4 ms·

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 ju

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.

deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
noodle 14y 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?
- mikeash 14y 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.
  - CKKim 14y ago
    "But we got 10 canned answers that told us nothing we already knew." What do you mean?
    - 001sky 14y ago
      http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4451556 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4451556
    - mikeash 14y ago
      Sorry, that's missing a negative. They told us nothing we DIDN'T already know.
  - noodle 14y ago
    Okay, he answered top voted questions at the time, all of which were generic questions that he's answered time and time again. What exactly would you expect? There weren't any different or insightful questions actually asked [and voted to the top where he'd see them]. I mean, I wonder how many times he's been asked "What was the most difficult decision that you had to make during this term?". Probably quite a lot. Hell, I get asked basically that every time I interview for a job.
    - JohnsonB 14y ago
      >Okay, he answered top voted questions at the time Well, for example, he was asked if he'd consider raising the budget for NASA, his answer didn't directly respond or answer the question, just re-quote his campaign piece on the issue. He didn't answer if he'd consider raising the budget, he just gave some purposefully vague reply about the notion that "we should stay at the forefront of space exploration." >There weren't any different or insightful questions actually asked More commonly AMAs are deemed "good" if the subject doesn't blatantly just answer the easiest questions asked and goes out of their way, even just a bit, to offer some unique or exclusive insight. Which Obama, or whoever it was, did not do.
      - noodle 14y ago
        So your complaint is the POTUS should've come to the AMA with more time to spend, hunted down "better" questions to answer, and then spent more time thoroughly answering the questions. Someone else's complaint is going to be, why is the POTUS wasting his time and our tax dollars with reddit? Someone else's complaint is going to be that reddit's lucky POTUS gave them any of his time and that reddit was not appropriately prepared for the server load. Etc.. Can't please everyone.
        raygunomical 14y ago
        A lot of busy, high-profile people (Noam Chomsky, for example) have done off-line AMAs. That is, commenters will post questions, and upvotes will determine the best/most popular ones. And then, answers for those will be posted all at once, maybe even as a different thread if enough time has passed since the questions were asked. That would have been an excellent model to follow here, and probably would have meant more time spent answering each question (for the President) and higher quality questions getting upvoted (since there's plenty of time for the collaborative filtering process to shape the question-space).
  - corkill 14y ago
    I'm going to guess because it's on thing to make a promise/statement in a traditional political campaign, another thing entirely to make a statement on reddit, e.g. people won't just forget in 5 minutes what you said. I think they wanted to take the safe option. It is a shame though the answers were not less scripted, they missed a big opportunity to engage people.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
akldfgj 14y ago
The president was precedented... "O'er the Ramparts we watched..."
k-mcgrady 14y 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.

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

noodle 14y 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?

mikeash 14y 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.
- CKKim 14y ago
  "But we got 10 canned answers that told us nothing we already knew." What do you mean?
  - 001sky 14y ago
    http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4451556 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4451556
  - mikeash 14y ago
    Sorry, that's missing a negative. They told us nothing we DIDN'T already know.
- noodle 14y ago
  Okay, he answered top voted questions at the time, all of which were generic questions that he's answered time and time again. What exactly would you expect? There weren't any different or insightful questions actually asked [and voted to the top where he'd see them]. I mean, I wonder how many times he's been asked "What was the most difficult decision that you had to make during this term?". Probably quite a lot. Hell, I get asked basically that every time I interview for a job.
  - JohnsonB 14y ago
    >Okay, he answered top voted questions at the time Well, for example, he was asked if he'd consider raising the budget for NASA, his answer didn't directly respond or answer the question, just re-quote his campaign piece on the issue. He didn't answer if he'd consider raising the budget, he just gave some purposefully vague reply about the notion that "we should stay at the forefront of space exploration." >There weren't any different or insightful questions actually asked More commonly AMAs are deemed "good" if the subject doesn't blatantly just answer the easiest questions asked and goes out of their way, even just a bit, to offer some unique or exclusive insight. Which Obama, or whoever it was, did not do.
    - noodle 14y ago
      So your complaint is the POTUS should've come to the AMA with more time to spend, hunted down "better" questions to answer, and then spent more time thoroughly answering the questions. Someone else's complaint is going to be, why is the POTUS wasting his time and our tax dollars with reddit? Someone else's complaint is going to be that reddit's lucky POTUS gave them any of his time and that reddit was not appropriately prepared for the server load. Etc.. Can't please everyone.
      - raygunomical 14y ago
        A lot of busy, high-profile people (Noam Chomsky, for example) have done off-line AMAs. That is, commenters will post questions, and upvotes will determine the best/most popular ones. And then, answers for those will be posted all at once, maybe even as a different thread if enough time has passed since the questions were asked. That would have been an excellent model to follow here, and probably would have meant more time spent answering each question (for the President) and higher quality questions getting upvoted (since there's plenty of time for the collaborative filtering process to shape the question-space).
- corkill 14y ago
  I'm going to guess because it's on thing to make a promise/statement in a traditional political campaign, another thing entirely to make a statement on reddit, e.g. people won't just forget in 5 minutes what you said. I think they wanted to take the safe option. It is a shame though the answers were not less scripted, they missed a big opportunity to engage people.

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

akldfgj 14y ago

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

k-mcgrady 14y 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.