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Comment by mikeash | Hacker News Reader

That's by far the least of the objections raised. 10 interesting, insightful answers that offered new information would have been fascinating. But we got 10 canned answers that told us nothing we already knew. That was the real problem here, although nobody should have been surprised.

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Okay, he answered top voted questions at the time, all of which were generic questions that he's answered time and time again. What exactly would you expect? There weren't any different or insightful questions actually asked [and voted to the top where he'd see them].

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.

>Okay, he answered top voted questions at the time

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.

So your complaint is the POTUS should've come to the AMA with more time to spend, hunted down "better" questions to answer, and then spent more time thoroughly answering the questions.

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.

A lot of busy, high-profile people (Noam Chomsky, for example) have done off-line AMAs. That is, commenters will post questions, and upvotes will determine the best/most popular ones. And then, answers for those will be posted all at once, maybe even as a different thread if enough time has passed since the questions were asked.

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).

So your complaint is the POTUS should've come to the AMA with more time to spend, hunted down "better" questions to answer, and then spent more time thoroughly answering the questions.

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

I read the AMA while it was in progress, as I could through the downtime, and I read the summary post in the thread afterwards before all of this discussion on HN.

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.

Why can't we express a desire for something better, while knowing full well that Obama is a politician and, like just about any American politician, got into office by avoiding hard questions and giving the answers the great unwashed masses want to hear?

The assertion that holding my politicians to a higher standard than playing word games is naive? That kind of apathetic thinking is exactly what allows the kind of things that stem from Washington to continue, people think it's naive and fruitless to speak up, so no one ever does.

Thanks for the harsh reminder of reality.

In short, we can't complain, because if things went the way we want them to, other people would be unhappy?

That makes no fricking sense.

I'm going to guess because it's on thing to make a promise/statement in a traditional political campaign, another thing entirely to make a statement on reddit, e.g. people won't just forget in 5 minutes what you said.

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.

"But we got 10 canned answers that told us nothing we already knew."

What do you mean?

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4451556

Sorry, that's missing a negative. They told us nothing we DIDN'T already know.

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