Red Button or Blue Button Question

Know Your Meme documents the Red Button or Blue Button Question as a moral-dilemma poll in the same family as the trolley problem: every person must press either a red or a blue button in secret. If more than half of humanity chooses blue, everyone survives; if not, only people who pressed red survive. Early Reddit polls with similar wording appeared by April 2023. The format exploded in late April 2026 when Tim Urban (@waitbutwhy) posted an X poll with that exact framing; it drew tens of millions of views and nearly a hundred thousand votes within days, then spread to quote tweets, explainers, and subreddits like /r/moraldilemmas and /r/fivethirtyeight as people argued game theory, trust, and selfish versus cooperative strategies.

Meme responses often caricature “team red” or “team blue” with reaction images, Wojak variants, and jokes about how online debate would actually collapse if the scenario were real—keeping the topic in the abstract ethics-and-shitpost lane rather than depicting real harm.

buttondilemma.com can host a read-only “scenario card” plus weekly discussion prompts: anonymized voting sims (no real stakes), short explainers on majority-rule paradoxes, and links to credited threads—useful for teachers and debaters who land from search.

redbuttonblue.com and bluebuttonred.com work as paired landing pages for A/B content tests: one domain leans meme galleries and caption contests, the other leans serious op-eds and podcast shownotes, both cross-linking so neither feels like empty parking.

privatevotebuttons.com fits a lightweight newsletter or RSS that rounds up the funniest poll screenshots and the clearest game-theory breakdowns after each viral wave, with a standing note to keep discourse kind and hypothetical.