How Reddit Got Obama: “There Are Quite a Few Redditors at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.”
Question No. 1: Yup, that's really Barack Obama, taking questions over at a Reddit AMA (Ask Me Anything). — Question No. 2: It was really no big deal, says Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian, via email:
Context & Ripple Effects
Barack Obama answering questions on Reddit is a first for a sitting president, and the pickup was unusually broad for a single web event — The Verge, the Washington Post, the Telegraph, Computerworld, GigaOM and others all ran it the same day, with The Verge framing it as Reddit's biggest traffic day ever. Alexis Ohanian's contribution to the AllThingsD piece is damage control turned victory lap: yes, it was really him, and no, it wasn't a big deal internally because 'there are quite a few Redditors at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.'
The political groundwork was already visible earlier in 2012: Ohanian and fellow activists had protested SOPA through site blackouts in January and were building a 'Bat-Signal for the Internet' alert system, making Reddit a recognized force in internet-policy fights months before the president showed up in its own forum. The AMA lands one week after the campaign began accepting text-message donations, another sign the operation was widening its small-donor, direct-to-voter toolkit.
First-order effects
- Reddit gets its largest traffic day to date and, with it, mainstream-media legitimacy — the AMA format is now validated at the highest level of electoral politics.
- The Obama campaign gains a proven free channel for unfiltered reach at exactly the moment it is experimenting with direct small-donor tools like text-message donations.
Second-order effects
- Other campaigns and officeholders now face pressure to match the format or explain why they won't subject themselves to unvetted questions, turning the AMA into a competitive benchmark rather than a novelty.
- Reddit's volunteer moderator corps and infrastructure become de facto political infrastructure, raising the stakes for how the site handles verification, abuse, and scale during high-profile sessions.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, community question-and-answer platforms shift from enthusiast spaces to standard stops on the campaign trail, giving platforms like Reddit leverage in their dealings with politicians they once lobbied from outside.
- The episode deepens the entanglement between internet companies and Washington that the SOPA fight started — the same activists who blacked out sites against legislation in January are, by August, hosting the president.
The trend: American politics is absorbing community-driven Q&A platforms as official campaign channels, converting sites built by activist communities into instruments of establishment outreach.