On February 27th, 2019, Reddit user lilmigger posted a What Did It Cost? version of the meme which gained over 64,700 upvotes in one week and had been reposted multiple times in the following months. Throughout September, additional screenshots from the site were posted on DamnLOL, WeKnowMemes and Tumblr under the tags #Will You Press The Button?, #Will You Press The Button, #Press The Button and #WYPTB, as well as discussions about the user-submitted scenarios on several message boards, including Multiplayer Game Hacking, the Drum and Bass Forum and Jiggmin. On September 8th, the subreddits /r/WillYouPressTheButton and /r/WYPTB were created. By July 25th, additional screenshots also began to surface on FunnyJunk, with another posted to Reddit two days later. This type of activity is also reminiscent of “Would You Rather?” threads, which became popular on 4chan in 2011 in discussions of the Fairview Fairview Goat Tower.Īs early as June 23rd, screenshots from Will You Press the Button have been shared on 4chan, specifically on /vg/ (Video Game Generals) and /vp/ (Pokemon).

Threads dedicated to hypothetical situations being solved by pushing a red button have appeared on 4chan since as early as June 2010 (shown below, left). The story has since been readapted twice, first in a March 1986 episode of The Twilight Zone (shown below, left) and second for the 2009 film The Box (shown below, right) While big red buttons used to activate a powerful force have been a trope in pop culture for decades, the idea of using one of them to make a decision with both positive and negative effects dates back to a 1970s short story by Richard Matheson titled 'Button, Button.' In the story, a couple receives a locked box with a button that, when pressed, will give them $50,000 but also cause someone that they didn't know to die.

The red button meme