Can't wait for the top post to be another asinine "comment phrased as a question" about legalising marijuana!
Joking aside, I predict disappointment. Reddit users will want hard-hitting answers, Obama will definitely not give them (already the internet freedom question has been fluffy-answered). In all honestly, no-one should expect anything else- the POTUS is not going to unveil new thoughts and strategies through Reddit.
That said, it shows how far they've come from the "jailbait" scandal a few months ago, but I strongly suspect Republicans will refer back to it in good time.
EDIT: Hey, at least PresidentObama bought Reddit Gold. Somehow I doubt it'll be enough to cover the bandwidth, though.
I'm trying to lay out what I think are the reasonable expectations from this AMA, and how they differ from what a lot of people will want. I'm sorry if this somehow offends you. In the future I'll try my best to be unrelentingly positive about everything, despite the evidence presented to me.
Don't get me wrong, it's a bold and somewhat brave move by the Obama team to do this- there are myriad ways it can blow up in their faces (Rampart, anyone?). But as a consequence of that, they're going to be playing it very safe, I'm sure.
"In all honestly, no-one should expect anything else- the POTUS is not going to unveil new thoughts and strategies through Reddit." <-- cold, hard common sense
If understanding how the world works and telling others makes you a hater, then sign me up.
This reminds me, in Chris Hedges' book War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning, there is a great section on why everyone always hates reality-based thinkers.
Essentially before and during when the war crimes (or whatever) are being committed, everyone hates the truth-tellers because they think they are wrong and they are challenging their worldview or whatever. And then afterwards, everyone hates the truth-tellers because they remind them that they were wrong. That's why you will never read an article about prominent Republicans coming forward and apologizing to Michael Moore or whatever.
Just want to chime in, it looks like Obama is heading out[1] after answering only ten questions. I think it's fair to call that disappointing when the thread had more than 12,000 comments.
Is it? It appears that his AMA was online for maybe 45 minutes. How long should we expect the President of the United States to stay on the site for? Presumably has has other things to do.
1. Space Race
2. Internet Freedom
3. Favorite Basketball Player
4. Small-Business tax breaks
5. First Activity on Nov 7
6. Most Difficult Decision
7. Money in Politics
8. White House Beer Recipe
9. Jobs
10. Work/Life Balance
They are largely boilerplate answers to softball questions. Nothing you couldn't get from listening to a White House press conference.
Questions about the state of Iraq, Syria, Libya, Iran, Egypt, et al would have been more interesting. Characterizing sending more troops as a hard decision is not too surprising.
Ok, but all you're gonna get from him on foreign relations ESPECIALLY is the exact boilerplate that comes out of the state department. There are actually policy reasons to stay boilerplate on that stuff, above and beyond political considerations.
That said, he did come about as close as he could to acknowledging the surge in Afghanistan didn't accomplish much. And he called for a constitutional amendment on Citizen's United, which he apparently hadn't done in public before (according to news outlets trumpeting it).
That's 3 minutes per question, given the half hour he allotted. I don't think that's too disappointing. Did you really expect him to answer 12,000 questions?
For perspective: I read a bit in the most recent New Yorker describing a fund-raiser dinner with the president; it was $50,000 a plate and the president had one hour which equated to 1 minute per person. His staff knew he wouldn't have time to eat so he was prepared a meal he ate quickly in the kitchen beforehand. A staffer with a watch would tap him on the shoulder every 5 minutes when he needed to move onto the next table.
The typical politician will avoid giving real answers whenever possible, and respond to any questions with canned answers that carry as little meaning as is humanly possible. Obama has shown no sign of being any different from the usual in this respect. And why should he? The current US political environment punishes deviations incredibly harshly.
People can be so cynical and unappreciative. It's easy to get caught up in the now and take the little things for granted.
President Obama's predecessor didn't use EMAIL!!!!
Now Obama is taking questions on Reddit.
It's all about perspective. His use of technology is completely different than yours. There are so many ramifications for everything he says and does. You can't imagine living in a world like that - very few can, because very few will.
So just take a deep breath and enjoy the entertainment.
This is just a cool way to suck the air out of the RNC convention news cycle.
I actually get really sick of people like you more than the people that would like our President to stop avoiding that question.
Give me a break. This comment was one step away from "fucking stoners". It's insulting and inappropriate regardless.
This is a typical HN troll post on reddit anyway. If you think the "jailbait" scandal defined reddit at any point, you obviously don't know what the hell you're talking about.
This comment was one step away from "fucking stoners"
No it wasn't, in any way, shape or form. I support legalisation, I'm just tired of it being treated like it's the most important thing you could possibly ask the President about.
If you think the "jailbait" scandal defined reddit at any point
Defined for who? It was on national television. I assure you that a lot of non-tech savvy people will have had their first exposure to Reddit as a result of that report.
