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Bill Gates plays Secret Santa on Reddit

What it’s like when the world's richest man is your Secret Santa?

A 25-year-old Reddit user named Cali found out after drawing none other than Bill Gates in the fourth annual Reddit Secret Santa. For her gift, Gates sent the young woman a Loki helmet from the Thor movies which she had put at the top of her wish list. He also gifted her a coffee table book of photographs from Africa, a stuffed polio virus microbe, and donated money in her name to Shot@Life, which is a charitable program that provides vaccines for children in poor countries.

More than 200,000 users signed up for the Reddit Secret Santa gift exchange. “Only on the internet can somebody like Bill Gates change your life and change somebody else’s life at the same time,” says Yahoo Finance Editor-in-Chief, Aaron Task.

Cali posted on Reddit a picture of herself donning the Loki helmet holding a picture of Gates and a letter he sent with the gifts. Cali said she was particularly thrilled with the charitable donation. She posted, “I can't even begin to describe how incredible it makes me feel knowing that he made this donation in my name! I always donate what I can for charities, which is never much cause money is always extremely tight, it really makes me glow!"

It speaks to the bigger community that is Reddit, says Henry Blodget. “It is great for Reddit which has been a tremendous success despite operating off the beaten track and so forth. They are doing very well.”

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Reddit has a reputation for putting its user base first. In September, the company netted $50 million in funding from investors led by Sam Altman, president of the start-up incubator, Y Combinator. Then-CEO Yishan Wong announced that the investors were interested "[giving] 10% of their shares back to the community." The company has since switched CEOs, but on Friday Reddit revealed how it would do that. A lottery will give out 950,000 users Reddit Notes, which is meant to be some sort of digital currency. It is unclear how users would be able to use the Reddit Notes, but the move has been well-received by users.

“It’s just that people feel like they are part of a community,” says Blodget. It’s a community that is growing.  Reddit has an estimated 175 million active monthly users as of early October, according to the company.

But the Reddit has had a rough year in the press.  Hacked celebrity nude photographs were leaked on the site. Reddit also received heat over misogynistic discussions on gaming forums that threatened women in the gaming industry.

More policing of the site will likely be necessary for the company to grow because, in order to grow, it will need an advertising platform that will generate cash but not alienate users.  Blodget says the best move would be for the company to come up with "a native Reddit advertising platform."

“There’s just always been within the tech community this knee-jerk, anti-advertising feel.” But what Blodget says is “interesting and ironic” is that the two fastest growing companies in Silicon Valley right now are Facebook and Google. “They are entirely driven by advertising,” says Blodget, “And yet this anti-advertising thing persists.”

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