The Button, Robin, Circle of Trust, Sequence: Reddit's April Fools' social experiments

On 1 April 2015, Reddit's admins published a short blog post: "When this post is 10 minutes old, a button and timer will become active at /r/thebutton." The timer would count down from 60 seconds and reset every time someone clicked; each account could press the button only once, and only accounts created before 1 April 2015 were eligible. "We can't tell you what to do from here on out," Reddit warned. "The choice is yours." Nobody knew what would happen when the timer hit zero, and Business Insider reported about 320,000 participants at press time, with the dilemma — push or don't push — visibly stressing people out.

What happened next turned a one-day prank into a sociological phenomenon. Pressers received a colored "flair" circle next to their username depending on how low they let the clock run — purple for pressing near 60 seconds, through blue, green, yellow and orange, down to red for the final seconds — while abstainers kept a grey circle. Users organized into factions around these colors, complete with mock religions, backstories and rivalries that media outlets compared to religions or cults. Non-pressers split between the "Grey Hopeful," who watched the timer in hope of rewards "in the after-timer," and "The Followers of the Shade," devoted to keeping their flair forever grey. The "Knights of the Button" sacrificed their own presses to keep the timer alive, and one user built a browser extension organizing volunteer pushers, then a second called "The Necromancer" that used dormant "zombie" accounts to stop the timer running down. The experiment even had its own malware: a user designed a plugin disguised as a monitoring app that pressed the button for unsuspecting installers, later admitting it was "an effort to convert the non-pressers."

Reddit's own analysis showed how the fever cooled: at first 60 percent of visitors to the button clicked it, falling to 10 percent within four days and settling at 5 percent after two weeks. The end came after a coordinated account-donation scheme failed — a bot queued up a donated account to press, only to find the account had been registered after 1 April and could not click. The last person pressed on 5 June 2015, and the timer finally ran out in early June after three months and five days, having involved 1,008,316 Reddit accounts. Behind the countdown was nothing but a message reading "The experiment is over," and the subreddit was archived with a final admin post echoing the first. The Guardian called it "the weirdest social experiment on the internet"; The Verge judged it destined for "the annals of internet history."

The button became the template for an annual tradition. Reddit's 2017 experiment, r/place — a shared pixel canvas that drew some 16 million tiles from more than a million users, created by Josh Wardle, later of Wordle fame — is covered elsewhere in this archive. Circle of Trust, the 2018 edition, let users create cliques. In 2019 came r/Sequence, where users submitted gifs and sentences that were voted into a communal narrative every three minutes; a Reddit admin called it a "tool for good" that would be "shut down" if used for "evil."

The experiments were not merely play. Announcing the 2022 return of r/place, Reddit executive Alex Le said April Fools' Day on the platform has "a history of inspiring how we build new features": Robin, a chat-room-like experiment that paired random users, led to Reddit's real-time chat, and Le said Circle of Trust inspired real-time comment and upvote counts. The series stands as a case study in how quickly pseudonymous crowds, given a constrained shared mechanic and no explanation, will invent tribes, ideologies, tooling and even low-grade malware — dynamics that play out less benignly in the platform's political and moderation conflicts.