"I'm just tired of it being treated like it's the most important thing you could possibly ask the President about."
If you're too jaded to care about millions of Americans dying for no reason, the destruction of the black community, the spread of AIDS and hepatitis, and our crumbling infrastructure, all direct consequences of prohibition, then that says a lot more about you than it does about those who would challenge Obama on the issue.
The reason people treat it like the most important issue facing society is because basically it is.
If people were being executed for jaywalking, would that be important enough to be persistent in asking? What if only a few people were getting executed? How do you feel about the Mayor of NYC proposing banning certain sizes of soda pop? These questions are related.
I was really hoping he'd respond to the law school student along these lines: "Well, where in your class did you graduate, and why did you think you'd have job prospects as a lawyer? Unless you're in the top 1/3 of your class at a good law school or top 5% of your class at an OK school, getting a job is hard in today's market. Part of the reason law school (and school in general) is so expensive is because we've removed a lot of the risk from the loan side of the equation. We give you 7% money, guaranteed against default, and the schools jack up the prices. That combines with faulty transparency in which some law schools hide employment rates. My guess is that a lot more people are going to law school than should be, and we need to fix the incentives to keep all parties honest about their prospects."
This redditor's reply to that student was along the lines of what you were looking for:
"Unfortunately you went to law school at a time when the job market for your prospective field was wildly oversaturated. I don't really feel like you can blame any politicians for that one.
Best of luck finding a job, though."[1]
Yup. I don't have much sympathy for him, considering he took out $160,000 in debt with only a 50/50 shot to pay it back (that's your chance to get a high enough salary coming out of a top law school to service that debt, outside of Harvard and Yale). His poor decision is further compounded by the fact that he decided to go to law school after the legal market crashed in 2008 and people started to realize how ridiculous first year associate compensation was getting. I'm not really sure why my tax dollars should be bailing out a guy with a college degree who took a six figure gamble (though I suppose we've already set the standard by bailing out those who took gambles much larger than that).
I don't disagree with a single thing you said - but I do find some irony in the fact that this community for the most part is centered around startups - some taking huge risks with either bootstrapped money, or angel money - and the failure rate is often estimated between 30% to 40%.
Sure, and the "woe is me" rate is estimated between 0% and "why don't you fire up that bong again" -- much lower than that of the (formerly) wealthy students that gambled on an expensive education.
The difference is who takes on the risk. With startup investment, the investors risk their money, and if the company dies, the investors take that loss. They do this because they can make a lot of money from the startups that make it big. With student loans, the risk lies with the student.
It's debatable how much the loan thing contributes to the overall price or rate of attendance. 7% sucks for a loan, it's not like they're supply-siding it. I'd put it more on students aren't the best decision makers when the choice is between "attend school or get a job". Not to mention that a large percentage of attendees at the ivies have parents who can pay the bill.
Also, it's worth noting that maybe not for this student, but for last year's class, starting law school in Sep 2008 looked like a great idea and graduating in 2011 looks terrible.
That said, I'm generally on board with the whole 10,000 lawyers at the bottom of the sea sentiment. If this is a market correction, good.
It looks like the Obama AMA has really caused some serious fires in reddit's backend infrastructure. The site's been down for the last 10 minutes.
I would've thought that they'd have brought in some additional computing power for such an event, should've been easy for them considering they have a cloud deployment. Maybe this gives them greater reason to hire more engineers. I found it impressive that they served billions of impressions with just 2 engineers a short while ago..
Also, it says a lot about the "Come Cloud with us, we'll help you scale" marketing bandwagon. We've seen time and again issues with EC2s infrastructure and if EC2 doesn't have issues right now (http://status.aws.amazon.com/) then it's just sad that they can't order a gazillion instances for this event and have it scale easily.
Definitely makes me think that we still have a long way to go to compute in a truly 'elastic' way.
reddit definitely does have some crazy infrastructure in place but this would've been one of the most important moments in reddit history (so far..) and I'm sad to see that their engineers are probably going to get blamed for this..
EDIT: Okay, they're back in read only mode.. I wonder how they'll hack in some write access for the AMA while keeping everything else read only. Time for some app server redeployments! Funsies!
I'd be more interested in seeing how a site using a service like Google App Engine responds. In theory their Cloud Storage should just keep on scaling and scaling, rather than forcing the admin to spin up more instances, set up database replication, etc, etc.
Well, to be fair maybe they didn't have enough notice to spin up additional instances and get replication completed beforehand but I highly doubt that considering how high profile this AMA is. The US President doesn't probably drop in on people / or websites :P
Yeah GAE might work better but they're a bit out of reach mostly due to the technologies that you are required to use. Any migration at that scale is a seriously massive matter.
I guess the funny thing is that you can't plan to grow that big. Usually it just happens suddenly (facebook/reddit style) and then you've got to make some tough architectural calls.
