The story
Why I built OddsRabbit.
Open any feed and half of what scrolls past was written by a machine pretending to be a person. I grew up somewhere realness was the only thing anyone had. OddsRabbit is what came out when I stopped treating those as two problems.
What I saw breaking.
I grew up online. Forums where you'd argue about something obscure with someone in Tokyo at 2am. The first wave of blogs. Communities that formed around a single show and stayed friends for fifteen years. The internet I grew up on was made by people. You could feel them on the other end of every thread.
That internet is dying.
Open any feed today and most of what scrolls past isn't a person. It's an AI-generated post pretending to be one. A bot reply farming engagement. A "creator" who's actually a prompt. The platforms know, and they ship it anyway — synthetic content is cheap, and the engagement numbers still go up.
Every platform I've watched go through this has ended the same way. Slower. Hollower. Worse for the people on it, better for the people who own it. The word for it is enshittification, and it's not an accident — it's what happens when the only goal left is squeezing more out of the same people.
I didn't want to keep scrolling through that. So I started building something else.
Where I'm from.
But the shape of OddsRabbit — why 10% of our ad revenue goes to charities our users pick, why a meal is donated for every new signup, why creators keep 90% of what their communities pay them — that part comes from somewhere else.
I grew up first-gen Asian American in NYC's Chinatown. Like everyone around us, my family didn't have much. My mom worked at the local sweatshop. My dad at the bakery. I 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, recycling plastic bottles for a meal.
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 worry about where their next meal is coming from.
I'm 35 now. Five years past the promise. I'm still not there, and honestly, I'm not sure when I will be. There's so much I want to do, so many people I want to help — and it feels like I'm letting them all down.
The same idea, told twice.
What if anyone could make a difference, just by doing what we already do every day?
So instead of waiting until I had millions, I built something that lets everyone do a little.
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 aren't separate. A community 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.
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.
Jingjun Ma Founder, OddsRabbit