Guide
What happened to r/sweepstakes and the giveaway forums?
The two biggest hubs are frozen. The community scattered. Here's the map of where it landed.
r/sweepstakes and r/giveaways closed during Reddit's 2023 API protest and never really reopened. The community scattered to aggregator forums, general freebie subs, and smaller niches (many now about sweepstakes casinos, a different thing). No single hub replaced them; the useful shift is toward feeds that filter giveaways for you.
If you went looking for a sweepstakes community on Reddit and hit a wall, you're not imagining it. The two biggest hubs, r/sweepstakes and r/giveaways, are effectively closed. Neither has taken a real post in about a year, and searches for them often land on a private-subreddit page. The old community didn't vanish, it scattered, and it's worth knowing where it went.
Photo: Andrea Piacquadio / Pexels
What happened to r/sweepstakes and r/giveaways
Both got caught in Reddit's 2023 API protest, when thousands of subreddits went private in protest of new pricing. Many reopened. These didn't, at least not in any active way. Combined with normal moderator burnout, the result is two large communities that still rank in Google but are essentially frozen, so newcomers keep finding a locked door.
Photo: Jan van der Wolf / Pexels
Where the sweepstakes crowd actually is now
The activity spread across a few places instead of one:
- The long-running aggregator sites and their own forums, like Online-Sweepstakes.com, still have active veteran communities.
- General money-saving and freebie subreddits, where "how do I find legit sweepstakes?" threads pop up regularly.
- Newer, smaller niche subreddits, though many that use the word "sweepstakes" today are actually about sweepstakes casinos, which is a different, gambling-adjacent thing.
That last point trips people up. If you're after free prize drawings, a lot of what now carries the "sweepstakes" label online is really social-casino content. We explain the split in sweepstakes casinos vs real prize sweepstakes.
What replaced the community hub
Honestly, nothing has fully replaced a single big prize-sweepstakes community yet. What changed instead is the tooling. Finding and tracking giveaways used to mean bookmarking a dozen sites and a busy forum thread. Now the more useful pattern is a single feed that pulls giveaways together and tells you which are worth entering, which is the gap we built VibeWin to fill.
Where to start today
You don't need a forum to find good giveaways anymore, just a source that filters for you. See the best live giveaways right now, or if you want a comparison of the sites still standing, read our rundown of sweepstakes aggregators and which are legit.