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Reddit Founder Alexis Ohanian (a.k.a. Serena Williams’ fiancé) was on Jimmy Kimmel Live last week when he was asked if he had one post in particular out of the millions on Reddit that was his all time favorite.
(Side note: if wives and girlfriends of athletes are called WAGs, what are husbands and boyfriends called? HABs? Is Alexis Ohanian a HAB? Did I just invent a new term? Yay me! Okay, back to the story.)
Now I would have guessed that with SO many posts on his site there would be no way for him to pick out just one, but as usual, I would have been wrong. Here’s how Ohanian described it…
“Ummm, there’s a lot! One of my favorites was on a community called ‘Ask Reddit’ where people just ask open-ended questions, one of our most popular ones.
“And the question was ‘have you ever picked up a hitchhiker?’
“It’s a pretty innocuous question and the top-voted comment was this amazing story from a person who talked about having not actually picked up a hitchhiker, but sort of being helped while stranded on the side of the road. Their car was just totally wrecked, they couldn’t get anyone to pull over….
“Then all of a sudden out of the darkness, this pick-up truck pulls up and a full family piles out of it and they’re a bunch of immigrants, Mexican immigrants and he can tell from the little bit of English they speak that they want to help – and they do so. They get his car fixed up, they offer him food, they give him a fresh tomales – and he’s insisting, he’s like ‘let me give you some money’ and they don’t speak a ton of English and he’s just trying to hand them 20 bucks or something.
“But the family got back in the car they said ‘no, no, no, no way’. But then on the way out, the driver, the husband, rolled down his window and he said ‘today you, tomorrow me’ and this obviously resonated with him.
“He shares this story on Reddit, half a million people see it by the end of the day, the New York Times excerpts it a day later.
“And here is this story of regular people just being decent to one another, that half a million people got to enjoy not because the guy that happened to was famous or gets to be on a show but because the internet said ‘this is good, more people need to hear it’.
“In the last 12 years since we started it, the platform has given so many more reasons to be hopeful about my fellow humans and less scared of my fellow humans and feel more connected to my fellow humans than any other social network – and I’m grateful for that.”
That is a good story.
Unfortunately for one other Reddit user, he too was sort of featured during Ohanian’s interview with Jimmy Kimmel and his story ended up being a TIFU…
This happened to me yesterday and I’m still baffled.
It all started when I posted a comparison picture of a dog which looks like the actor William H. Macy. I couldn’t stop laughin over it but I never thought it would gain so much attention.
However it ended up on the front page with much more upvotes I could have imagined. This alone was crazy for me because I never expected to have a submission on the front page.
When I checked my phone the next morning my reddit inbox exploded over the sheer amount of youtube links I received. I checked them and found my submission on the latest Jimmy Kimmel Show with Reddit Co-Founder Alexis Ohanian. I was mind blown over this.
They proceeded talking over reddit users and Jimmy ended up checking my history. Well I hardly ever post filthy stuff but I commented on a NSFW TIFU a few days ago and I think Jimmy thought it was my submission at the short glance he took.
Keep in mind they even named and showed my username – he made it look like there was a lot of filthy stuff going on in my history so this was quite embarrassing for me and Im getting a lot of crazy messages now.
I don’t know if this perfectly qualifies for a TIFU but on the one hand it felt like one, when he revealed my history with ‘filthy stuff’ as he said. On the other hand it’s just cool and a story to tell. However I regret nothing!
tl;dr: Jimmy Kimmel had Reddit Co-Founder Alexis Ohanian as a guest. They ended up browsing my reddit history and Jimmy made it look like there’s filthy stuff going on.
Hilarious.
Here’s Ohanian talking with Kimmel about Reddit and his favorite post…
And here he is talking about having a baby with the GOAT tennis player Serena Williams…
H/T UNILAD