Ask President Barack Obama anything on Reddit (seriously)

http://venturebeat.com/2012/08/29/ask-president-barack-obama-anything-on-reddit-seriously/

by azat_co • 14 years ago

70 28 14 years ago

venturebeat.com

pixelcort• 14 years ago

Link to actual AMA: http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/z1c9z/i_am_barack_obam...

Reddit's ops team is going to have a fun day today. (Link's down as I post this.)

willpearse• 14 years ago

I can't even load the page, so... "was bubble sort the wrong way to go?" ...I hate myself a little.

baggachipz• 14 years ago

All questions have to be about Rampart.

jeffool• 14 years ago

There's already a thread above this one on the main page, and it actually links to the AMA: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4450803

bersius• 14 years ago

I've never seen so many positive up-votes before. What do you think of this as a move? Do you think it makes him accesible or will it be seen as pandering?

ericd• 14 years ago

I think it's an awesome, inspired idea - a direct public forum of discussion with your leader. I can't get to the page to see how he's handling it, though.

pjscott• 14 years ago

That would be great, wouldn't it? In practice, it turned out to be more like having a conversation with a bot: when someone asked a question that he could answer with a super-generic, achingly inoffensive rephrasing of one of his campaign messages, he did. And that's all he did.

I would be disappointed, but I wasn't expecting anything more.

the_cat_kittles• 14 years ago

It depends on the answers he gives to questions. From what I've read, they are fairly generic, which is ok, but I think we expect more on the internet. Its a good step in the right direction though, I think.

smallblacksun• 14 years ago

I'm pretty sure the vast majority of Americans on reddit were already going to vote for him, and that it will have virtually no impact on anyone who doesn't use reddit.

philhippus2• 14 years ago

I'm pretty sure the vast majority of Americans ... were already going to vote for him. Is the other guy remotely viable? Really?

Edit: a guy from Europe's viewpoint.

Selfcommit• 14 years ago

As stated in the reddit thread... He's currently out and about in Virginia - So this is a staffer pretending to be him.

Sad.

grecy• 14 years ago

As stated in the top of the thread:

"UPDATE: Hey everybody - this is barack. Just finished a great rally in Charlottesville"

So he's doing it while on the road.

This pic shows he's obviously in some kind of temp office/building: http://i.imgur.com/oz0a7.jpg

betterth• 14 years ago

I just realized that they covered that Macbook's Apple symbol with a Reddit alien.

Chances of this being a staffers computer...rising. But then again, AllThingsD has an email from Alexis (admin) that says that this has apparently been floated for years and they were notified before hand. http://allthingsd.com/20120829/how-reddit-got-obama-there-ar...

Wingman4l7• 14 years ago

Also, the mouse is on the left side of the laptop -- and according to the almighty Wikipedia[1], Obama is left-handed -- so +1 for authenticity.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Handedness_of_Presidents_of_the...

eli• 14 years ago

It's weird that there has to be a pointless conspiracy theory about everything.

amanvir• 14 years ago

I hope Reddit follows up with a blog post on how they handled the load and how it affected the amount of new sign-ups

reddit_clone• 14 years ago

Well, they are not handling it that well. The site is down right now.

BHSPitMonkey• 14 years ago

They didn't. I spent an hour and a half just refreshing the page and only ever saw "Reddit is under heavy load..."

Ask President Barack Obama anything on Reddit (seriously)

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