Why I built OddsRabbit.

I grew up a first-generation Asian American in New York City's Chinatown. Like everyone around us — immigrants who'd come to the U.S. chasing opportunity — we didn't have much. My mom worked at the local sweatshop. My dad baked at the bakery down the street. I still remember the lights going out when we couldn't pay the bills. The eviction notices, my mom begging the landlord for rent extensions. Lining up with my grandma at the food bank after school. Watching the elderly pick through trash and recycle plastic bottles just to eat.

That's why I made myself a promise: by 30, I'd have enough to start a nonprofit. The elderly shouldn't have to rummage through trash. Kids shouldn't wonder where their next meal is coming from. Poverty shouldn't exist.

I'm 35 now. Five years past the promise. I'm still not there — not financially, at least — and honestly, I'm not sure when I will be.

Instead of waiting until I had millions, I built something that lets everyone do a little. But why a community platform, of all things? Because I grew up online too — forums where you'd argue with someone in Tokyo at 2am, the first blogs, communities that formed around a single show and stayed friends for fifteen years. That internet was made by people, and it's dying.

Open any feed now and most of what scrolls past isn't a person. It's a machine pretending to be one — an AI post, a bot farming engagement, a "creator" who's actually a prompt. The platforms ship it anyway, because synthetic content is cheap and the numbers still go up. Everyone calls it enshittification. I didn't want to keep scrolling through it.

So I built the other thing. OddsRabbit is people-first — and the place where the ad revenue from your scrolling doesn't go to billionaires. It goes to a charity you pick. At zero cost to you. I call it hopescrolling: the same fifteen minutes you'd have spent on any other feed, except a kid gets fed and the person you're talking to is actually a person.

The two halves were never separate. A platform that hands its economics back to its users only works if the users are real. And a people-first feed only matters if something good comes out of all that human attention. They're the same idea, told twice.

So far, your scrolling has funded

It's a small number against everything I want to do. But it's proof the model works — that scrolling can be something other than extraction.

I'm still chasing that original promise. I'm not waiting to keep it anymore.

Jing Jun Ma Founder, OddsRabbit Written July 2026