It's funny how folks are like "That's a problem I'd like to have..". I'm not sure they're very happy with this problem at this very moment.. sigh
I don't know about websites, but the US President drops in on lots of places (restaurants for instance) as a matter of security. From what I understand with interviews, it's often not uncommon for the interviewer to get very little notice either at times.
Well there is no magical database solution where you can do that and I have to make decisions on what I can buy today not on what may be magically developed in the future.
In this respect, application partitioning with a deployable schema is not a bad solution for what I do.
I agree that this is more of a problem with elastic cloud services than reddit engineers. I am sure that they anticipated the load and did what they could, but the traffic is surely immense
It's a stupid question because the particular dialect of assembler this was written in is completely irrelevant for performance considerations.
You've been brainwashed by the idiotic pop culture language wars that pretend a question like Ruby vs Python vs whatever has any meaning. These are debates over buzzwords, not reality.
All that matters is the database configuration and associated architecture. Not some buzzword drama.
The main issue with his post is he has no idea what he's talking about. He mentions languages neither interpreter is written in and talks about 'buzzwords', while all the products I mentioned are real things.
My comment is sarcastic and abstract. A literal interpretation will not suffice to understand my meaning.
If you want it literally: the language this is written in is irrelevant, because the performance differences between the various languages are negligible next to the performance differences that come about due to the precise design of the website.
A poorly engineered website in a "fast" language will still be slower than a well-engineered website in a "slow" language. The actual language is completely irrelevant next to the implementation details.
>Also performance has a massive effect on how and what language a site is written in.
Not really. Experienced engineers understand that language is basically irrelevant for a situation like this. Whether it is written in Python or something else is irrelevant information.
Additionally, newbies tend to focus on "language" and "language wars" and the comparison between languages not for any engineering or technical reason. Newbies do this because languages represent buzzwords around which various communities congregate. The Python vs. Ruby fight is as irrelevant as the Presbyterian vs. Baptist fight. It is the psychological appeal of "identity politics" that motivates people to engage in these meaningless debates about buzzwords.
No, it's probably due to the massive number of reads/writes pumping through their system. I'm pretty sure that their database isn't able to handle what's going on at the moment.
Also, if you were to use Varnish as a cache, that wouldn't help you much with write access because every time there is a write (a new post..) you'd have to invalidate the cache. In a high volume scenario such as this (tons of posts coming in..), the page is as good as dynamic, even if you DO cache it for a bit.
Varnish can only really help Reddit with users who aren't logged in since every page is customized. It'd still help in high volume scenarios since Varnish solves the thundering herd problem: only one request (at most) will hit the database for each invalidation.
Reddit's customization is far more than snippets. I've used ESIs with Varnish extensively, and I don't think it would help much for authenticated Reddit users.
No, PHP+Varnish can not always scale. You're forgeting the most important important factor in this equation, the database. Varnish is simply for caching and you won't find any large site that doesn't have it. PHP is a scripting language and the runtime performance differences to other common web application languages (i.e. Python, Java) is negligible since you're using caching anyway. Here's what you should worry about if you want scaling: Your database, your data structures and your code quality.
reddit's backend could be written in assembly hand-tuned by God Himself, and having half the world hit it at once would still cause bottlenecks at the database.
The problem is that pretty much all of it is dynamically generated. Short of the sidebar & header there is nothing that is really static static. e.g. With all the comments it checks whether that person is on your friend list & colours those differently. Easy enough to do...but it doesn't scale well. They've got a blog explaining the issue(s) somewhere.
I think it's particularly interesting to watch some internet event go "mainstream" and watch even large services like reddit strain under the load. Put some perspective around how many people true mainstream media services reach.
Weird... I am guessing that if Obama was going to be on Reddit, they would have given the Reddit staff some early notice, in order to add some extra preparations for the load. Or maybe not, does anybody know if there's any sort of normal protocol around this sort of thing?
The AMA mods often arrange high profile AMAs amongst themselves -- or with the reddit community staff involved -- so it's likely they were aware before hand. I can't check the sidebar because reddit isn't responding, but they normally have the "upcoming" AMAs in the sidebar and lots of are listed days/weeks in advance.
Since I'm not up on the Reddit staff, in case anyone else is wondering, Hueypriest is Erik Martin, Reddit's General Manager (formerly Community manager) https://www.twitter.com/hueypriest
I was just going to say that. While, Reddit's not "down" for me, every time I click the "show more comments" button, red text that says "loading" shows up and it ... never ... loads. Considering Reddit's usual traffic, this must be a truly unprecedented weight on the servers.
To be fair (as a longtime redditor), reddit is guaranteed to go down after anything slightly out of the ordinary (and even then it's not too uncommon).
The difference is that the "true mainstream media" is one-directional, so they are just broadcasting the show. If there would be a show with Obama answering telephone calls on live TV or radio, then very few calls could be heard live.
