It isn't difficult to look at sites like Reddit, Digg, or any other significantly huge web community, and view their total user base with a set level of distain? Anonymity has the unpleasant practice of turning reasonable folks into top-class jerks.
But occasionally we come across stories that confirm that there are fair, kind folks behind many of those avatars. One such case occurred this vacation season on Reddit, where thousands of users have banded together to form what might have been the biggest Secret Santa program in history.
Reddit user Antonio Cangiano has penned a long blog post detailing the program, and it's truly quite heartwarming. The entire thing started when a few Redditors decided amongst themselves a Secret Santa program would be fun.
Dan McComas put together a site called Redditgifts to organize it with some limitations in place to help cut back on trolls (you could not join with a new account). After making registration the site automatically coordinated with the users as Secret Santa’s, sharing address info in order that they could send one another gifts but tiny in the way of private info. Over 4500 folks joined up, and they shipped a total of five thousand gifts (you might exchange more than one present if you wanted). The majority of the users came thru with their cargos, with just a couple of hundred dawdlers. And even with those procrastinators, Cangiano writes that Reddit has far excelled the previous record holder for biggest Secret Santa ever.
