Every Christmas I think of this song and happily, mushily reaffirm that yes, love is alive. I’m lucky.
RedditGifts: an online gift exchange program for the reddit.com community
This is remarkable.
Imagine Digg users or even Facebook users trying to organize something like this (they aren’t).
Think of the Guinness World Record for “Largest Secret Santa Exchange” being 1,500 people when there are already ~2,000 people signed up for the RedditGifts exchange.
Consider how some people might actually put more thought into a gift for an anonymous person than they might for friends and acquaintances they know IRL.
Conducting a Secret Santa between (mostly) anonymous users on a social news site is a captivating social experiment. Are community-based trust and good will enough to ensure everyone plays by the rules? Will the organizers be able to structure it well enough that everything goes off without a hitch? Will the threat of bad karma and the shunning of virtual peers prevent people from gaming the system?
I just signed up, and I’m anxious to find out.
(via reddit and more reddit)
