It was a banner week for Reddit’s good side.
Lucas Gonzalez suffers from a rare disease that is exceedingly expensive to treat. It took Reddit just 12 hours for the site to save his family from potential financial ruin.
Lucas’s health and long-term happiness is its own reward, but there was some reciprocity on the part of the family. His father, Luis, did a live question-and-answer session on the site last night.
Our favorite exchange came from this question asked by redditor Ocrasorm:
Q: For Lucas: Would he rather have Super Strength or be able to become invisible and why?
A: Lucas: “Super Strong” and he flexed his muscles. He didn’t have an answer for why, just keeps flexing :)
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Lucas Gonzalez’s case was a moment of urgent and specific need. But Reddit’s generosity is often wholly random and a little insane.
Last night, for instance, at one of the greatest Web communities around, r/Random_Acts_of_Pizza, redditor IdTugYourBoat went mad with pizza power, slinging out pies with generous abandon (by our count, about 25 in total). We’re not sure why, exactly, he ordered pizza delivery for strangers. All we know is that anyone and everyone got one, so long as they asked.
IdTugYourBoat explained: “I don’t care if you’re a college student living off Top Ramen, a single mother living paycheck to paycheck with a dozen mouths to feed, a frequently masturbating goat herder, or just a lonely person needing some cheesy closure; whatever, I don’t care. I’ll give you a goddamn pizza.”
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On Tuesday hihi_birdie wrote that her 8:30 a.m. physics class made her a little lusty. (The admission was part of a thread asking “What is the most mundane thing/situation that always makes you horny for unknown reasons.”)
She probably expected that comment to remain pseudonymous. But when a site boasts about 30 million unique visitors every month, there’s always a chance for some real world serendipity.
It turns out another student in an 8:30 a.m. physics class was reading her thread. Any chance it was the exact same class, at Ohio State University’s Smith Laboratory, he asked?
Sure enough, the it was. The two redditors shared a class.
Now they’re sharing Reddit fame.
They’ve posted two photographs of their subsequent post-physics lab meetups.
“It really wasn’t as awkward as you would imagine,” i_am_the_cheese explained. “Reddit has given us plenty to talk/laugh about.”