Some Reddit users are concerned that anonymous scrooges are soliciting free gifts for themselves.
Many who donated to Rogers made no effort to rescind their orders, leaving one to question whether the episode had any real negative impact on the site's charitable giving. Were those claiming they'd never donate because of what happened even likely to have donated at all?
"I actually did some checking into a couple of those people," says BadBrowni. "None of them had donated before. It was like those internet boycotts where people said they wouldn't shop at such and such a place that they'd never visited in their lives."
In fact, he found that traffic to the subreddit the next day increased tenfold, leading to an increase in charitable giving there.
BadBrowni feels that despite the negativity, the free publicity for Random Acts of Christmas did something positive.
"All in all, our homeless friend was good for RAOC," he wrote in a chat message. "God bless the law of unintended consequences."
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Simon Owens is an assistant managing editor at U.S. News & World Report. You can follow him on Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. He can be reached at sowens@usnews.com.
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