How Reddit Got Obama

https://allthingsd.com/20120829/how-reddit-got-obama-there-are-quite-a-few-redditors-at-1600-pennsylvania-ave/

by rkudeshi • 14 years ago

103 100 14 years ago

sharkweek4• 14 years ago

As much as I love it, Reddit has some pretty unsavory corners. Assuming this makes any news outside the tech space, I'd be curious to see what comes out -- "President Obama answering questions on website affiliated with necrophilia" ?

eaxbin• 14 years ago

Well, he also did a Google Hangout, and I think we can all guess what that's also being used for.

mcantelon• 14 years ago

No doubt that political avenue's being explored as we speak. Reddit last hit mainstream news due to jailbait photos, IIRC.

emmett• 14 years ago

As much as I love it, the internet has some pretty unsavory corners. Assuming this makes any news outside the internet, I'd be curious to see what comes out -- "President Obama answering questions on new technology associated with necrophilia AND child porn".

I'm being snarky, but it's comments like the one you just made which are echo-chambered into "there is something wrong with communications medium X because it was once used by group Y". Reddit's a big public forum: any big forum will have those issues.

lotharbot• 14 years ago

> "the internet has some pretty unsavory corners."

Average voters actually use the internet and understand it. There's porn and stuff "out there", but most people don't run into it when they're visiting facebook, yahoo, espn.com, and other mainstream sites. The average voter isn't going to question the judgment of someone who "uses the internet" because it doesn't seem seedy to them.

The average voter doesn't know what reddit is, and wouldn't "get" it from the homepage. On the homepage right now, there's Obama's AMA and a couple of other serious political stories -- sandwiched between half a dozen memes, a picture of a canker sore shaped like a penis, and several instances of the word "fuck". You don't have to go looking in the unsavory corners of reddit to find stuff that would make my mom question the judgment of people who use the site.

sharkweek4• 14 years ago

I guess I'm just more curious to see if the benefit provided from using reddit will outweigh any potential consequences. I do believe this will mostly be overlooked by news outlets outside of tech spaces, but... Most people don't understand reddit and it'd be ridiculously easy for opponents to spin this one deep into the negative.

raldi• 14 years ago

Seriously. That would be like the president having a Twitter account, or a telephone.

sharkweek4• 14 years ago

As popular as your former employer is, there's a pretty wide gap from reddit to owning a telephone -- Look how badly CNN misrepresented reddit; that's the level of understanding most people will have if someone who is essentially looking for a news story spins it that direction.

monksy• 14 years ago

Humanity as a whole has some unsavory corners. Learn to live with it.

nl• 14 years ago

"Front page of the internet" was always an ambitious tagline.

Reddit is living up to it now, though.

redthrowaway4• 14 years ago

That comes straight from pg, as reddit was his idea. He sold it to Alexis and Steve as "the front page of the Internet", that is, a user-curated list of all of the most interest links out there. While it may be read as ambitious, it was originally just intended to describe what reddit was and how it worked. It was the precursor of the "AirBnB for lightbulbs" taglines that dominated pitches a couple years ago.

ibelieveinx• 14 years ago

This comment confuses me.

derleth7• 14 years ago

> AirBnB for lightbulbs

This statement exists in a Universe I don't inhabit, but would like to visit sometime.

jonathanberger• 14 years ago

> "Not surprisingly, every answer he’s offered up so far has been studiously on-message."

This part was a bit disappointing. Part of the fun of an AMA is finding out the unexpected.

His one-liners about the Bulls or "NOT BAD" were my favorite parts.

Clotho• 14 years ago

It was like finding a paint by number in an art museum.

derleth7• 14 years ago

What do you expect? When you're in an office, and I mean a high office, you represent that office and all that office represents. Right or wrong, the office of the President of the United States represents America on the international scene.

And people are unfair. People take things out of context. Occasionally, people just make shit up and shove it into your mouth. You can't stop them, but you can avoid helping them to the extent it's physically possible.

There's always going to be a noise floor in politics: The rampant idiocy, blatant lying, and absolute unreasoning psychotic hatred honestly felt by certain groups. Going off-message can either raise or lower that floor, and the sad fact is a single bad statement raises it a lot higher than a large number of good statements can lower it. Look at Muskie: He lost the nomination in part because he possibly cried on stage. Possibly. It could have been snow, but the implication was there. Nixon's lies hurt him, but it was likely the 'tears' that broke him.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edmund_Muskie#Presidential_cand...

waterlesscloud• 14 years ago

Then frankly he shouldn't be going on a forum known for its impertinent (to say the least) questions and saying "Ask Me Anything".

