Reddit, an American social news aggregation, web content rating, and discussion website (basically a group of numerous forums) created an online gift exchange in 2009. This gift exchange has gotten so large they created a separate website, redditgifts.com. The most famous online gift exchange (there are several others) they have is for Christmas. Several celebrities also participate in the exchange, from Bill Gates to Jimmy Fallon. Each gift exchange works essentially the same way. The person giving is most likely not going to be your match for you to give a gift back.
In a nutshell, the way it works is each person writes up a bit about what they like by filling out a questionnaire. Then you post proof that your item was sent. Once the other person receives their gift, they mark it as such on their site. They can also post a photo and comments about their gift if they wish. The recommended spend is $20. This will be my first year participating in RedditGifts. Having read the faq’s and rules on their website, I already shopped for and sent out my recipient’s gift. It was apparent that my giftee was a young adult (the minimum age to participate is 18). A couple things noted on his questionnaire were that he just completed building his own computer and that he liked dragons, so I found a cool dragon keyboard and mouse on Amazon. 
I checked on the status of my giftee and he updated his status to having received the gift, and posted a simple, thank you for the gift message. Perhaps he was expecting more, or just didn’t have time to elaborate, but I got the impression that he may have been disappointed. The intention is not to be looking for a lottery level gift from someone, but to spread joy and friendship to someone in the ether of the Internet, or something like that… I’ve been checking that status of my Secret Santa, and it seems they may be waiting for it to be closer to Christmas to send the gift.
I did finally receive my gift, in January 2020. My secret Santa apologized but came through with a very nice gift, a Raspbery Pi 4. This is a really cool but tiny computer that can do many things. There’s an older version of the Raspberry Pi, a model 3, that is serving as our VPN and has been running non-stop for a few years now.
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