If Reddit would do only broadcasting then it would be an easier problem because reads can be cached easier then reads + writes.
I would be very much in favor of political leaders doing AMAs on a regular basis. Monthly, or heck, weekly like PMQTs.
Connect with the people more often and more directly. Eventually those politicians who made genuine connections would perform better on AMAs than those that simply regurgitated the usual talking points.
That kind of thing could make a real difference.
I think the odds are against it since it would remove some of the buffer that the current style of message-controlled, divide-and-conquer, us-v-them politics absolutely depends on.
It's potentially very different in that on Reddit questions are voted up, giving an indication of how many people attach value to it. In theory this would make ignoring difficult questions a lot harder. In practice, in this situation, he can breeze by them all and never return.
It's also very different since our population is now 300+ million as opposed to 3+ million at the inception. Any one of those 300 million could potentially have asked the president a question, not limited by geography or social/financial status.
Reddit doesn't track or verify geographical location, so in reality someone from Iran could be asking the President a question just the same as someone from Virginia. That's awesome.
You could always write a letter, you've probably got just about the same chance that he'll actually reply with a non-canned answer, and there have been telephone conference town hall meetings for decades.
Are we seriously considering otherwise? Obviously the PR department managed it. Obama seems pretty lighthearted, so he has a bit of leeway in responding wittily, but much of it has to be planned.
I’m really not sure what you expect. The President has a busy schedule, plus (as the guy running for office) enough money to hire people to do stuff for him.
We all nearly always plan what we say and do. The stakes might not be quite so high for us most of the time – but the principle behind it is the same.
The only difference is that the President can afford people whom he can delegate some of that planning to. It’s very simply not possible to do this any other way.
Well, this wasn't going to be a forum to influence future policy. I think it's pretty cool that this happened - even now my Mom might know what the "AMA" stands for.
And great timing to do it during the RNC and steal some buzz away.
Reddit Admins, When you get a chance to read this. Please write a blog post on the traffic story from today... I'm sure I'm not the only one who's interested to see statistics on "new users" and hits. I'd also be interested to see the long tail effect as well.
REMEMBER TO VOTE IN NOVEMBER - if you need to know how to register, go to Gottaregister.com.
It's hard - truthfully the main thing other than work is just making sure that I'm spending enough time with michelle and the girls. ...
I understand how tough it is out there for recent grads....
Money has always been a factor in politics....
The decision to surge our forces in afghanistan. Any time you send our brave men and women into battle, you know that not everyone will come home safely, and that necessarily weighs heavily on you. ...
Win or lose, I'll be thanking everybody who is working so hard - especially all the volunteers in field offices all across the country, and the amazing young people in our campaign offices.
We've really focused on this since I came into office - 18 tax cuts for small business, easier funding from the SBA. Going forward, I want to keep taxes low for the 98 percent of small businesses that have $250,000 ......
Jordan - I'm a Bulls guy.
Internet freedom is something I know you all care passionately about; I do too. We will fight hard to make sure that the internet remains the open forum for everybody - from those who are expressing an idea to those to want to start a business. And although there will be occasional disagreements on the details of various legislative proposals, I won't stray from that principle - and it will be reflected in the platform.
Making sure we stay at the forefront of space exploration is a big priority for my administration. ......
The reddit team must be absolutely shitting themselves right now under strain. How the hell do you accurately predict the load when the President is using your site?
For those who can't get access to the site, here are his answers so far. I hope you can deduce the questions, jeopardy style:
I am Barack Obama, President of the United States -- AMA by PresidentObamain IAmA
[+]PresidentObama[S] 4 points5 points6 points 2 minutes ago (0 children)
[–]PresidentObama[S] 4 points5 points6 points 2 minutes ago
It's hard - truthfully the main thing other than work is just making sure that I'm spending enough time with michelle and the girls. The big advantage I have is that I live above the store - so I have no commute! So we make sure that when I'm in DC I never miss dinner with them at 6:30 pm - even if I have to go back down to the Oval for work later in the evening. I do work out every morning as well, and try to get a basketball or golf game in on the weekends just to get out of the bubble. Speaking of balance, though, I need to get going so I'm back in DC in time for dinner. But I want to thank everybody at reddit for participating - this is an example of how technology and the internet can empower the sorts of conversations that strengthen our democracy over the long run. AND REMEMBER TO VOTE IN NOVEMBER - if you need to know how to register, go to Gottaregister.com. By the way, if you want to know what I think about this whole reddit experience - NOT BAD!
