We are excited to announce that reddit inc has acquired redditgifts.com and that Dan McComas (kickme444) and Jessica Moreno (5days) will now be able to work full time on redditgifts.com.
Dan & Jessica started redditgifts in response to a community call for a massive gift exchange for the 2009 holiday season. Since then they've grown redditgifts into a way for subreddits to hold meet ups and gift exchanges like the Secret Santa exchange at any point in the year. To date, if you combine all the exchanges, 42,771 people in 106 countries have spent $1,458,891 on gifts! That is a lot of holiday cheer.
We long admired what Dan & Jessica and the reddit community created with redditgifts, and we've supported it from the beginning with house ads, free server space, etc. However, when talking to them earlier this year it became clear that what had started as a fun project had mutated from a fun nights & weekends project into a demanding 24/7 project. 2011 Secret Santa is on pace to potentially have 30k+ participants, and there's no way Dan & Jessica could continue to run redditgifts.com as a volunteer project. We wanted to see redditgifts grow, and we wanted Dan & Jessica to be able to invest even more time and energy into making redditgifts even better. So, we figured out a way to bring them inside the reddit family proper.
Here's Dan & Jessica's take:
We are really happy to be joining Reddit! The reddit team has beenvery supportive of us since the beginning so it feels like a naturalprogression. Being able to devote ourselves to redditgifts full timeis an amazing opportunity that will allow us to do things we havewanted to do for years but not had the time for. We can't wait to get to work!
In general, not much will change except that now Dan & Jessica will now be able to work on redditgifts.com full time. Like all things reddit, we try to be as open as possible, so here's our plan of what will and what won't change:
What will change:
- Dan & Jessica will have more time to devote to improving redditgifts.com and managing gift exchanges
- Dan will now be the product manager of redditgifts.com and Jessica will be the community manager of redditgifts.com
- Registering on redditgifts.com will be much easier (soon)
- redditgifts.com will become open source (ASAP. no date set)
- Eventually we may integrate redditgifts meetups into local subreddits, but no current plans
What won't change:
- Dan & Jessica will remain in charge of redditgifts.com
- redditgifts.com will remain a separate site, and Dan & Jessica will be focused on redditgifts.com and not working on reddit.com
- Your profile on redditgifts won't be linked from your reddit profile. We may change this in the future, but if so it will be optional and opt-out by default of course
- redditgifts will remain free to use
We are excited that we are able to support the growth of reddit gifts, and as with all things reddit, we wouldn't be able to do this without you. Thank you for your support!
Now that redditgifts is a part of reddit what would you like to see next from gift exchanges, meet ups, and Secret Santa?
Relevant Links:
For more information on reddit gifts and how the gift exchange works
see redditgifts.com FAQ.
For images of gift exchanges in all their glory go here
See the redditgifts stats!
Sign up for the next gift exchange here
