RedditGifts

» see redditgifts.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

The first RedditGifts Secret Santa in 2009 had 4,500 people in it, which was already more than the two people running it had planned for. Dan McComas, posting as kickme444, had built it between freelance jobs with an anonymous collaborator known only as 5days. You filled in a profile about yourself, the site assigned you a stranger, and you were on the hook to buy that stranger something they would actually like. Then you were supposed to come back and write a thank-you note to whoever had done the same for you.

It kept growing because the second half of that loop is unusual on the internet. Most anonymous systems let you take and leave. This one gave you a name to disappoint, and a public record of whether you had. Gifts generally landed between ten and twenty-five dollars, participation was free, and the only paid tier was a cosmetic membership called RedditGifts Elves.

By 2014 the December exchange had 212,894 people in it from across the world, and Guinness had certified it three separate times as the largest online Secret Santa. Themed swaps ran all year as well, including a Halloween round and one called Arbitrary Day, which the site described as a celebration of nothing in particular.

Reddit bought the whole thing in August 2011. McComas and 5days had reached the point where they could not keep the servers and the matching logic running alongside their day jobs, and before the sale something like 1.5 million dollars of gifts had already moved through it. Both of them stayed on to keep running it from inside the company.

~ the dossier ~

~ fourteen percent ~

The acquisition was not charity. RedditGifts grew a storefront alongside the exchange, Reddit took fifteen to twenty percent of every purchase, and by December 2013 the operation was generating roughly fourteen percent of all Reddit revenue. McComas said at the time that those sales alone could put the company firmly in the black.

Yishan Wong, then chief executive, called it a service that "provides real value" and described it as promising, then raised the headcount on it to eight. For a couple of years the gift exchange was the closest thing Reddit had to a business model, which is a strange sentence to write about a site now worth billions on advertising.

~ who could actually play ~

Taking part required two things nobody in the announcement thread talked about: a postal address you were willing to hand to a stranger, and a customs regime that would not hold the parcel for a month. From Turkey in those years both of those were real obstacles, and the matching pool skewed heavily toward people shipping inside North America and western Europe for exactly that reason.

Bill Gates played five times under the username thisisbillgates, which the Gates Foundation confirmed. One year his match was a cat enthusiast and he sent a haul large enough to make international news. That is the story the site is remembered by, and it is also the clearest possible illustration of what the matching algorithm was doing: it did not know or care who anybody was.

~ the sunset notice ~

On 9 June 2021 Reddit posted "Sunsetting Secret Santa and Reddit Gifts" to r/announcements. New account registration was switched off the same day, and the shutdown was set to take effect once the 2021 exchange had finished running. That exchange went ahead, the gifts went out in December, and the site came down in January 2022. Today redditgifts.com answers with a 301 to the reddit homepage.

Twelve years is a long run for a thing that cost the company staff time and shipped physical objects. The surprise is not that Reddit closed it. The surprise is that a site built on anonymous strangers managed thirteen consecutive years of people keeping their word.

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