permalinkcontextfull commentsI am Barack Obama, President of the United States -- AMA by PresidentObamain IAmA
[+]PresidentObama[S] 21 points22 points23 points 10 minutes ago (0 children)
[–]PresidentObama[S] 21 points22 points23 points 10 minutes ago
I understand how tough it is out there for recent grads. You're right - your long term prospects are great, but that doesn't help in the short term. Obviously some of the steps we have taken already help young people at the start of their careers. Because of the health care bill, you can stay on your parent's plan until you're twenty six. Because of our student loan bill, we are lowering the debt burdens that young people have to carry. But the key for your future, and all our futures, is an economy that is growing and creating solid middle class jobs - and that's why the choice in this election is so important. The other party has two ideas for growth - more taxs cuts for the wealthy (paid for by raising tax burdens on the middle class and gutting investments like education) and getting rid of regulations we've put in place to control the excesses on wall street and help consumers. These ideas have been tried, they didnt work, and will make the economy worse. I want to keep promoting advanced manufacturing that will bring jobs back to America, promote all-American energy sources (including wind and solar), keep investing in education and make college more affordable, rebuild our infrastructure, invest in science, and reduce our deficit in a balanced way with prudent spending cuts and higher taxes on folks making more than $250,000/year. I don't promise that this will solve all our immediate economic challenges, but my plans will lay the foundation for long term growth for your generation, and for generations to follow. So don't be discouraged - we didn't get into this fix overnight, and we won't get out overnight, but we are making progress and with your help will make more.
permalinkcontextfull commentsI am Barack Obama, President of the United States -- AMA by PresidentObamain IAmA
[+]PresidentObama[S] 631 points632 points633 points 24 minutes ago (0 children)
[–]PresidentObama[S] 631 points632 points633 points 24 minutes ago
It will be out soon! I can tell from first hand experience, it is tasty.
permalinkcontextfull commentsI am Barack Obama, President of the United States -- AMA by PresidentObamain IAmA
[+]PresidentObama[S] 242 points243 points244 points 25 minutes ago (0 children)
[–]PresidentObama[S] 242 points243 points244 points 25 minutes ago
Money has always been a factor in politics, but we are seeing something new in the no-holds barred flow of seven and eight figure checks, most undisclosed, into super-PACs; they fundamentally threaten to overwhelm the political process over the long run and drown out the voices of ordinary citizens. We need to start with passing the Disclose Act that is already written and been sponsored in Congress - to at least force disclosure of who is giving to who. We should also pass legislation prohibiting the bundling of campaign contributions from lobbyists. Over the longer term, I think we need to seriously consider mobilizing a constitutional amendment process to overturn Citizens United (assuming the Supreme Court doesn't revisit it). Even if the amendment process falls short, it can shine a spotlight of the super-PAC phenomenon and help apply pressure for change.
permalinkcontextfull commentsI am Barack Obama, President of the United States -- AMA by PresidentObamain IAmA
[+]PresidentObama[S] 557 points558 points559 points 31 minutes ago (0 children)
[–]PresidentObama[S] 557 points558 points559 points 31 minutes ago
The decision to surge our forces in afghanistan. Any time you send our brave men and women into battle, you know that not everyone will come home safely, and that necessarily weighs heavily on you. The decision did help us blunt the taliban's momentum, and is allowing us to transition to afghan lead - so we will have recovered that surge at the end of this month, and will end the war at the end of 2014. But knowing of the heroes that have fallen is something you never forget.
permalinkcontextfull commentsI am Barack Obama, President of the United States -- AMA by PresidentObamain IAmA
[+]PresidentObama[S] 809 points810 points811 points 35 minutes ago (0 children)
[–]PresidentObama[S] 809 points810 points811 points 35 minutes ago
Win or lose, I'll be thanking everybody who is working so hard - especially all the volunteers in field offices all across the country, and the amazing young people in our campaign offices.
permalinkcontextfull commentsI am Barack Obama, President of the United States -- AMA by PresidentObamain IAmA
[+]PresidentObama[S] 199 points200 points201 points 36 minutes ago (0 children)
[–]PresidentObama[S] 199 points200 points201 points 36 minutes ago
We've really focused on this since I came into office - 18 tax cuts for small business, easier funding from the SBA. Going forward, I want to keep taxes low for the 98 percent of small businesses that have $250,000 or less in income, make it easier for small business to access financing, and expand their opportunities to export. And we will be implementing the Jobs Act bill that I signed that will make it easier for startups to access crowd-funding and reduce their tax burden at the start-up stage.
permalinkcontextfull commentsI am Barack Obama, President of the United States -- AMA by PresidentObamain IAmA
[+]PresidentObama[S] 765 points766 points767 points 39 minutes ago (0 children)
[–]PresidentObama[S] 765 points766 points767 points 39 minutes ago
Jordan - I'm a Bulls guy.
permalinkcontextfull commentsI am Barack Obama, President of the United States -- AMA by PresidentObamain IAmA
Internet freedom is something I know you all care passionately about; I do too. We will fight hard to make sure that the internet remains the open forum for everybody - from those who are expressing an idea to those to want to start a business. And although there will be occasional disagreements on the details of various legislative proposals, I won't stray from that principle - and it will be reflected in the platform.
