Within the /r/thebutton community, lower numbers are more prestigious. These colored badges have created a virtual status hierarchy. You can only press the button once, so once you get a badge you're stuck with it for life. People who pressed between 42 and 51 seconds get blue flair 32 to 41 seconds gets green. If you were impatient and pressed the button with more than 52 seconds left, you get lame purple flair. The color indicates how much time was left when you pressed the button - this user pushed the button at 31 seconds and has a coveted yellow badge as a result. People who have pressed the button get a flair that looks like this: If you've never pressed the button, you get a gray 'non-presser' badge that looks like this: When users post messages on the /r/thebutton subreddit, a colored badge (called 'flair' in Reddit-land) shows whether the user has pressed the button and if so, what time the counter showed at the time that user pressed it. The button is powered by two of the most powerful forces in human societies: status competition and boredom. What's so interesting about this button that more than 700,000 people have wanted to press it? Because of the combined efforts of these people, the timer has never gotten below 27 seconds. As I'm writing this on Tuesday afternoon, it's been pressed by more than 730,000 people. No one (outside of Reddit staff) knows, because it's never happened. What happens when the timer reaches zero? And each user only gets to push the button once. Only people who had Reddit accounts before April 1 are allowed to push the button. Every time a redditor pushes the button, the counter resets to 60 seconds and begins counting down again. At the right is a counter, which starts at 60 seconds and counts down to zero. It has its own subreddit at /r/thebutton.

The button is a feature that the popular social media site Reddit introduced on April 1, 2015. To explain it, we have to start at the beginning.

The previous sentence probably didn't make much sense to you. On Friday morning, the community reached a new milestone, as users started earning coveted yellow flair.

The button began its life as an April Fools' joke, but nearly two weeks later the community surrounding the Reddit social experiment is still going strong.

Will you push the red button game