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What is an AMA?

• oniony 11y ago
  There is a subreddit called /r/iama where people can say "I Am A <noun>, Ask Me Anything" and then answer (or not) the myriad questions asked of them. It is, perhaps, not too much of a stretch to say that it is this particular subreddit that transformed the site from a venue for engineering types to the mass market beast it is today. For better or worse.
  • nostrademons 11y ago
    It's a bit of a stretch. :-) The techie overshadowing was already underway nearly from the beginning. r/politics had displaced r/science and r/programming as the most popular subreddit by 2007 [1]. r/nsfw was the most popular subreddit in 2006. Indeed, one of the major impetuses for the creation of subreddits was to get all the damn political content and soft-core porn off the front page so that the science & techie types could have their own community. r/IAMA was itself a spin-off of r/AskReddit, which was filled with frivolous questions at the time. It wasn't created until 2009. I'd argue that the creation of Hacker News in 2007 was really what transformed Reddit from a venue for engineering types to a mass-market beast. Before then, the programming types would hang out on r/programming, but afterwards, a good portion of Reddit's programmer userbase migrated to Hacker News. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_Reddit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_Reddit