What Is The Reddit Button? No One Knows What Happens When The Clock Strikes Zero

It's an April Fool's joke that isn't going away. The Reddit Button that's fascinated so many since it debuted earlier this month is still around, and it's even the subject of a new behavioral study. But that doesn't make it any less confusing.

A new thread on the popular community news and social media site is trying to answer one question: Can you resist clicking a button? The thread simply shows a button next to a clock counting down from 60 seconds, which rests every time someone clicks the button. Over 766,000 Redditors have participated in the challenge, but no one knows what will happen when the clock strikes zero -- it hasn't happened yet.

Each user can click the button only once, earning a flair depending on how long they're able to resist the temptation. Clicking the button with 51 to 42 seconds left, for instance, earns a user a blue flair. Green goes to anyone who clicks between 41 and 32 seconds, and so on.

Now Chris Stevens, a 16-year-old high school student in Essex, England, has created a website that compiles all the statistics generated by the button. Among them: the Button attracts 0.567 clicks per second, the time has yet to go lower than 25 seconds, and at the time of this writing, 766,905 people have clicked since April 1.

“It is kind of a big deal, isn't it?” David Elliott Hauschild, a Reddit user who held the previous records at 27 seconds, told Time magazine. “I feel like I'm sitting at the top of the world's biggest social experiment.”