Monday, December 13, 2010

Over 17,000 reddit Secret Santas spread a world record setting amount of clandestine holiday cheer

Many of the over 17,102 participants in 90 countries for Secret Santa 2010 have already received their gifts and started posting in the redditgifts.com gallery. This year reddit gifts has been giving awards to the best gifts, and you can even jealously browse the gifts by award categories such as Arts & Crafts, reddit Themed, Meme Related, Stalker, Clever, Heartfelt, and Over the Top. Over half a million dollars in gifts and shipping so far has been delivered to complete strangers around the world.

Some stand outs include: $1337 in apple store cash, a guitar, a classy oil painting of the recipient, live lobsters, an ipad, and of course hand made look of disapproval mittens.

To keep up with new and crazy gifts as they reach their destination and get posted, you can follow @redditgifts or subscribe to /r/secretsanta. Big thanks and appreciation for kickme444 (Dan McComas) and the volunteers at redditgifts.com. They managed to quadruple last year's volume and and make the event even better.

Secret Santa 2010 already got some nice press from the Daily Pennsylvanian, which wrote:

"As cliched as it might sound at this time of year, the sentiment of
doing something for someone else’s happiness ... really punctures a
hole in the cynicism we are only too eager to associate with the
internet today. The generosity and fun-lovingness demonstrated in the
actions of 17,000 individuals reminds us that there are good people in
the world who want to do good things, and the internet can be a
wonderful facilitator for them..."

A toast to all the reddit secret santas out there. Keep punching those holes.

Thursday, December 09, 2010

Doodling for shirts and giggles

The Colbert Report has issued a challenge to the Internet: Photoshop (or Gimp, or MSPaint...) Stephen's portrait into something cool or funny, and presumably, the best ones will be featured on the show or linked to on their blog or something.

Since redditors know a thing or two about pixels, we'd like to add a challenge of our own: add the reddit alien to Stephen's portrait (hi-res version) and post it in the comments. We'll give a rally t-shirt to three winners: the one with the highest "top" score, the one with the highest "best" score, and an admins' pick.

Oh, and even if you can't draw, you can still get one of these limited-edition shirts for $25 on our BustedTees page. 10% of the proceeds go to DonorsChoose (where, incidentally, the grand total is approaching $600,000!)

Friday, December 03, 2010

reddit gold gift creddits: now for sale!

Last Friday, we introduced reddit gold "creddits", which are essentially one-month gift certificates you can bestow upon deserving redditors. Over the weekend, we included three creddits as a bonus to anyone who signed up for a year of gold.

The test went well, with hundreds of months being given and hundreds of redditors getting to try gold for the first time. And today, we've added creddits to the reddit gold shoppe. They're the same price as regular subscriptions: $3.99 / month, or a 12-pack of creddits for $29.99 (which works out to just $2.50 / month).

On top of that, you can now give gold anonymously, and / or include an optional gift message:

Again, the place to buy creddits is reddit.com/help/gold.