Reddit’s Genius Social Experiments
The online forum reddit has truly become the front page of the internet. The website is now over 15 years old and is showing no signs of slowing down. Their recent adoption of crypto and their implementation of aspects of web 3.0 will keep them on the cutting edge for the time being. Though the site’s place in culture seems solidified now, the platform was anything but 10 years ago. It’s wild to think that I’ve been browsing reddit for over a decade. After all that time, it’s incredible to see what it’s become — and it’s the perfect time to look back on some of its most interesting stories.
Reddit has a long, tumultuous past. If you want to look for drama or scandals, there is a never-ending flow of disastrous AMAs, internet sleuths gone right and horribly wrong, and mysterious posts leading down rabbit holes. The most fascinating periods of reddit history come from their own social experiments. Those who used reddit at the time experienced a handful of these unique studies. They were fun and novel, and are now endlessly interesting to look back on. They not only gave us a taste of what was to come for reddit but for the internet as a whole.
There were two main reddit social experiments that most are aware of:
Place and The Button.
Reddit has mastered a few things. They have constructed a simple site, where simple rules and protocols determine the success or failure of content. In a similar vein, their social tests seemed to be rooted in the investigation of simple rules, actions, and movements on a societal scale. Let’s break down the experiments.
The first of the two was The Button. The idea was this: on April 1, 2015, a subreddit called r/thebutton was created with some very simple rules. There was one button and a 60-second countdown timer. If you press the button, the timer resets back to 60. You get one button press per account. There was no indication of what happened when the timer hit zero. The game began. It took some time for the community to evolve. Slowly at first, and then very quickly, the group began adopting rules, notions, and ideas.
Many people pressed it right away and became the foot soldiers to step over for the later participants. After a few days, there were factions, groups, and sects within the community that wanted or preached for different things. It became a microcosm of the world itself. People began taking sides and defending them to extreme ends. But the thing they were fighting over was the button.
Reddit was designed as a place to gather communities and strengthen ties. Its usefulness can also become its downfall — reddit is susceptible to tribalism, group-thinking, and it is an extreme echo chamber.
The main differentiation was based on the time in which you clicked the button. Depending on the number the timer was at when you clicked, you got a different flair. For example, if you clicked when there were 16 seconds left, your color was different than someone who clicked at 33 seconds. This was a simple way to factionalize the community based on your action — but perhaps the strongest group to form out of this were the non-pressers. This group chose to not press the button. That would be how to break down the two main groups, the pressers, and non-pressers. You’d think pressers would defend one another, but no. Someone who pressed at 12 seconds was certainly of a higher caliber than someone who pressed at 54 seconds. It takes no restraint to press at 54, while it requires patience to get a low number.
There began to be theories, calculations, and ideas on when the last press would occur. Over time, the countdown timer would reach closer and closer to zero. Eventually, it would get to below 5 seconds nearly every time. There was a group of defenders of the button, named ‘The Knights of the Button,’ who did everything in their power to keep the button active. They made more accounts, recruited more people, and clicked as many times as they could. If a group like this had enough people, couldn’t they have kept it going indefinitely? Yes, they could have. Reddit decided that accounts needed to be created before the start date in order to click the button. And with that, on June 5, 2015, the last button was pressed.
The user who clicked last was dubbed the ‘pressiah’ by the community, he became a hero for his fifteen minutes. The forum was archived a few minutes later, and the experiment was complete. And that was it.
It may sound silly in hindsight, but I assure you, if you were active on reddit at the time, it was anything but in the background. It was the front page of reddit while active, and it permeated into nearly every subreddit. So much so that talk of it was banned in certain places. The factions splintered out into their own subreddits that eventually died out too, and the users split back into their old subreddits. Just as it came into the world, it faded. Every once in a while, you see a post about it — but that does not capture the energy and excitement the average reddit user felt during that time. It felt as if you were part of something bigger, more extraordinary than the usual internet. And in many ways, it heralded the new wave of concepts for a decentralized internet. Reddit was aware of these concepts and took it one step further two years later with their next experiment. The button gathered people together with a closed-ended goal. It was binary — you clicked or you didn’t. Though interesting, the dynamics are not as complex as most scenarios.
The second of reddit’s social experiments was r/place. Reddit Place was started on April 1, 2017, much in the same way as the button. But this was more collaborative. The rules were simple. Place was a large pixel grid, each user could change the color of a single cell one at a time. The square itself and the user were then put on cooldown, and could not be changed for a set amount of time.
When it first started, the idea was pretty basic. I logged in, changed a color, and went on with my day. But soon, groups started to form — with goals. Some of them had the goal to create, and some to destroy. It is hard to explain, or go into detail the extent of the evolution that place saw — so it is easiest to just view a quick time-lapse of what happened.
The way shapes spread, move, and grow are akin to Conway’s Game of Life. Formations arise and fall apart. Symbols, words, and flags grow in certain areas — while others are consumed by an ever-growing black. Logos, groups, communities, countries, organizations — everyone took part of the grid for their own people and worked together. Groups fought for territory — flags grew or shrunk. Entities were wiped out. Some engulfed those next to them.
It was a living, breathing entity that thrived for only 72 hours. In hindsight, this experience seemed to last a lifetime. Just looking at the time-lapse feels like longer than 3 days. The life cycle that the project saw, in terms of realization, adoption, and growth was astounding. In only 3 days, millions of blocks were changed and tens of thousands of users were actively participating. Borders, territory lines — war, battles — just for a pixel grid. The intensity and fervor that was launched, much like the dedicated Button pressers or non-pressers, was organic and natural. It was spurred on by nothing but its own momentum. The subreddit was archived and placed on the wall of reddit history.
It was lauded by papers, sites, and sources all over the world for its ingenuity and execution. The extraordinary aspect of it was of course the community. Though the rules were set in place by reddit, the way it played out was entirely based on the actions of the people. Just as reddit became a space for the evolution of thoughts, ideas, and groups — place did as well.
These two social experiments by reddit show something bigger than the results themselves. They reveal a feature of the internet, of the community, that is impossible to quantify. Though the internet may seem like another world, a screen separated from reality, it becomes reality in these contexts. The barrier between the world and Place became thin — people became entrenched in the world of Place, even just for a few days. The conclusions can either be scary or affirming. The intensity that a group will fight with can lead to success or spectacular failure. Reddit’s experiments revealed to everyone just how common and easily influenceable that vigor is.