The Button on Reddit has finally reached zero

Can it be true? After 65 days and more than a million clicks, Reddit's The Button appears to be over.

As of 10.50pm last night UK time, this was what greeted visitors to The Button's sub-Reddit.

The Button was originally intended as an April Fools' Day joke by Reddit. A message on April 1 said:

When this post is 10 minutes old, a button and timer will become active at /r/thebutton.

The timer will count down from 60 seconds. If the button is pressed the timer will reset to 60 seconds and continue counting down.

You may only press the button once.

But what was meant as a joke soon morphed into something of a social experiment. Because only people with accounts registered before April 1 could press the button, it meant that its lifetime was finite.

As everyone could see the same timer counting down, tens of thousands of people were playing a form of digital chicken, seeing how long they could wait before pressing it.

Colour-coded cliques also formed depending on what time a user pressed the button, with a grey icon awarded for never pressed, purple for 60-52 seconds and so on.

By the final reckoning, The Button had been clicked 1,008,316 times, with only 30,729 of those people pressing it with 11 seconds or less remaining.

Now we're at zero though, what happens now? As far as we can tell; zilch. So everyone who joined in can now get on with the rest of their lives.

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