you can press it as often as you like. There's no per-user tracking or anything like that. Also the timer was 10 seconds instead of 60. It lasted under 12 hours.

[1] http://dom.ink/post/59611971605

[2] http://ludumdare.com/compo/2013/08/26/impetus/

7Z7• 11 years ago

That sounds like exactly the opposite of the reddit button.

janoelze• 11 years ago

yep, here's the hn thread for the game: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6292750

cool to see it come up again.

dlsym• 11 years ago

This whole social hierarchy based on colors reminds me of Jasper Fforde's Shades of Gray.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shades_of_Grey_1:_The_Road_to_...

thret3• 11 years ago

It reminds me of The Wave, or the Blue Eye-Brown Eye experiment.

joshdick• 11 years ago

Or the Great Orangered/Periwinkle Clash of April Fools Day 2013.

https://www.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/2jne44/what_w...

shaurz2• 11 years ago

I just hope I get a nice badge for it. I missed out on the orangered/periwinkle thing.

pkrumins• 11 years ago

How do they make sure just 1 click registers? I'd imagine 10k people are clicking the button at the same time, but the counter keeps increasing by 1.

nowlnowl• 11 years ago

I guess it just listen to the first click and disregard the others

danielsamuels• 11 years ago

They don't, you can have multiple people get the same flair at the same time. Most trackers will tell you how many clicks occurred on each reset.

kalleboo2• 11 years ago

It doesn't always increase by 1, it's just the traffic is quite low right now. In the beginning when it was launched the counter was increasing by around 10 every second, and when it was first entering the 40's, each time it hit 41 it went up by like 5-20 as groups of people were trying to snipe it.

gojomo• 11 years ago

Is it true the last person to press it wins a million dollars?

ing33k• 11 years ago

why didn't hn had one ?

Shivetya• 11 years ago

To be honest, while I read reddit daily I have never once seen mention of the button nor do I have any inclination to even go to the sub.

so how was this introduced to reddit, it was not on the front page for long if ever. if not for reading here I doubt I would have ever encountered it

detaro• 11 years ago

What is the button?
The button is a feature that the popular social media site Reddit introduced on April 1, 2015. It has its own subreddit at /r/thebutton.

After April 1st it hasn't been that visible though

Vivtek• 11 years ago

Button-related posts keep making it to /r/all, though (my main Reddit window).

kalyan02• 11 years ago

It was introduced on 1st of April and was definitely on the frontpage for few days.

They also have a blog post [1] about it.

[1] http://www.redditblog.com/2015/04/the-button.html

abluecloud• 11 years ago

it was announced in a blog post, and has featured many times on /r/all, but if you don't ever read /r/all, you wont have read it.

It was also most likely featured at some point on trending subs. And if you read a hell of a lot of reddit, you'll see it mentioned elsewhere on the site (like in memes, comments etc)

babuskov• 11 years ago

There was a blue box on the right side saying "Have you clicked the button?" on most subreddits I read on April 1st.

gtwy• 11 years ago

Most likely, he is blocking ads

ozh• 11 years ago

To be honest, you don't read reddit daily :)

MrBra• 11 years ago

That's why Reddit doesn't click with me.

zkhalique6• 11 years ago

Something about the simplicity of this experiment and its additional meaning adoption makes it sublime

lepunk• 11 years ago

4, 8, 15, 16, 23, 42

mahouse• 11 years ago

"This webpage has a redirect loop"

moron4hire2• 11 years ago

I must be old. I don't get it. I mean, I understand what is going on. I don't get why people care. I don't get why people care so much that they are screaming at each other on the internet about it.

alexbecker• 11 years ago

It's a fundamental law that the less important something is, the more people will scream at each other about it over the internet.

jerf• 11 years ago

I already posted this on /r/button a while ago, but:

"In [the The Robbers Cave Experiment], the experimental subjects—excuse me, 'campers'—were 22 boys between 5th and 6th grade, selected from 22 different schools in Oklahoma City, of stable middle-class Protestant families, doing well in school, median IQ 112. They were as well-adjusted and as similar to each other as the researchers could manage.

"The experiment, conducted in the bewildered aftermath of World War II, was meant to investigate the causes—and possible remedies—of intergroup conflict. How would they spark an intergroup conflict to investigate? Well, the 22 boys were divided into two groups of 11 campers, and—

"—and that turned out to be quite sufficient.

"The researchers' original plans called for the experiment to be conducted in three stages. In Stage 1, each group of campers would settle in, unaware of the other group's existence. Toward the end of Stage 1, the groups would gradually be made aware of each other. In Stage 2, a set of contests and prize competitions would set the two groups at odds.

"They needn't have bothered with Stage 2. There was hostility almost from the moment each group became aware of the other group's existence: They were using our campground, our baseball diamond. On their first meeting, the two groups began hurling insults...."

Eliezer Yudkowsky, The Robber's Cave Experiment: http://lesswrong.com/lw/lt/the_robbers_cave_experiment/

Distressing how well it fits, isn't it?

joezydeco• 11 years ago

The Cave Experiment seems even more planned out than this.

My gut says this was just a silly April Fool's joke to confuse Reddit users, but now it's evolved into its own animal.

(I don't plan to click, anyway)

moron4hire2• 11 years ago

Quite distressing. Especially considering we've now had several decades of these sorts of stories in the popsci press. You would think people would be more aware of these sorts of issues.

