Unshakeable Narratives and /r/thebutton
By: Stephen Goldmeier
Tags: Culture, The Internet, Reddit, Storytelling, Social Media

That’s all background for the thing that interested me. Up to a few days ago, the timer had never gone below 12 seconds, so no one had the coveted red flair. People were waiting to see who would be first to get the red flair, to get their name enshrined in a document called “The Complete Catalogue of Rare and Exotic Button Pushers” (so good!) as the first to breach a new color band. Then, the unthinkable happened: there was a glitch. The nature of the glitch is maybe a little too complicated to be interesting, but the end result was that the timer was still ticking and resetting even though not everyone could see it, so someone, during this gray glitch period, clicked the button at 8 seconds and received the first red flair.

There was a bit of an uproar as to whether or not glitched red flairs counted as actual red flairs, i.e. whether this user deserved their position as the “first red.” As anyone who has ever been part of a tiny subculture would know, this got ugly faster than outsiders might predict it would. The user in question even hid their flair while browsing so people wouldn’t be able to see that glaring red circle when the user posted in the community, like someone trying to cover their scarlet letter and blend into the crowd. Things eventually calmed down, and everyone accepted that this user was the first legitimate red. The button kept ticking along.

Until there was another glitch, this one worse than the last.

It was worse because, to all people watching, the timer looked like it was running normally. But clicking the button didn’t make a difference; the timer just kept ticking. Some clicked in the 50s and 40s. It kept ticking. Some clicked in the 30s. It kept ticking. Some clicked in the 20s, but the timer kept going down, lower than it had ever been before. Within a minute, as all of these people who had made the button a big part of their lives for the past almost-month watched helplessly, the timer ran out. The thing people had been fighting for 25 days happened: the timer turned over to zero, and a message came up saying that the experiment was over.

When the glitch was fixed and the button resumed its count-and-reset-cycle, it was revealed that a number of people who clicked during the weird outage had received the corresponding flair, even though their clicks didn’t actually reset the button. These clicks, wasted on a dead button, still counted as the “single click” for a bunch of users. There were a slew of new red flairs, including one person who received a “zero seconds” flair, presumably the lowest possible flair (and hailed as the flair of the “Pressiah”).

One notable new red-flaired user revealed himself as well: a Reddit employee, creator of the experiment, and moderator in the /r/thebutton community. (I’ll just refer to him as the “moderator,” since, while it’s very easy to discover his name and I’ll be linking directly to things he posted and things posted about him, using his name feels a little like heaping onto the garbage-pile forming on top of him right now.)

This moderator found himself in a bad place. He had wasted his click in this giant experiment, his one shot at playing the game, on a glitched moment in time. His press didn’t mean anything. He wasn’t happy.

And I get it. I’d be pissed, too. But what he did with his anger was a little troubling: he used his powers as administrator to reset his flair and give himself a new click.

In case it’s not clear from the above: a second click is antithetical to the whole button ecosystem. The idea always (haha “always” means “for almost four weeks” in this case) has been that every user gets one chance to click, and they have to choose which values this click will embody, what identity they create with their decision. This one-chance mechanic is what made the button such a great metaphor, such a great narrative-producing machine. This moderator had undone one of the core philosophies of the button community and given himself a second chance, pretty seriously shaking up the foundation upon which so many narratives had been built.

Interestingly, most people in the community actually WANTED those affected by the glitch to get a second press (see the first comment in this thread, with over 2000 upvotes). It seemed unfair to punish them and remove them from the game because of a technical problem, and it made a sort of narrative sense to nullify these circumstantially-coerced clicks. But what challenged the structure of the button community was that only one person actually got a second chance: this moderator, the person with the power, the creator of the experiment. The elite.

People were furious.

This moderator soon decided that resetting only his flair and giving only himself a second press was the wrong move, so he restored his red flair, with its low number. But now there were over 50 people, some active in the community, who had been locked into being victims of the deceptive glitch, removed from the game, even though the majority of the community wanted those users back, wanted them to be given a second chance.

In the end, the moderator did what every person who seemingly abuses their power eventually does: he wrote an apology:

Up until yesterday’s outage I had thought of myself as a non-presser. However, when faced with the dwindling timer I pressed the button: I found myself, despite my previous thoughts, wishing for this project to continue. Once I realized my press had not reset the timer I thought to exempt myself from the rules of the button by reverting my presser status. This impulse stemmed from my own sense of importance within this community. I have a position of status here and misguidedly thought it was okay to preserve that status by exempting myself from the rules. For me, this was the test of the button. I am grateful to the community for calling me out on my error. As the others who pressed during the outage, my flair shall remain. The rules remain and apply for all: You may only press the button once.

On the one hand, this all sounds very admirable, and I congratulate this moderator for realizing the power he wields in the community around his creation and apologizing for misusing it.

On the other hand, what the moderator did here fits almost too perfectly with what politicians always do when they are called out for abusing their power but want to minimize it and move past it. First, it took 22 hours for the moderator to apologize, presumably so that he could do whatever possible to fix the problem before owning it. Second, the language of the apology is exactly what you’d expect: an explanation why the moderator made his mistake, in emotional terms with which people will sympathize; some sappy pandering to the community for calling out the mistake; and an assertion that the rules apply to everyone equally, regardless of their status.

That last bit rings false to the community, because the power this moderator had would have allowed him to listen to the community and give action to the thing they all wanted. He chose a different thing, a thing that matched his values instead of the values of the community that sprung up around his creation.

Cue an onslaught of posts in that most classic of internet genres, the “I’m leaving” posts. Some examples are below.