Reddit has announced that it is shutting down its Secret Santa gift exchange service.
The service is one of Reddit’s popular offerings and has seen renowned personalities like Bill Gates, Jimmy Fallon, and Snoop Dogg participating.
Launched back in 2009, this event took place every year and thousands of people across the globe participated in it.
Reddit announced that it is shutting down the Secret Santa on its platform, where it said, “Today is a difficult one: 2021 will be the last year of Reddit Gifts.
We will continue to run exchanges through the end of the year — including the last ever Arbitrary Day.” Explaining why the company has decided to pull the plug on this, Reddit said, ”We made the difficult decision to shut down Reddit Gifts and put more focus on enhancing the user experience on Reddit – this includes investing in the foundation of our platform and moderator tools, making it more accessible for people around the world and evolving how people engage with one another.” Reddit said that for retiring Reddit Gifts after the final exchange at the end of 2021, the platform will disable the creation of any new Reddit Gifts accounts, ban all accounts that have incomplete exchanges and turn off the option to buy Elves.
“If you purchased an Elves membership and have remaining months after the 2021 Secret Santa Exchange, we will email you about your refund options then,” said Reddit.
“These changes have been put in place to ensure that these last exchanges are enjoyable for the legacy Reddit Gifts users.
We want to celebrate the end of Reddit Gifts with the community that we’ve built so far,” added the company.