This week belonged to Reddit’s atheists.
Over the weekend, the community made a huge fundraising push, raising more than $150,000 for renowned medical charity Doctors Without Borders.
When I asked r/atheism moderator tuber if he had any point to prove with the fundraising drive, he said emphatically that he didn’t. “Speaking only for myself, I hope to improve lives, save lives, or both,” tuber wrote in a message. “Sending a message is not a significant motivator for me.”
Still, you can’t help but think that many other atheists did have a point to prove. At the FirstGiving site, redditors picked up the phrase “Good without God” as a rallying cry. Atheists, they seemed to be saying, are just as charitable as anyone else.
Ulterior motives hardly take away from what the subreddit has accomplished. FirstGiving rep Dina Pradel told me their most successful campaigns often hinge on some kind of group event or activity: a run, a walk, a bike race. In this case, the ulterior motive was proving atheists are good people. Nothing wrong with that.
There was one fairly significant difference, however. Normally, 40 percent of FirstGiving donors opt to pay the credit card fee. Reddit’s atheists paid that fee 60 percent of the time.
“These guys are really superstars of fundraising,” Pradel said.
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The atheism community got excited about a lot more than charity this week. Specifically, the idea that gay porn—hosted on the domain WestboroBaptistChurch.xxx—might be a powerful weapon in the fight against the insanely homophobic Westboro Baptist Church. Even Gawker picked up on the idea. But since posting on Wednesday, redditor VinCenzo831 has mostly disappeared, and his newly purchased .xxx domain remains in limbo.
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Reddit was down all day Wednesday for reasons that remain a little mysterious. Once it came back, you’d normally expect the site to be taken over with obnoxious self-referential image memes joking about how Reddit was down all day. To the site’s credit, that didn’t happen. A concrete example, perhaps, of how shutting down r/reddit.com and enforcing the rules in r/pics has been good for the site.
Of course, if “reddit is down, fear the imminent apocalypse” jokes are your thing, you can always turn to Twitter.
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In other news, a Russian live-reddits the revolution, an American live-reddits the Virginia Tech shootings, and Reddit’s Android fans take on Apple’s patent laws.