The abuse of Reddit AMA for boring, dull, traditional PR purposes takes one of its more interesting contributions to the internet and makes it just another venue for the Same Old Thing.

If a politician wants to be careful, let them go to the old careful outlets.

lhnn• 14 years ago

I absolutely agree that it's tough to be honest and off-the-cuff in politics, much less modern politics. However, as someone else said, no one should look at Obama and think about how 'hip' he is for using Reddit as a phone-in for stances he's already talked about. It's called "Ask Me Anything". I would have even been a little impressed if he were honest and said "AMAA".

mikeash5• 14 years ago

It's precisely what I'd expect, but that doesn't mean I can't be disappointed by it. I expect the worst from our politicians and my expectations are usually met, but that doesn't mean I wouldn't like more.

shorttime• 14 years ago

I'm not bashing anyone but there must be some observations made obvious.

He's lived in Chicago, the Bulls comment makes sense. Appealing to his home town.

"NOT BAD" - do you REALLY think he knew to say that or do you think someone prompted him?

There are very smart people that control his speeches, people behind the curtains, to get the maximum appeal from the audience in which he is speaking to. Everything is scripted ever so carefully. Always keep this in mind. He's trying to win you over, for your vote.

lukevdp2• 14 years ago

I don't think you're giving him enough credit.

He speaks in public forums all the time. He speaks for himself just fine there, why would an internet forum be any different?

leeskye• 14 years ago

I wonder if Romney will follow up with his own AMA

samstave• 14 years ago

That would be hilarious.

We should force him to answer his stance on the movie Rampart.

stfu• 14 years ago

He should send Ann to do an AMA on ColbertNation and only questions regarding Rafalca and dressage should get answered. Would make some entertaining reverse trolling.

ORioN63• 14 years ago

Or how Obama killed reddit.

rorrr2• 14 years ago

What a disappointing AMA. He answers stupid questions about his favorite basketball player and the white house beer recipe, but completely ignores the important ones about decriminalization of marijuana.

Fuck him. I'm not voting for him. He's a mild and more sociable version of Romney.

redthrowaway4• 14 years ago

Why on Earth would he go touch marijuana legalization with a 10-foot pole? He's not Ron Paul; he's actually trying to win the election. The average swing voter is a middle-aged mom, and you want him to talk about marijuana legalization?

You can either be a frank politician who addresses all questions honestly, or you can be a politician who wins elections.

001sky2• 14 years ago

Why on Earth would he go touch marijuana legalization with a 10-foot pole?

Well, if its good enough for TED, why not Reddit?

http://whohastimeforthis.blogspot.com/2012/03/best-of-ted-20...

Hands down, the best [TED] talk this year was from Bryan Stevenson on injustice in the US criminal legal system. For example, the number of prisoners in the last 40 years has grown from 300,000 to 2.3 million (primarily, I believe, due to non-violent drug infractions). One third of young African American men are in prison, on probation or on parole. Ours is the only country in the world that gives life sentences to 13 year olds. As for the death penalty, one out of nine defendants sentenced to death have been exonerated. in California a billion dollars will be spent defending and executing the death penalty in the next 5 years, although a referendum is on its way to re-direct those funds to police enforcement budgets.

What made the talk great was Stevenson's ability to weave in his personal stories, recounting memories of what it was like to grow up among activists like Rosa Parks. There was so much enthusiasm for Stevenson and his cause that TED Curator Chris Andersen jumped on the occasion to solicit donations for Stevenson's private foundation. Right there many of us stood up and, in aggregate, pledged close to a million dollars!

rorrr2• 14 years ago

Because that's one of the promises he made during his first election campaign, and he broke it.

nacker8• 14 years ago

"What a disappointing AMA. He answers stupid questions about his favorite basketball player and the white house beer recipe, but completely ignores the important ones about decriminalization of marijuana."

This.

Do not vote.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy:_The_God_That_Failed

http://mises.org/document/1092/Myth-of-National-Defense-The-...

derleth7• 14 years ago

> Do not vote.

Wonderful way to be lazy while pretending to take a moral stand: Claim they're all crooks, that you can't see any difference between them, and that you refuse to participate.

