President Barack Obama posted this photo on Reddit to verify he was hosting the AMA.(Photo courtesy of Twitter)
On Wednesday afternoon, social media users were surprised to learn President Barack Obama was opening up an AMA (Ask Me Anything) on Reddit.
The president, who has 28 million Facebook fans and 19 million Twitter, stated subtly on the site on Wednesday afternoon “Hi, I’m Barack Obama, President of the United States. Ask me anything. I’ll be taking your questions for half an hour starting at about 4:30 ET.”
The thread was verified further with a tweet from the official Barack Obama Twitter account and a photo on Reddit of the president seated at a plain wooden desk, staring into an Apple laptop in front of a single lamp.
Obama’s half-hour session broke records as the masses flooded the site. Reddit had issues keeping up with traffic – at times having to take down the “Comment” option or show a “heavy traffic” page.
To put Obama’s IAmA subreddit in perspective, popular threads on the IAmA subreddit get up to “hundreds of thousands” of page views. The very popular ones can rise to 1 million views in a month or so – Obama hit 3.8 million within a day.
Reddit’s general manager Erik Martin gave raw numbers to The Washington Post on Thursday, stating that there along with the over 3 million page views, there were over 22,000 comments (23,125 as of 9:30amPST, Thursday).
Reddit’s overall numbers are around 2 billion page views and 34 million unique visitors per month — thus, Obama’s time on the site was a pretty big success. The president waded through hundreds of comments and questions, answering 10 including: protecting Internet freedom, funding for the space program, campaign finance reform, all the way to the identity of his favorite basketball player.
Read All Of Obama’s Answers Here
Martin explained the true approval rating for the thread was around 75 percent (not 50 percent as it’s seen on the site) – interesting due to Obama’s current approval rating of 47.7 percent according to Thursday’s Wonkbook reports.
High profile people have been interviewed before on the site, including Larry King, Jimmy Kimmel, Ron Paul and Stephen Colbert. The two most popular Ask Me Anythings before Wednesday were astrophysicist Neil Degrasse Tyson and Jeopardy! champion Ken Jennings.
Obama’s usage of social media was prominent during his campaigning against Senator John McCain in 2004. He’s shown over the years his massive respect and knowledge of the Internet and social media, and how together these can be powerful tools for a politician – especially when gaining popularity with younger, tech-savvier generations. He earned some social media kudos when he seemed to referenced his own meme – Not Bad Obama — in his final answer: “By the way, if you want to know what I think about this whole reddit experience — NOT BAD!”
So now the big question is – when will Redditors get Relatable Romney to follow suit and have his own AMA? What do you think? Share your thoughts with us, here!
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