(She may have done her job a little too well, uncovering not only his birth sister, but topless photos of her too.) User syllabell took less than five hours of hardcore Googling to locate his birth parents. "So I'm looking for my birth family after nearly 24 years," he wrote. He didn't have the money or resources to hire a private investigator, so he posted everything he knew on Reddit, including a photograph he had of his birth parents. In December last year, a few days before Christmas, one Reddit user single-handedly managed to track down the biological parents of user steezy-wunda-bred, who was adopted, in a matter of hours. "Reddit saved my life," wrote user DwedPiwateWobberts. This community, called " r/suicidewatch", has more than 2.2 million subscribers and apparently has been responsible for helping to save many lives. There is an entire subreddit dedicated to talking to and helping people who may be struggling with suicide. "Because of my own personal bullying story, I've now decided to become an advocate of change," she says in a video for the foundation. It was originally intended to be a holiday fund for Klein, who has since retired and set up the Karen Klein Anti-Bullying Foundation. In a month, 32,000 people from around the world donated more than $US700,000 ($670,000). A YouTube video of the ongoing attacks was posted on Reddit in June this year and soon went viral. "I can't even begin to convey our gratitude."īus monitor Karen Klein, 68, was being viciously verbally abused by teenagers on their way home from school in New York. "Thank you all again for your incredible kindness," said Lucas' father. His family desperately needed funds for treatment, and within 12 hours of posting the story on Reddit, users had raised a whopping $US31,000 ($29,600). One story that captured the eyes of click-happy good Samaritans was that of three-year-old Lucas Gonzalez, a toddler with a rare blood disease. "This is a great example of technology galvanising real-world action for the better."
"We often ignore the potential of things that go on online to have an effect on everyday life," she says. Dr Christine Satchell, senior research fellow at the University of Melbourne, believes that this behaviour is indicative of the merging of our online and real-world identities. While many social media websites are overrun with scathing insults, known as "flaming" and "trolling", Reddit has largely avoided this trend. Half of the users identified as single, but Reddit won't be used as a dating service any time soon: its ratio of single men to single women is 12 to one. The survey also found that a whopping 85 per cent of redditors are aged between 18 and 30, with the average age 24.7. Users, called "redditors", are overwhelmingly male (87 per cent) according to a demographic survey conducted on the site about its user-base last year. The posts, which live on pages called "subreddits" according to their subject, are voted for or against by users, the most popular of which appear on the home page, thus garnering more attention. Users not only post innocuously addictive photos of cats, but also help each other out with anything from learning a new language to helping raise money for charities, including more than $200,000 for Doctors Without Borders.
The website has burgeoned into a hub for well-wishers and do-gooders to lend a helping hand. After answering questions on subjects as diverse as money, politics and beer, Obama commented that Reddit was "an example of how technology and the internet can empower the sorts of conversations that strengthen our democracy over the long run". If these figures didn't speak for themselves, Reddit's status was cemented last month when US President Barack Obama did an "AMA" ("Ask Me Anything") on the site. In spite of the website's simple, text-heavy layout that is somewhat reminiscent of Craigslist, it has grown steadily from having a small cult following to more than 4 million unique monthly visitors viewing approximately 3.5 billion pages. Steezy-wunda-bred's photo of his biological parents.
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