User:Alias777/sandbox

Community and Culture
The website is known for its open nature and diverse user community that generate its content. Its demographics allows for wide-ranging subject areas, or main subreddits, that receive much attention, as well as the ability for smaller subreddits to serve more niche purposes. The unique possibilities that subreddits provide create new opportunities for raising attention and fostering discussion across many areas. In gaining popularity in terms of unique users per day, Reddit has been a platform for many to raise publicity for a number of causes. And with that increased ability to garner attention and a large audience, users can use one of the largest communities on the Internet for new and revolutionary purposes.

Its popularity has enabled users to take unprecedented advantage of such a large community. Its innovative socially-ranked rating and sorting system drives a method that is useful for fulfilling certain goals of viewership or simply finding answers to interesting questions. User sentiments about the website's function and structure include feelings about the breadth and depth of the discussions on Reddit and how the site makes it easy to discover new and interesting items. Almost all of the user reviews on Alexa.com, which rates Reddit's monthly unique traffic rating 125th in the United States, mention Reddit's "good content" as a likable quality. However, others raise the negative aspects of the potential for Reddit's communities to possess a "hive mind" of sorts, embodying some negative aspects of group interaction theories like crowd psychology and collective conscience.

In recent history, Reddit has been known as the instigator of several large-scale projects, some short and others long-term, in order to benefit others. A selection of major events are outlined below:


 * In early December 2010, members of the Atheism and the Christianity subreddits came together to cross-promote fundraising drives for Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders) and World Vision's Clean Water Fund, respectively. Later, the Islam subreddit joined in, raising money for Islamic Relief. In less than a week, the three communities (as well as the Reddit community at large) raised over $200,000, with the vast bulk of that raised by the Atheism subreddit.
 * In early October 2010, a story was posted on Reddit about a seven-year-old girl, Kathleen Edward, who was in the advanced stages of Huntington’s disease. The girl's neighbors were taunting her and her family. Redditors banded together and gave the girl a shopping spree at Tree Town Toys, a toy store local to the story owned by a Reddit user.
 * Reddit started the largest Secret Santa program in the world, which is still in operation to date. For the 2010 Holiday season, 92 countries were involved in the Secret Santa program. There were 17,543 participants, and $662,907.60 was collectively spent on gift purchases and shipping costs.
 * Members from reddit donated over $600,000 to DonorsChoose in support of Stephen Colbert's March to Keep Fear Alive. The donation spree broke previous records for the most money donated to a single cause by the reddit community and resulted in an interview with Colbert on reddit.
 * Reddit users donated $185,356.70 to Direct Relief International for Haiti after the earthquake devastated the island in January 2010.
 * Reddit users donated over $70,000 to the Faraja Orphanage in the first 24 hours to help secure the orphanage after intruders robbed and attacked one of the volunteers, Omari, who survived a strike to the head from a machete.

Controversial subreddits
The website has a strong culture of free speech and very few rules about the types of content that may be posted; it only prohibits posting of personal information. This has led to the creation of several subreddits that have been perceived as extremely offensive, including forums dedicated to jailbait and pictures of dead bodies; several such subreddits were the focus of an edition of Anderson Cooper 360 in September 2011. However, "Suggestive or sexual content featuring minors" was not explicitly banned until February 2012, after members of the forum Something Awful planned to send correspondence to "Parent Teacher Associations, politicians, churches, news outlets and the FBI" about such subreddits. In March 2012, the Southern Poverty Law Center included r/mensrights as part of its coverage of misogyny and the men's rights movement.