Reddit has its biggest day ever thanks to President Obama's AMA


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Reddit has its biggest day ever thanks to President Obama's AMA

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President Barack Obama showed up on Reddit today for an unannounced Ask Me Anything session at around 4PM today. The post set a record for Reddit, with more than 200,000 concurrent visitors at any one time.

"Reddit" and "Barack Obama" quickly broke into Twitter's trending topics, and the story hit the blogosphere within minutes. Mainstream outlets like CBS andThe Washington Post were just as surprised as Mashable; it seems the White House thought the stunt would work better if it were a surprise.

Reddit's servers struggled to keep up with the load, with some curious readers locked out for the entire session -- although the site never fully went down. Two hours later, Reddit is still cleaning things up. "Chaos here," Reddit's general manager Erik Martin told The Verge over Gchat.

The president's post got 6,500 comments in the first 34 minutes. Heartbreakingly, he only answered ten questions before declaring the experience, "NOT BAD!" and presumably returning to running the country.

Source: The Verge

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I can see

Yeah, from "the other side of the pond" it was impossible to check out the AMA. Still is.

I can see it in England. :s

To be honest, you're not missing much anyway. I scanned the thread, and he (or one of his staff) only answered some very specific questions with very generic "vote for obama" answers. Whole thing is just a vote grab. Even the proof wasn't any good. It came from the generic publicity twitter account, and only showed the above photo of him at a computer. He could have been typing a speech for all we know.

EDIT: It looks like the reddit servers are creaking a bit, so it's unlikely that you're being blocked, just that the reddit servers are being hammered.

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I guess we can expect more of these types of events in the future. Granted he only got to 10 questions but it goes to show how technology can help connect us little people to people such as the President and vise versa. I would guess the traffic overload didn't help. I specially see more of these when you get more potential candidates with better computer skills then the current political generation. Reddit is also going to get a jump in traffic after tonight.

Jump straight to the answers

http://www.reddit.com/user/PresidentObama

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Whether you like his politics or not, you gotta admit, he sure knows how to work the "crowd".

This sold it for me " By the way, if you want to know what I think about this whole reddit experience - NOT BAD!"

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An interesting experiment for sure, even if it only netted 10 answered questions. Makes for a good break from the annoying parroting most politicians do on Twitter (some do talk about personal interests than repeating sound bites).

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