hell no

I think pressing would almost cease, until word spread beyond this subreddit, then sociopaths and the mentally ill would start showing up. Eventually programmers would publish scripts to track down pressers and alert the authorities, or hack the button itself and shut it down manually.

The mechanism for "a random person dies" would be old-fashioned street violence. Each button press would order a random hit somewhere in the world.

We all find out when someone leaks graphic proof to this subreddit - maybe a corpse posed next to a laptop with /r/thebutton open, and footage from multiple recent murders. We would learn that all the mods have been dead for two weeks, and their accounts taken over.

Responsible for this would be some large, existing group we've all heard of, like a huge drug cartel or maybe ISIS No. The scale of deaths here is too large for any one group. Someone is piggybacking off regional violence all around the world, using existing infrastructures of violence.

So probably a savvy, smallish cyberterrorism group involving at least one long-time redditor. Attaching all these deaths to /r/thebutton would really just be a theatric flourish for them, a story hook for the media. "Look how smart we are."

Really it would happen like this: someone manages to start a 'kill tallying' trend among various factions, and from there builds it up into "we want x number of confirmed dead by friday." With this infrastructure in place, attaching deaths to the button is trivial.

Someone in the right place with the right means - not quite as scary as it initially seems. Ultimately, most of these deaths would have happened anyway. (We will all be telling ourselves this, over and over.)

Fun prompt, thanks! Well, you know, "fun"...