Like, don't people know freemium smartphone games are a scam? I see people who had the same education as me, people I know have read the same psychology textbooks, paying hundreds of dollars to play these games that have no compelling "fun" factor. These games have such shallow verniers over their slot-machine nature that I don't understand why supposedly intelligent, knowledgeable people can't see them for what they are.

I get needing entertainment and I get not spending 100% of your time single-mindedly focused on "business" or whatever. I watch movies, play games, read books, drink in bars, go to sportsball recitals. I'm here, posting on HN. At least with HN I, get practice writing, have my opinions challenged, learn about new and interesting things, and get a chance to share my own work for feedback and traffic. I don't get money out of HN, but I do get real things out of it.

ultimape2• 11 years ago

Reminds me of: youarenotsosmart.com/2011/08/21/the-illusion-of-asymmetric-insight/

mhink• 11 years ago

Mostly, just for fun, I think. In a way, it's sort of a role-play, with all the different 'factions' on /r/thebutton collectively assigning meaning (in the form of mock religions) to the button itself. I don't think "screaming" is really the vibe- it's playful, because in the absence of any real meaning, any meaning for what a "player" chooses to do (not click, click, click at a certain time) can be almost completely made up.

Look at it like a very simple role-playing game. When you play D&D, your roleplay has to fall within the constructs of the world and the story. In the 'game' of /r/thebutton, though, the only actual 'story elements' are the button, the timer, and the flairs.

I dunno. Mostly, it's just fun, I think.

BWStearns• 11 years ago

http://deepthought.be/thebutton/

Disclaimer, I didn't make it.

georgehotelling3• 11 years ago

One faction known as the Knights of the Button created a Chrome extension called Squire to coordinate button presses in order to keep the timer running for as long as possible.

The craziest thing I've seen so far is that another group known as the Assassins created a fork of that extension that would claim they would press the button, but in fact wouldn't so that the timer would run out.

There are groups sabotaging other groups' code based on their goals for the button.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Knightsofthebutton/comments/31x3c0/...

wnevets• 11 years ago

someone released a Chrome extension that pressed the button without the users knowledge

abra02• 11 years ago

Squire dev here. We were DDoSed, infiltrated about 4 times and had an author of another similar extension turn on us. But we will persevere.

All hail the great and glorious Button! Long may we serve, long may it live.

knobs2• 11 years ago

I've had a look at your code... GTFO!

username = r.config.logged; // stealing reddit username and sending them to your own server

socket.on('alert_autoclick', thebutton.click() ); // click the button automatically when your server tells it to

socket.on('reload', location.reload() ); // reload page when your server asks to inject new code from it

and the server code isn't even publicly available...

is this a joke? do you know what malware is?

cs702• 11 years ago

This is the purest system invented for earning imaginary online social status so far.

Instead of having to make insightful comments to earn imaginary karma points in HN or provide helpful answers on Stack Overflow to earn imaginary badges, with this new system you only have to stare at your screen for a really long time and click a button at just the right time to earn higher status!

diminoten• 11 years ago

Diabolical idea: "First 10,000 people to give reddit gold to people in /r/thebutton are allowed to press the button a second time."

Dunno if folks would tolerate that, but I get the sense it'd work.

zedadex4• 11 years ago

That'd likely do them more harm than good in the long run.

tdaltonc• 11 years ago

Wow, a pay-to-win version of Reddit. I guess there are probably people already guiding their own comments for visibility.

lnanek22• 11 years ago

There was a famous viral online game (OK web page) where visitors had to do this to keep a cute astronaut in a hibernation unit alive. You could hear her heart beat and breathing. She eventually became a skeleton. Felt more personable and engaging than just a button with no character, though.

Delryn• 11 years ago

Do you have anymore details on this game? I can't find anything on it, but it sounds interesting.

I agree that the game you describe is more personable, but /r/thebutton does have an air of mystery going for it. The simple premise has left room for a lot of interpretation. Is it better to press the button, or stay gray? Which colors are the most desirable? What will happen after the timer runs out? etc.

lnanek22• 11 years ago

Ah, someone else linked it: http://dom.ink/post/59611971605

humanarity7• 11 years ago

The last couple hours I hacked together a chrome ext that notifies you whenever anyone presses the button (oh god) and also can run a robot to press it for you. It works, tho I don't claim there's no bugs.

The github:

https://github.com/humanarity/reddit-thebutton-push-it

And the Webstore:

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/rthebutton-robot/m...

Check it out! :)

S_A_P• 11 years ago

My Button Press is for sale- I think this is something that VCs could all get behind here...

https://www.reddit.com/r/thebutton/comments/32hf6y/for_sale_...

cmpaul• 11 years ago

1. Open JS Console. 2. Copy and paste the following, but don't submit: var n = {seconds: $("#thebutton-timer").val(),prev_seconds: r.thebutton._msgSecondsLeft,tick_time: r.thebutton._tickTime,tick_mac: r.thebutton._tickMac}; 3. Wait for the timer to hit a time you like and hit ENTER to record the timer seconds and tic MAC. 4. Repeat until you're happy with the score. 5. Paste the following into your console and hit ENTER: $.request("press_button", n, function(e) { console.log(e) });

wesleytodd• 11 years ago

3 days of watching and I got the yellow!!!! 30s

thret3• 11 years ago

This social experiment is still running.

Some good things have come out of it, most recently: https://www.reddit.com/r/thebutton/comments/33jpwe/the_endga...

The button: social experiment driving Reddit crazy

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