A house in Virginia full of unopened toys has helped launch the newest charitable section of Reddit.
Launched just five days ago, r/RandomKindness calls itself a place for strangers to ship one another something nice in the “name of kindness.”
Reddit, the social news site, already had a home for random pizza donors — r/Random_Acts_of_Pizza, but there was nowhere to give away things other than tomato pies. So a few redditors launched r/RandomKindess, a place to give anything and everything you want to: new things, old things, things in your attic or basement — anything you don’t want that someone else might need.
A few days after the subreddit launched, redditor ransim posted with a sad story and a unique offer. His brother passed away in an accident six years ago. While some people cope with anguish by turning to drugs or alcohol, ransim started buying toys en masse — toys that, in the end, he didn’t really need.
He turned to the newly minted r/RandomKindness, which was so new and so small, in fact, that no one was taking him up on his offer.
Disappointed by the tepid response, one enterprising forum moderator turned ransim’s story into an image and posted it to reddit’s largest pics section. It quickly shot to the site’s front page. That brought ransim a whole lot of toy requests, and the subreddit a new wave of readers.
Since then, redditors have been giving way with reckless abandon: books, home-made cookies, “$200 worth” of anything, home-brewed pumpkin beer, and a whole lot more.
And why not?
As the subreddit observes in its sidebar: “If you have some stuff lying around and want to give it away and make somebody happy then do it here. If we can randomly deliver pizza, we can randomly deliver other nice stuff.”
It’s not the stuff, after all, that really matters. It’s the randomness of it all. On Reddit, it seems, nothing is too big, small, or specific to be given away for free.
Photo by ~maya*maya~