from Hacker News

Sunsetting Secret Santa and Reddit Gifts

by flankstaek on 6/9/21, 10:56 PM with 156 comments

• by Rebelgecko on 6/10/21, 1:12 AM

  Maybe I'm not the typical user, but to me reddit seems to be losing sight of why people use the site. They're killing aspects of the community that people actually care about. In the meantime, most of the site's new features seem to be centered around avatars and selling cosmetic microtransactions.

  I can't blame them too much for trying to monetize, but I wish their strategies were more inclusive of the way I use reddit

• by brink on 6/10/21, 12:31 AM

  Years ago I participated in this. Someone sent me a beautiful programming book, but I failed to purchase and send a gift for my recipient because I was a stupid, selfish kid. I still feel horrible about it to this day.

• by julietteeb on 6/10/21, 12:47 AM

  Looks like its being recreated by the first three employees at r/newsecretsanta (https://old.reddit.com/r/newsecretsanta/)

• by drawfloat on 6/10/21, 6:16 AM

  I appreciate it’s a very different time, so not saying they’re comparable 1 to 1, but back in the waning days of Digg you saw Reddit suddenly growing and growing as this new and actually interesting competitor.

  Is there an equivalent today?

  I enjoyed using Reddit for years, then used it without (tbh) enjoying it much for probably a couple of years, and finally have almost fully disconnected. There’s no denying it has many more years worth of genuinely useful information on it, so I’ll still use it as a resource for community recommendations when searching.

  However, the actual _news_/curated feed mechanic I’ve long sworn off. Is there anything new coming up atm that isn’t just a Reddit knock off?

  Edit: side note, thinking about how long ago the Digg —> Reddit shift was has actually filled me with a bit of existential dread. When you stop and think, Reddit has had an incredible run as a popular platform so far.

• by Aardwolf on 6/10/21, 9:21 AM

  "We made the difficult decision to shut down Reddit Gifts and put more focus on enhancing the user experience on Reddit"

  Oh, enhancing user experience sounds good: so they'll reinstate the old reddit UI back as the default, the one that doesn't block viewing threads in a mobile browser half the time?

• by CPLX on 6/10/21, 1:24 AM

  I realize that it’s not the most important issue given the current state of the world but I really wish the tech community would stop using the word “sunset” to replace the universally understood word “end”

• by MattIPv4 on 6/10/21, 12:14 AM

  Hopefully, maybe, the community might come together and crowdsource a new Reddit Secret Santa that's run by the Reddit community rather than the Reddit admins.

• by LeoPanthera on 6/10/21, 12:28 AM

  It lost any charm it had as soon as it started having sponsors, maybe 5 years ago? I don't remember exactly.

  Before that it was the community doing something fun together. After that it was just yet another advertising opportunity and I noped right out.

• by myrandomcomment on 6/10/21, 2:35 AM

  Dropped Reddit in general a few years ago. Much happier. I sometimes read the tech stuff that friends link but otherwise done.

• by yalogin on 6/10/21, 12:30 PM

  Worst part is they don’t give any reason. Looks like it’s purely a cost cutting measure. It probably doesn’t meet their ad percentages for a sub and it probably throws a wrench into their load balancing plans as the sub only gets active in December and after that it’s dormant.

  It’s a shame because this was what endeared me to Reddit among other things a long time ago. They should think of this as an investment just like Netflix throws money at content to get users. Someone over there is not making good decisions, first the new UI, definitely takes away user experience and now this.

• by Axien on 6/10/21, 1:40 AM

  We should do a secret Hacker News Santa.

• by felipemesquita on 6/10/21, 9:49 AM

  Replace www with old in Reddit links to bring back the old layout, as in https://old.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/nw2hs6/sunse...

• by boomboomsubban on 6/10/21, 12:35 AM

  Didn't the idea start on Something Awful or another site like it? Do they still run their secret Santa?

• by chiph on 6/10/21, 1:17 AM

  Maybe I don't understand - other than hosting the subreddit, what was Reddit Inc.'s involvement?

• by canada_dry on 6/10/21, 3:28 AM

  I participated a couple times, years ago, as a novelty when I first joined. I suspect reddit simply discovered that most users drop off after just 1 or 2 exchanges for various reasons so there isn't much of a retention bonus.

• by JohnBooty on 6/10/21, 12:41 PM

  I get it.

  On a much smaller scale, I was in a similar position once.

  Ran a very active online community. Each year we had a big (well, for us) in-person meetup. Everybody loved it, looked forward to it, etc.

  In retrospect I'm not sure it was the best use of our extremely limited people-hours.

  On the plus side, the gathering/convention was great the 0.1% of our active users that made the trek each year and I believe there was a harder-to-measure positive "halo effect" from it that benefitted the community in general.

  On the downside, the "staff" for this site was basically "me working part time, plus community volunteers." The site's infrastructure needed major work and I lacked time to properly market the site, etc.

  TL;DR --

  Given our limited resources, a LOT of necessary work went undone, in favor of this yearly event that directly benefitted only a tiny fraction of our users. I suspect Reddit just came to the same conclusion.

• by im3w1l on 6/10/21, 12:08 PM

  It makes sense. Reddit is too big for something like that.

• by smnscu on 6/10/21, 12:04 AM

  Top comment nails it:

  > So you took over someone elses project years ago, made some money off of it and then killed it. Yikes.