permalinkcontextfull commentsI am Barack Obama, President of the United States -- AMA by PresidentObamain IAmA
[+]PresidentObama[S] 1810 points1811 points1812 points 43 minutes ago (0 children)
[–]PresidentObama[S] 1810 points1811 points1812 points 43 minutes ago
Making sure we stay at the forefront of space exploration is a big priority for my administration. The passing of Neil Armstrong this week is a reminder of the inspiration and wonder that our space program has provided in the past; the curiosity probe on mars is a reminder of what remains to be discovered. The key is to make sure that we invest in cutting edge research that can take us to the next level - so even as we continue work with the international space station, we are focused on a potential mission to a asteroid as a prelude to a manned Mars flight.
Pretty weak, typical round-about answers that you'd expect from any politician. Not what AMA has come to expect, and what's the proof that it's actually Obama writing the answers and not some intern or campaign staffer?
Yeah it's mostly sanitized, but I'm still impressed though at his overall level of savvyness, deciding to do a Reddit AMA at all. Come on what did we expect? A heart to heart with a unicorn, err... I mean honest politician? :p
He seems to be getting credit and generating overall positive impact, regardless of the depth of his answers.
Pretty naive to think the President is the savvy one deciding to do a reddit AMA, and not one of the many, many people in his reelection campaign PR team.
Anyway, it reminded me that the news of his first election was the highest voted submission in reddit's history at the time.
I mean, that’s one of the most important traits of any President: The ability to hire the right people and delegate. You cannot administrate a country alone, it would be truly sad and pathetic if every good idea he ever decided on implementing came only from himself.
You are naive and have a very simplistic view of the President’s role if you think this is totally worthless if it wasn’t his own idea.
> Pretty naive to think the President is the savvy one deciding to do a reddit AMA
Isn't that a tad bit presumptuous?
WRT his decision, I suspect it bubbled upwards through his campaign staff, and at some point he said something like, "Cool".
Don't think that takes away from his decision, regardless of nature of the chain. He could have said "Nah, not wasting my time with that" when presented the option, but instead he decided to do it.
Of course, there is no proof that what he is typing on the laptop is answers to questions on Reddit, but then again, no picture is really proof that the person writing the answer is the person they claim to be.
Has he publicly supported a constitutional amendment to overturn Citizens United? Google search for "obama overturn citizens united" is packed with references to the reddit thread.
Does anyone know more about how reddit does booking for their iama? They have a schedule and consistently book notable people. Do they have a staff dedicated to it?
A couple colleagues from my company have done scheduled IAMA's...I believe our communications people reached out to the mods, who then put it on the sidebar schedule.
Let the conspiracy theories start. Did the Republicans DDOS the server to stop the President from connecting with Redditors, or did the Democrats do it so that the President wouldn't have to really answer any tough questions but just say he did? Or is it the work of Terrorists? Or Kevin Rose's final revenge?
I've read, I don 't know, hundreds of AMAs through the years on reddit and, in each and every case, I hate the UI experience. I wish there was a way I could say "Only show me questions that have been answered by OP". Right now, doing a find for [S] is about as good as it gets. When you get large AMAs though, they get buried due to the sheer number of comments. Ugh.
Reddit.com is down. Pretty poor capacity planning. Having spent the better part of this month trying to accomodate spikes in traffic up to 100k concurrent users then receiving just a fraction of that, I am jealous of Reddit's lazy effort.
It's a tough site to run because hundreds of thousands of people have write access to the database and reddit attempts to provide the millions of people reading the comments pages with up-to-the-fraction-of-a-second updates.
It's like running a tenth of a twitter with a 10k char limit, if twitter had 10 people on development/operations
I've anecdotally noticed an increase in stale pages lately as well, which I would guess is from more aggressive caching. For example, new submissions used to show up instantly, but on popular subreddits may now take a few minutes to show up on the New tab.
And although their will be occasional disagreements on the details of various legislative proposals [sic]
THE DEVIL IS IN THE DETAILS
-[engineers everywhere]
Edited: for relevance ;)
Edit2: SIC WTF? - per comments below
Edit3: Downvotes? Wow. POTUS commenting on IP Law, Privacy, Internet Freedom. etc. PLS Read the context. It was included. Tks.
________
[–]SharkGirl 812 points 32 minutes ago
We know how Republicans feel about protecting Internet Freedom. Is Internet Freedom an issue you'd push to add to the Democratic Party's 2012 platform?
[–]PresidentObama[S] 130 points 10 minutes ago
Internet freedom is something I know you all care passionately about; I do too. We will fight hard to make sure that the internet remains the open forum for everybody - from those who are expressing an idea to those to want to start a business. And although their will be occasional disagreements on the details of various legislative proposals, I won't stray from that principle - and it will be reflected in the platform.
