“One rainy cold night in February, we posted, and nobody showed for a while,” Mollé says. RELATED: Meet Reddit-famous BART portraitist Hamilton Cline So they decided to try a dedicated post, where right in the headline, they invite anyone to join them if they can find them - first drink free. Cline had always been curious about how Reddit’s algorithms worked, and Mollé, quite the extrovert, was just happy to meet new people. They didn’t, and “nobody came,” Mollé recalls, but it nevertheless got the two of them thinking. In the comments of Mollé’s favorite bar post, he and Cline added an invitation, asking anyone who might see their message to join them. That night, Mollé sat at this bar with his best friend and former co-worker, Hamilton Cline ( another Reddit celeb in his own right). The post blew up with anecdotes and stories of local lore, leading Mollé to wonder if there might be another way to connect with his neighbors. One day, he took that conversation to Reddit, posting a simple question to r/sanfrancisco: “This is my favorite bar,” he wrote, accompanying it with a photo of the House of Shields. When he’s not with his kids, he likes to drop by the House of Shields and talk about the classic bar’s sordid backstory with the other patrons. He lived in San Francisco for most of that time, then moved to the East Bay after his daughters were born to be closer to them and his co-parent. Mollé’s worked in this neighborhood by New Montgomery for more than 20 years. RELATED: Why one of San Francisco's oldest bars is legally frozen in time Mollé just wanted to meet new people, IRL.

The social media attention, however, was never the intention. In the process, over the last few months, he’s become a veritable local Reddit celebrity. Offline, a handful of those Redditors locate Mollé and join him to hang out, network and trade contact information. When they figure out where he is based on his picture or a riddle (or, one time, coordinates), he’ll buy their first drink.Ī surge of upvotes and comments typically follows online, elevating Mollé’s post to the top of r/sanfrancisco. In them, he invites anyone who sees his picture in the San Francisco forum, called a “subreddit,” to join him at this unidentified bar. Once or twice a month for almost a year, Mollé has posted a photo of himself on the social media site Reddit under his username u/jimmyjah. The Castro Valley local has built something of an online community for himself based on exactly these types of mystery meet-ups.

They could be here to meet Mollé - he’d have no idea.

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