It's laziness mixed with condescension and moral outrage. Perfect!

eli• 14 years ago

I don't really see what you're getting at. Do you think the Whitehouse policy on drugs has changed since the last time they addressed legalizing marijuana [1]? If not, how is anyone served by hearing the same answer rehashed?

[1] https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/legalize-and-regul...

chimeracoder2• 14 years ago

Well, it changed sometime between his campaign and his inauguration, so what's unreasonable about hoping it changed again...?

edw519• 14 years ago

There are quite a few redditors at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave...

Your tax dollars at work.

akozak• 14 years ago

I know your comment was sarcastic, but it touches on the recent debate about whether the US government deserves any credit in the development of the Internet. And it at least gives me hope that the next generation of policymakers will appreciate the power of the open web to facilitate speech, culture, and economic development.

user-id• 14 years ago

Are you your job? I'm sure you're more things than that.

_delirium• 14 years ago

Is this comment a performative critique of the low-value political jabs one commonly finds on Reddit?

nacker8• 14 years ago

It's so sad to see so many HN and Redditors so intent on their "upwardly mobile", morally relative dreams that they fail to take account of the totalitarian state they have come to live in. You will NOT be alright, jack.

Listen. As of September 2012, the AppForThat, Startup, bubble is just about over. I say this as someone who warned others of the dotcom and real estate bubbles. If you want to think of it as a "technical", or chartreading thing, fine. The bottom line is: GET OUT NOW, the shit is about to hit the fan. Yeah, I know you don't want to hear it. Sorry to bear bad news.

If you haven't heard of it, this is the Fourth Turning. (Startpage.com it). If you think life is going to go on as as usual, think again.

Get ready. Hunker down. This is for real. Don't trust the government.

vecinu• 14 years ago

Wait, what's going on? I want to understand but I can't decipher your words.

CKKim2• 14 years ago

I cannot see how this is a reply to edw519's comment. Perhaps you could clarify.

derleth7• 14 years ago

"Fourth Turning", eh? Your Strauss and Howe is showing. Sadly, they are kooks and so are you.

http://seekingalpha.com/article/167253-the-fourth-turning-sh...

> Among quants there is a saying that goes “don’t torture the data until it talks”, which is another way of saying don’t over-fit the data. While Howe & Strauss’ analysis is very intriguing, I find many disturbing signs of data fitting that make me uncomfortable.

http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/William_Strauss_and_Neil_Howe

> William Strauss and Neil Howe think society turns on a repeating set of four 20-year cycles and try to predict the future based on this.

[snip]

> According to the authors (writing in 1997), the U.S. was in an "unraveling" in the 1990s and due for another crisis in the 2000s-2010s, which will be followed once the crisis is resolved by a new "high" of economic liberalism and social conservatism a-la the 1950s.

It's interesting how all these cycle-meisters (a subset of woo-meisters or just plain frauds) always say that the crisis is near. Always. Their magical cycle theories never predict a distant crisis.

Onwards:

> The generations themselves are arbitrary constructs. They have an age range of about 20 years each, but what gives somebody born in 1965 (a Generation Xer) more in common with a Generation Xer born in 1980 rather than a Baby Boomer born in 1961?

It's crap. It's one of many cycle theories that gets promoted every so often, and it's based on torturing the data that isn't ignored entirely with huge amounts of retrospective predictions (predicting the past, so much easier than predicting the future), just like the others.

nacker8• 14 years ago

No, really. I was expecting downvotes and I see I'm getting them. I understand people don't want to hear this. Why am I saying this then? I have nothing to gain.

Altruism. It exists.

Run for the hills!

http://pt.scribd.com/doc/95493792/The-End-Game

parasubvert• 14 years ago

Fascinating. The last "Fourth Turning" was roughly 1925-1945, with the crises of the stock market crash, Great Depression, and World War 2.

It also was the formation of the New Deal, the Allied victory, the GI Bill of Rights (free higher education for vets), the rise of the US as a global superpower.

Further, it was followed by the "First Turning", from 1945-1965, which was the post-war boom.

A crisis can lead to a lot of good.

I'm not quite sure what this has to do with trusting the government - I think you may be reading far too much into Strauss-Howe to coincide with your own political beliefs. The US is not a totalitarian state, nor is Europe (though disclaimer, I'm in Canada). One of my parents did live in a totalitarian state - it was not like this, by any stretch.