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[–]davidjoho 104 points 29 minutes ago
And when you say "Internet Freedom" do you mean the Republican version ("Freedom for the access provider monopoly") or the version in which the Internet is free to anyone with an idea or an expression?
It is too easy to confuse the two. They're not using their grammar skills there. Perhaps distracted by NOLA and if he knew whether the new weather was bad there.
The grandparent was posted on the merits and relevance of the material. If you read the context, BO tells Reddit: "I'm all for internet freedom, but don't sweat it if a couple of details are either here or there." Which in matters relating engineering and/or IP law, is a bit of a flip answer. That Potus laid down a [SIC] error is poetic irony, humourus (or not). So your comment, is not really warranted and should at least be qualified.
I'm looking at the sort rank of questions on reddit and they don't exactly feel right. I can't pin point it except to say that a question with 59 upvotes posted 58 minutes ago is ranking higher than a question with 620 upvotes posted 60 minutes ago.
Do reddit moderators step in during these situations to supervote questions?
Yes, I'm in love with their sorting algorithm. That's why I was particularly interested in seeing what appears to be deviations in it. However, I'm probably just seeing things.
Does this seem like it could be fake to anyone else? Could someone have simply hacked his twitter?
He only posted it on the @BarackObama twitter. Not any of the other ones related to his campaing. Reddit didn't advertise this AT ALL. Most big celebrity AMAs are known for days. The photo of him is just him sitting in front of a laptop. There's no proof at all that he's doing an AMA.
Reddit is going down HARD. I doubt the Obama campaign spontaneously decided to do this. Anyone savvy enough to suggest an AMA should know that it would likely take down the site and they'd probably talk to Reddit first.
His answers seem like answers the president would give though (but he did reference his NOT BAD meme, which seems too cool to be true). If you were impersonating the president, it would seem like you would try to wreak some havoc.
[–]SharkGirl 1504 points 51 minutes ago
We know how Republicans feel about protecting Internet Freedom. Is Internet Freedom an issue you'd push to add to the Democratic Party's 2012 platform?
[–]PresidentObama[S] 1185 points 29 minutes ago*
Internet freedom is something I know you all care passionately about; I do too. We will fight hard to make sure that the internet remains the open forum for everybody - from those who are expressing an idea to those to want to start a business. And although there will be occasional disagreements on the details of various legislative proposals, I won't stray from that principle - and it will be reflected in the platform.
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[–]ormirian 2350 points 51 minutes ago*
Are you considering increasing funds to the space program?
[–]PresidentObama[S] 1471 points 31 minutes ago
Making sure we stay at the forefront of space exploration is a big priority for my administration. The passing of Neil Armstrong this week is a reminder of the inspiration and wonder that our space program has provided in the past; the curiosity probe on mars is a reminder of what remains to be discovered. The key is to make sure that we invest in cutting edge research that can take us to the next level - so even as we continue work with the international space station, we are focused on a potential mission to a asteroid as a prelude to a manned Mars flight.
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[–]FifthSurprise 762 points 50 minutes ago
What was the most difficult decision that you had to make during this term?
[–]PresidentObama[S] 158 points 20 minutes ago
The decision to surge our forces in afghanistan. Any time you send our brave men and women into battle, you know that not everyone will come home safely, and that necessarily weighs heavily on you. The decision did help us blunt the taliban's momentum, and is allowing us to transition to afghan lead - so we will have recovered that surge at the end of this month, and will end the war at the end of 2014. But knowing of the heroes that have fallen is something you never forget.
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[–]daveforamerica 319 points 51 minutes ago
What is the first thing you'll do on November 7th, win or lose?
[–]PresidentObama[S] 482 points 24 minutes ago
Win or lose, I'll be thanking everybody who is working so hard - especially all the volunteers in field offices all across the country, and the amazing young people in our campaign offices.
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[–]silent1mezzo 415 points 47 minutes ago
What's the recipe for the White House's beer?
[–]PresidentObama[S] 158 points 13 minutes ago
It will be out soon! I can tell from first hand experience, it is tasty.
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[–]karlfranks 93 points 51 minutes ago
Who's your favourite Basketball player?
[–]PresidentObama[S] 433 points 28 minutes ago
Jordan - I'm a Bulls guy.
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[–]suzmerk 321 points 55 minutes ago
What are you going to do to end the corrupting influence of money in politics during your second term?
[–]PresidentObama[S] 106 points 21 minutes ago
Money has always been a factor in politics, but we are seeing something new in the no-holds barred flow of seven and eight figure checks, most undisclosed, into super-PACs; they fundamentally threaten to overwhelm the political process over the long run and drown out the voices of ordinary citizens. We need to start with passing the Disclose Act that is already written and been sponsored in Congress - to at least force disclosure of who is giving to who. We should also pass legislation prohibiting the bundling of campaign contributions from lobbyists. Over the longer term, I think we need to seriously consider mobilizing a constitutional amendment process to overturn Citizens United (assuming the Supreme Court doesn't revisit it). Even if the amendment process falls short, it can shine a spotlight of the super-PAC phenomenon and help apply pressure for change.
