Reddit's TheButton, penny auctions and Fomo3D are the same game
In each of them a move resets a countdown, and the game ends when nobody moves before it runs out. One died of caution, one made its operators a fortune, and one was won by jamming the network it ran on. The mechanism was the same. What differed was what the players were rewarded for.
The model: somebody has to do it
Game theory has a name for a situation in which everyone wants something to happen, one person doing it is enough, and doing it costs whoever does it: the volunteer's dilemma (Andreas Diekmann, 1985). Think of a group of people who all hear a car alarm and each hopes someone else will call.
A countdown that anyone can reset is this dilemma, played again every few seconds. Everyone wants it to keep going. One press is enough. And if pressing costs you something, the sensible move is to wait and hope that someone else does it first.
The model's best-known result is uncomfortable. When everyone plays it rationally, adding players makes each one less likely to act, by more than enough to cancel out the extra people. Say volunteering costs a tenth of what everyone gains when someone does it. With two players, the chance that nobody acts is 1 %. With a thousand, it is almost 10 %. As the group grows, the chance that nobody acts tends towards the ratio of cost to benefit, and stays there.
The psychologists call the same thing the bystander effect. The lesson for a countdown is the same either way: more players don't save it. Only making the press cheaper does. Experiments confirm the model only in part, people volunteer more than it predicts, so take it as a way of seeing the problem, not a forecast.
Reddit's TheButton: pressing was expensive
In 2015 Reddit put a button on r/thebutton with a 60-second countdown. Every account could press once, ever. Your press gave you a coloured flair showing how much time had been left: purple for the impatient, red for whoever pressed in the last 11 seconds.
That made a press very expensive. You spent the only one you would ever have, and pressing early cost you the rare red flair. So players waited. Reddit published the whole log, and we went through all 1,008,315 presses (the script, Python, standard library only). In weeks 3 to 7 the crowd watched so closely that the countdown fell below 2 seconds only 9 times, where random pressing at the same rate would have let it happen about 4,900 times. By week 9 it fell below 2 seconds more often than chance: 2,894 times. On 5 June 2015, with about 120 presses an hour still coming in, it reached zero.
TheButton didn't run out of players. The cost of pressing went up until enough of them waited too long.
Penny auctions: the last move wins
Now put a prize at the end. In a penny auction, every bid costs a fee, raises the price a little and resets a short countdown. When the countdown runs out, the last bidder buys the item at the final price. Swoopo, the best-known site, charged $0.75 a bid.
Theory says the operator should, on average, take in about what the item is worth. Ned Augenblick studied 166,000 Swoopo auctions (Review of Economic Studies, 2016) and found margins of more than 50 %. In over 2,000 auctions for cash, the operator took in on average 204 % of the cash being auctioned. His explanation is the sunk-cost fallacy: the more a player has already spent on bids, the less willing they are to stop. Swoopo went bankrupt in 2011; the format lives on.
Same countdown, different reward. Nobody waits here: a prize for the last move turns every reset into a reason to pay again.
Fomo3D: the end becomes the target
In 2018 Fomo3D ran the same game on Ethereum. Players bought keys, each key added time to a countdown and money to a pot, and when the countdown ran out the last buyer took the biggest share.
On 22 August 2018 the first round ended, and the last buyer won 10,469 ETH, about $3 million at the time. They had not outplayed anyone. Once they held the last key, they filled the blocks of the Ethereum network with their own transactions until the countdown ran out, so that nobody else's purchase could get through. The contract worked exactly as written.
That is the third lesson. If the end of a countdown is worth something to one player, sooner or later that player stops playing against the others and plays against the infrastructure.
What a countdown needs to survive
I'm building one. unpressed.app is a single button for the whole world and a countdown of 120 seconds that is meant never to reach zero. Each of the three games above ruled something out.
- The press has to cost almost nothing. It is free, and everyone gets one a day, so pressing spends nothing you will miss tomorrow. Pressing every day builds your streak, so the press pays for itself. Alerts when the countdown runs low are free and the same for everyone: selling them would sell a cheaper press.
- Waiting must not pay. The time left at your press is public, but it is never ranked, never a badge, never a colour. Nothing is gained by pressing late.
- The last press must not win. If the countdown ever reaches zero there is a Winner, but it is not whoever pressed last. It is the longest streak of days among everyone who pressed in the 24 hours before the end: someone who kept showing up, not someone who timed it.
- No money in the game. No paid presses, nothing purchasable affects the countdown or who wins, and the Winner gets a title, the last word on the final page and a printed certificate, nothing of money value. An earlier design had a cash pot. Penny auctions and Fomo3D are why it went.
Fomo3D's lesson is the one that shaped the engineering. The site shows, live, who would win if it ended now, and that person has a reason to want it to end. They can't stop other people pressing, so the only way left is the servers. So a failure can never end the game. If the database or the server is gone for more than 5 seconds, the countdown freezes, and it resumes with the time it had. A press counts by when it arrived, not when it was processed. Every press and every outage is in a public log anyone can download and check. The details are in How unpressed.app is built.
What I don't know
All of this is a model. The volunteer's dilemma predicts people worse than they behave, unpressed.app hasn't been played yet, and players will find incentives I haven't thought of. A streak is itself a reward, and I don't know yet what it does to people over months.
What I can promise is the data. Every press will be public, with the time left at it, so anyone can run the same analysis on unpressed.app that we ran on TheButton and see whether the theory held.