When I woke up today and looked through my e-mails that had come in over night I basically wanted to go to bed again: Reddit had announced that they’d sunset RedditGifts, the platform behind the yearly Secret Santa event there.
We have decided to take the resources involved with holding Reddit Gifts together and use them to drive product innovations to everyone on Reddit. Looking ahead, we’re going to re-focus our efforts on reaching new countries, investing in foundation and moderator tools, and evolving how people engage in our communities.
Weirdly enough, the e-mail has a completely different wording than the respective post in r/SecretSanta but the gist seems to be the same: Either due to limited resources or to the platform not making enough money on its own it was decided to scrap it.
To put it mildly: I’m really sad right now. Secret Santa was (and still is) an amazing event where you meet new people from all over the world and exchange gifts, stories, and just happiness. It was also a large driver for Reddit as a whole with probably not few people joining the platform just for this yearly event.
As far as I can tell no further details have been announced about the reasoning behind this decision and what alternatives were considered but there are already multiple groups involving core folks from RedditGifts building up and talking about relaunching the platform or at least something similar. I’ll most likely keep a close eye on r/NewSecretSanta and hope for the best 🙂 If nothing else the reaction of the community has shown how important that initiative has been over the years but also the willingness of everyone to help out!
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