I don't understand how a question with an unsupported/uncited premise equivalent to "do you still beat your wife?" constitutes "an excellent question".
He's free to answer 0/"I have never beaten my wife". It's an excellent question because Obama has been responsible for the deaths of many people, some of whom were almost certainly killed illegally.
Your second statement begs the question: Pres. Obama would argue that none of those killed were due to an illegal direct order from him (and he may rationalize this with his own begging of the question).
Would it be a better question if it specifically mentioned that the killing of Osama bin Laden and the disposal of his body violated the Geneva Convention?
Looks Barack Obama has proven that cloud infrastructure just isn't quite there yet, ha. I'm really curious as to what others have asked especially in relation to 911, Wall Street and the birth certificate fiasco.
This aside and I'm not starting an argument here, but this very AMA bringing down Reddit pretty badly goes to show that even EC2 isn't the answer to life's scaling problems nor are other cloud services like Heorku.
It makes me wonder what some US politicians wouldn't do for a vote. I'm not in the US at the moment, so I don't know the full extent of what his appearances. But I can only imagine. I know he was recently on Entertainment Tonight. That seemed a little peculiar. Now he's on Reddit. What next?
I'd like to see him do Fear Factor.
If you want my vote Barack, you have to go on Fear Factor. Those are my terms. Non-negotiable.
He won't be F5ing the page himself, nor will he be typing in answers, so I'm sure answers will just appear as and when his staff are able to post them.
I was just discussing this with colleagues, maybe he gets access to a special page where he can answer questions without going through the standard load balancer/database stack.
At least, that's what I would do if I had some as high profile as the US president using a site that would get slammed HARD.
1. Check out the up and down votes on reddit! 158,753 up votes 152,631 down votes with a net difference of 6k or so positive. That's crazy! Are those partisan lines or something? Why wouldn't everyone on reddit be excited to see the president?
2. Why has this had such low rank on HN given the number of votes? It had 200+ in the first hour and never seemed to get in the top 3.
1. Reddit doesn't show the real numbers, like mentioned. If a post is getting a lot of upvotes, it will register a handful of downvotes as well. If you look through the highest ranking posts of all time, you'll notice most of them are quite old. Some time ago, they implemented an algorithm to keep votes from getting out of control; as the number of upvotes gets higher, the number of downvotes does as well. This is to normalize it at a certain level of votes. There's a ceiling that the votes practically cannot get above.
2. HN doesn't allow downvotes but it does allow you to flag a post. I don't know the algorithm for this, but it's possible people were flagging this post.
For 1, Reddit has a fuzzing algorithm on large vote counts, so voting bots don't know how much influence they're having. Refresh the page and you'd probably see a different number of up and down, but the same "net".
Akamai handles that billion connections. “All” Reddit has to do is handle the database transactions. They’re also serving all signed in users directly, from a secondary cache, but this is the kind of traffic they already handle on regular basis anyway.
One way to handle this kind of thing would be to setup a separate stack just for Obama. obama.reddit.com running on a separate web/db/etc. That way even if everyone else is slowed down he can keep going.
Of course it entirely depends on where the problem was, but this kind of thing tends to work in a lot of cases.
Grammar-naziism is a part of reddit culture, and one of the reasons they still have relatively erudite discourse given the size of their userbase. I think it's a net positive, and only natural that it would come out in this AMA.
If I was Steve Huffman or Alexis Ohanian I'd be feeling pretty good about myself today. You know Reddit's become a fairly important piece of infrastructure when sitting presidents are conducting interviews using it.
They were pretty shitty back when he first started but they've improved steadily, and he really does churn them out. And Redditors do love their novelty accounts.
What does Reddit 'humour' consist of in this case? Tired pun threads? (He did Nazi that coming, Anne Frankly...) Reddit 'celebrities' posting inane comments with all of the child comments consisting of people fawning over them? A Shitty_Watercolor painting? Someone referencing Rampart like it hasn't already been done in every single IAmA since it happened?
Joking aside, I predict disappointment. Reddit users will want hard-hitting answers, Obama will definitely not give them (already the internet freedom question has been fluffy-answered). In all honestly, no-one should expect anything else- the POTUS is not going to unveil new thoughts and strategies through Reddit.
That said, it shows how far they've come from the "jailbait" scandal a few months ago, but I strongly suspect Republicans will refer back to it in good time.
EDIT: Hey, at least PresidentObama bought Reddit Gold. Somehow I doubt it'll be enough to cover the bandwidth, though.