What The Button was
On 1 April 2015 Reddit opened r/thebutton: a light blue button next to a 60-second countdown. Any press reset the timer for everyone. Each account could press it once, and only accounts created before the experiment began could press at all.
It was created by Josh Wardle and started as an April Fools' post. Nobody was told what would happen when the timer reached zero.
The flair was the point
Pressing gave you a colored dot next to your name, set by how low the timer was when you pressed: purple near 60 seconds, then blue, green, yellow, orange, and red for the last 11. People who never pressed kept a grey dot.
The color was a public, permanent record of one decision. It became a status symbol. Groups formed around each color, with names like The Emerald Council and The Violet Hand, and the non-pressers became a camp of their own.
How it ended
The timer hit zero a few times because of technical problems and was revived. On 5 June 2015 it reached zero with nobody pressing, and the experiment was over. The final count was 1,008,316 presses, roughly two months after it began.
The Knights of the Button, a grey-flair group trying to keep it alive with automated accounts, were undone in the end by an account that turned out to be too new to press.
Why a meaningless number worked
The Button gave people a scarce, visible, irreversible choice and nothing else. No reward, no explanation. That was enough for a community, a mythology and a final moment people still remember.
It is the same pull behind most internet leaderboards: a number that measures nothing useful, shown in public, that you cannot fake.
A button you press every month
Forget Your Credit Card keeps the public part and adds a bill. You pick a monthly amount from $1 to $1,000, Stripe charges it, and confirmed payments count toward a Lifetime board if you choose to appear.
There is no reward and nothing coming back. The only thing it records is how much you chose to forget.