AMAs get a lot of attention outside of reddit, and often you’ll see “Top 10 answers or moments to [insert name of celebrity or person]’s AMA.” While those recaps may be good for those who cannot follow AMAs as they happen live, there is so much more to AMAs that those brief excerpts cannot convey. One of the best parts of AMAs is experiencing the complete spectrum of questions and answers with full context.
With this app, we want to share more about what reddit is all about, so people can find and enjoy a wider variety of AMAs as they are happening.
Some of our favorite AMAs are by people who have had amazing experiences, like winning Jeopardy, rescuing Raju the elephant and driving solo across North America in a Tesla or living in a rainforest without electricity, running water or internet for seven years. We’ve had people do AMAs from outer space (astronaut Chris Hadfield) and in exile from the Ecuadorian Embassy (Julian Assange).
Some of the most popular AMAs on reddit are by people who are doing everyday jobs and want to share their stories, like the flight attendant for a top airline, and the vacuum cleaner repair technician who even followed up. And we love curveballs like the guy who kicks people out of Alamo Drafthouse movie theaters for texting or talking.
Sometimes your questions are better than the answers (sorry, Jose Canseco). Famous redditors like to ask questions, too, like Snoop challenging Madonna. Sometimes the answers are really unexpected, like the medical answers in a surprising NSFW AMA that challenged people’s conceptions.
And you also feel reddit’s community spirit in AMAs. When a teen with leukemia fell asleep at the start of his AMA, others answered questions for him. People show their reddit gold love in AMAs; the AMA with the most gildings was Patrick J. Carney’s with 264 months of gold given. That’s even more than Bill Gates (170 gildings across two AMAs), though he has personally received the most gold from AMAs (65 in his first AMA, 13 in his second).
We appreciate all the guests who stop by to visit our community; some of our favorite celebrity AMAs include ones by Bill Murray, three-timer Gillian Anderson, Emmy Rossum, Monty Python, Uzo Aduba, four-timer Neil deGrasse Tyson, and Lil Jon. And we’ll never forget the late, great Robin Williams.
Ultimately we want people to have different ways to reddit. Ideally, when people learn about reddit, they should have an understanding of what it is, not just what others portray reddit to be. So we created this introductory app for people to enjoy some of the best of reddit. We beta-tested it and our Android app with our gold users and /r/IAMA mods, who gave really helpful feedback (and lots of love for the ability to find AMAs by categories--check it out).
In the iOS version, you’ll see that due to Apple guidelines, we hide NSFW content by default in the iPhone app, but don’t worry! If you log in and check “allow adult content” you can see all AMAs uncensored, including NSFW ones. We know we still have a lot of work to do, so please share your feedback, and we’ll keep trying.
We’re also interested in what your friends think. If you have friends or family that aren’t on reddit, please ask them to check out the app and share their feedback. We’re listening.
[1] For more background, here’s a good article on AMAs.