What happened
In 2009, Redditor Dan McComas (username kickme444) launched RedditGifts to organize a global Secret Santa gift exchange for the community. The first event drew roughly 4,500 participants who filled out preference profiles and were each randomly matched with another user to send a gift, typically valued between $10 and $25. Within five years the program grew from a few thousand people to more than a quarter-million participants spread across over 200 countries.
The exchange became a defining example of Reddit's capacity for large-scale goodwill, eventually holding the Guinness World Record for the world's largest online gift exchange on multiple occasions. RedditGifts demonstrated that the same crowd that produced Reddit's controversies could also coordinate one of the internet's biggest acts of organized generosity. The project's success and its two-person team's inability to sustain it on volunteer time set the stage for Reddit's first corporate acquisition two years later.