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Reddit is starting to grow up, even if only in fits and starts.

The huge online community message board site unveiled Redditmade on Wednesday, a crowdfunding initiative that allows Reddit users to raise money to manufacture and sell customized items.

The move will add another revenue stream to Reddit, which has tried to find creative ways to make money from the millions of people who visit the site without angering its quirky community of Internet denizens.

Reddit has grown enormously in popularity over the last five years but only recently started focusing more on making money. Reddit now makes money from a small e-commerce site, Reddit Gifts. It also sells Reddit Gold, a subscription program that offers perks for signing up. Its largest moneymaker by far, however, is advertising.

Redditmade is conceptually like Kickstarter, the Brooklyn-based start-up that ignited a surge of popularity in companies using the vast reach of the web to raise money for their projects and ideas.

But unlike Kickstarter, Redditmade focuses more on physical goods, like T-shirts, shot glasses and stickers. Users are asked to create a custom item and have 30 days to raise the necessary amount of funds or orders to manufacture and send out the item. Users are not required to put in any money upfront, according to the site; a Reddit spokeswoman said the company would take a small cut of the campaign to cover the costs of its platform. This is similar to Teespring, a San Francisco-based start-up that also encourages users to create T-shirts to raise awareness for specific causes.

While users who create successful Redditmade campaigns can keep any money they have raised for themselves, Reddit also encourages users to donate the funds raised to charities, causes or individuals that the users find most important.

That idea taps directly into one of Reddit’s greatest capabilities: funneling its traffic firehose of close to 170 million regular users to accomplish specific goals. In the past, popular Reddit subcommunities have been able to coordinate action — for good or ill — across the web. When the annual Boston Marathon was attacked by bombers in April last year, Reddit embarked on a manhunt to identify the suspects. Users accidentally blamed the wrong person.

But the company is quick to point out the many good deeds its community has carried out as well. So-called Redditors have raised money for cancer survivors, animal shelters and clean drinking water for developing countries in the past, all by rallying around causes brought to their attention on the site. Reddit also plans to donate a percentage of its revenue to charity, according to Yishan Wong, the company’s chief executive.

That is most likely what the company wants to see more of and ultimately encourage via its official Redditmade site.

It could also be a convenient way to do good things on the web, even if you don’t know the people you’re doing them with.

“I’ve always wanted an easy way to buy the weird stuff that other redditors make without actually talking to them,” a person who uses the name iamed18 on the site said in a Reddit post.