Why Everyone Is Obsessed With ‘The Button’
You only get one click to reset the timer on Reddit’s “The Button.” (Photo: Reddit)
Forget The Dress — the world has a new online obsession.
Reddit launched “The Button” on April 1, a new subreddit that has a 60-second timer that resets and shows multi-colored flair every time a person clicks on it. There only seems to be one purpose to the subreddit: See how long people can hold off on clicking on The Button, because you can only click on it once. (The record for waiting to is 35 seconds, according to the subreddit thread.)
The Button is shrouded in mystery: People don’t know who created it, or why. Newcomers to Reddit also aren’t allowed to play: “Only accounts created before 2015-04-01 can press the button,” a message on the subreddit reads. “We can’t tell you what to do from here on out. The choice is yours.”
More than 660,000 people have kept the timer going, and, at last glance, more than 9,004 people were on The Button’s subreddit at one time. But why are we so obsessed with it?
It’s all about team camaraderie, says psychologist Jane Greer, PhD, author of What About Me?. Essentially, the “team” is everyone who visits the subreddit and is competing against The Button to keep the game going.
“Despite there not being any rewards for clicking or not clicking, people feel the emotional reward of being able to participate in the latest trend and be part of this virtual team,” she tells Yahoo Health. “It’s not about winning ‘the game’; it’s about playing it.”
While The Button is pretty meaningless on its own, it becomes meaningful because of all the attention people are lavishing on it, she says. (In addition to all of its clicks, The Button has also inspired several YouTube videos and even a song.) People get swept up in the trend and enjoy knowing that they were part of the latest Internet phenomenon like The Dress, The Dancing Man, and the Ice Bucket Challenge. There also might be a little superstition at play, since no one seems to want to take a chance that they’ll be the reason time runs out. “People would rather avoid contributing in any way to a potential negative outcome,” explains Greer.
Just one of the videos inspired by “The Button.”
But it’s not just about the group mentality: Greer also notes that The Button is a stress reliever because there are no immediate consequences or losses if you click or don’t click.
No one but The Button’s mysterious creator(s) know what will happen when the time runs out, and eventually it will — just probably not for a while.
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