Reddit's The Button becomes viral sensation

On April Fools' Day this year, a mysterious button popped up on Reddit, inviting members of the social media sharing site to press it.

The Button is little more than a grey box with a timer next to it. So what does it do? Well, if anyone in the world presses it, the times resets back to 60 seconds. As far as anyone knows, the system doesn't do anything else, but no one knows for sure, because so far it has never come anywhere close to zero.

It all began on April 1 when a message appeared on Reddit that read: "When this post is ten minutes old, a button and timer will become active at /r/thebutton.

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"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."

Once you press the button you are assigned a colour, which is attached permanently to your Reddit profile. You will be badged as purple if you are very impatient and hit the button before the timer reaches 52 seconds, blue if you can hold out slightly longer, then green, yellow and orange and finally red.

As the colours have been handed out, Reddit has factionalised into colour groups – with large numbers in the purple, blue and green factions and significantly fewer in yellow. So far, there are none at all in red.

Despite this, a community of "wannabes" has sprung up, The Guardian reports, that have devised their own credo:

I submit myself to the Order of the Red,Long shall be our days and nights ahead,Although weary our watch, we shall not alter,No matter how arduous, we shall not falter,We shall stay the course of the rose-way instead,And receive the cherry fruits – stained in blood-red!

While the whole thing is entirely frivolous, it has spawned interesting data visualisations and a prediction of the date when the timer will have to reach zero. By November 21, every Reddit user will have used up their single button press, calculated Redditor ezeeetm.

So, if you want to know what will happen when the timer expires, come back in November. Or if you can't wait until then, simply convince everyone in the world to stop pressing The Button.