We do exist in a time of crisis, financially, and in terms of global political leadership. In the US, the Republicans have become radicals, not conservatives, while the Democrats can't seem to be focused or unified on anything. In Europe, the leaders can't seem to accept the Euro will destroy their economies if they don't either fix their central bank or move to a more unified fiscal arrangement. In China, the government artificially keeps their currency low to foster growth that hides the fragility of the kleptocracy at the state and local levels of government. I could go on.

These are crises, but they are also opportunities to fix problems that seem intractable today. I do not think anyone can foresee the outcomes, I suspect it will be not hewing to any particular ideology, but rather a mix of pragmatic approaches that "just work".

edit: formatting

bguthrie2• 14 years ago

This is a dismayingly flippant comment, and I'm particularly disappointed that you of all people should have made it. Would you be more relieved if our executive branch were entirely composed of people who are completely disengaged from the internet at a social level?

citricsquid• 14 years ago

Pretty sure the joke is they're using reddit at work. It's a common reddit joke.

jinushaun• 14 years ago

No different than some guy at a private company reading reddit.

JohnsonB2• 14 years ago

They didn't "get" Obama at all. He has so far answered a total of 10 questions, all of them canned, standard set pieces from his campaign that you could have just as easily read off his website. And he wasn't even the one interacting with the community; it's questionable if he was involved with this AMA at all. This was essentially a complete abuse of the AMA system but no one's calling him on it because he's the POTUS.

noodle4• 14 years ago

> He has so far answered a total of 10 questions

I'd point out that he did say he only had 30 minutes, and given how poorly reddit handled the traffic, I'm surprised he managed to get 10 answers in, copy/paste jobs or no.

How would you have preferred it to go, anyway? Seems like he's not going to make everyone happy no matter how its sliced, so perhaps he should have just not done one?

mikeash5• 14 years ago

That's by far the least of the objections raised. 10 interesting, insightful answers that offered new information would have been fascinating. But we got 10 canned answers that told us nothing we already knew. That was the real problem here, although nobody should have been surprised.

akldfgj2• 14 years ago

The president was precedented... "O'er the Ramparts we watched..."

k-mcgrady• 14 years ago

You realise he's the President and has more important things to do with his time? Taking 30 minutes to answer questions on Reddit is probably an important chunk of his day. Answering 10 questions with mostly paragraph long answers in that time is good.

"it's questionable if he was involved with this AMA at all"

In the opening of the AMA he said it was him and posted a photo as proof (fair enough it could have been a lie but I don't see why they would do that).

"standard set pieces from his campaign that you could have just as easily read off his website"

What else would you expect? He's running for a second term. Just look at how much these people get berated when they make a simple slip of the tongue during a speech or side comment to a camera. Most of what he says has to be run through speech writers and staff to make sure he doesn't contradict policy or accidentally reveal non-public information.

jcr• 14 years ago

Is it "Reddit got Obama" or is it "Obama got Reddit"?

I think the best answer is, "Yes," since it seems to be mutually beneficial exploitation of Reddit USERS for the sake of press coverage (both Obama getting press and Reddit getting press).

shmerl• 14 years ago

His answer about Internet freedom was not to the point, sounded more like standard blank political talk without essence.

mintyice• 14 years ago

>if he doesn’t want an uncomfortable “boxers or briefs” moment, he can control that.

Jokingly I did actually comment that.

rdl• 14 years ago

The question I wanted to ask was "under what conditions would you call for an accelerated withdrawal from Afghanistan, or an extended presence in Afghanistan, compared to the announced 2014 withdrawal date." But Reddit was in read-only mode most of the time.

I really hope Romney/Paul and Gary Johnson (again) do IAMAs.

majormajor• 14 years ago

Something overlooked in the "he didn't give interesting answers" complaints is that just being able to ask a question (even if it goes unanswered) is a form of communication with the President that's never been available to an average citizen in this way.

akldfgj2• 14 years ago

I'm pretty sure that Americans have been able to send to-be-ignored letters to the President since Ben Franklin invented the USPS.

RandallBrown• 14 years ago

Look, I get it. The President's time is extremely valuable, but 30 minutes? Seriously? I got the page to load 1 time, and by then it was over. I would have rather he didn't do it at all.

I did like that one of his answers referenced the Obama Not Bad meme, but I imagine that was pre-canned by one of his interns or something.

How Reddit Got Obama

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