Yesterday, an online community I participate in gained lots of media attention when president Obama decided to let the community ask him questions. The community I am referring to is Reddit: a site where users post links to web content, or post their own content, to share with other users. Posts are submitted to a particular "subreddit" which is a forum for a particular subject or genre. Users then "upvote" posts they like to increase the likelihood of others seeing the content, and "downvote" posts they do not like. When viewing a subreddit, the posts with the highest rating (upvotes minus downvotes) are shown first.

One of the larger and more interesting subreddits is called r/IAmA ("r/name" is the convention for identifying subreddits by name). IAmA stands for "I Am A" and the subreddit is a place for users to assert what they are and let people ask questions about their life. They then end with "AMA" meaning "Ask Me Away." It is interesting to see what its like for others in a different industry, job, career, or lifestyle. The posters range from "ordinary" people to people who are far from ordinary. Some examples of posts include: "IAmA Legal, Oregon Marijuana Farmer AMA," "IAmA Former Stripper Who Has Recently Finished a Graduate Program at Harvard AMA," and "IAmA High School Math Teacher in Nebraska AMA."

Yesterday, president Obama worked with the r/IAmA moderators and reddit staff to participate in an IAmA session. The discussion thread almost instantly blew up with hundreds of posts. At first people were skeptical, but reddit moderators, as well as proof via pictures and the Obama twitter feed, confirmed that the poster was legitimately president Obama. Obama spent the time to answer several of the questions posed by the reddit community. Questions by the community dealt with a large variety of topics including the economy, the NASA space program, money in politics, internet freedom, and even the recipe for the White House's signature beer.

The post caused so much traffic to the page that it had to be put into read-only mode, disallowing comments or upvoting and downvoting. This is rarely done; since the reddit creators favor free exchange of ideas and fair community evaluation, censorship or limiting expression is only done when absolutely necessary to keep the site running smoothly. Once the news hit the media the large increase in traffic actually caused the reddit site to crash and remain offline temporarily.

I think it was a courageous act for Obama to submit to the reddit community, which is known to be filled with jokers, smart-asses, "trolls" and the like. Inappropriate comments and raging debates are not uncommon on reddit, and giving reddit a chance to ask him questions was an interesting public move for Obama. However, with the growing size and popularity of reddit he was able to reach out to the reddit community, many of whom may support him due to their younger demographic. Reddit is not the most well known of sites either, so it displays an up-to-date position in this technology world that other politicians don't seem to display. Of course it was probably an idea by a media relations staff member, but its still impressive nonetheless.

Overall, I feel Obama reaching out to the reddit community was a interesting and unexpected move for its members, but it may benefit him the support of some of the community. That's an upvote for Obama!