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?
What do you mean?
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.
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.
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.
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).
You clearly are not reading the subtext of what (s)he's saying, or you're willfully ignoring it to appear steadfast in your dissent: it has been admitted and acknowledged that the POTUS had a limited amount of time with his interactions on Reddit. The complaint is that the answers given were reiterations of campaign points and political tent-poles.
The President took a unique and unheralded opportunity to interact with the voting population in a highly interactive way, and demonstrated a familiar ability among politicians to respond to a question without actually answering it. As citizens and by proxy a community that represents a base of voters likely to support a president keen on engaging his constituents on topics they're overtly concerned about, and responding to them in a fashion they find most accessible: he failed on both fronts. This is frustrating. This is our problem with Mr. Obama's appearance tonight.
"Time", which you seem so fixated on is not our problem with the President's appearance this evening; his lack of at least initiating a dialog by providing politically safe answers is.
Here, cliff notes-as it appears painfully obvious you have not even read the AMA itself: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4451556
What exactly do you expect? The POTUS to, simply because he is on reddit, to suddenly say "By the way, I smoked pot, I'm an athiest, I think the RIAA is evil, etc.?"
He is the current President and actively campaigning for re-election, and he stated up front that he had 30 minutes to burn to "personally" answer questions. To expect this AMA to have gone any other way is simply naive. Regardless of what you believe politics are or should be, expecting anything different is neglecting the reality of modern politics.
Thanks for the harsh reminder of reality.
That makes no fricking sense.
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.
"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.