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Comment by peregrine | Hacker News Reader

I wouldn't say it was unexpected, reddit has been pushing hard for this for about a month now.

No, no, I'm just saying that if you asked me in 1985 whether an online community of people who had never met one another could raise hundreds of thousands for charity in order to get a liberal political entertainer posing as a mock conservative to hold a rally in contrast to a modern-day rabble rouser posing as a real conservative, I would have failed even to understand the question.

Me too, but to be fair I was five years old and wouldn't have understood most of those big words.

Believe it or not,it has only been 17 days since the post that started it all.

I am not convinced that Reddit was not played on this one.

It is easy to get anything to do with Colbert upvoted on Reddit. It was around 17 days ago that he seemed to start making personal appearances in the comments too.

All it would take is one Colbert/Stewart staffer to seed Reddit and it is off and running.

Not disparaging it. I think the rally is a great idea and the theme is brilliant. Reddit and other similar sites can be a powerful initial catalyst but it feels like this happened awfully fast to attribute the real genesis to the Reddit community.

If "playing" reddit ends up with >$150k donated to charity, then I say, play on.

edit: I think it was $150k when I checked this morning, now it says $244k. A quarter of a million dollars in less than a week.

True. I am constantly astonished at how fast online communities can come together for the common good.

I can be a bit oversensitive with anything that smells like astroturfing, I suppose, even when it is for events/organizations/people/causes I like.

That is depressingly likely. However, the user who made the post that started it all had been a redditer for over a year and posts on a number of topics, so if your theory is correct they were fairly subtle about it.

I would be willing to bet that most of Colbert's and Stewart's staff have an average Reddit age of over a year :)

Do you have the username of the post that started it all? I'd search but, you know, their search feature....

Now the idea is starting to bug me and I'd like to look into it a bit.

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