

Ask HN: Why can't we have our own AMAs, like Reddit? - vijayr

Tech focused, startup focused AMAs.
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dang
HN tends to want to distinguish itself from Reddit, as befits a younger
sibling. But we'd be interested in hearing from you all about what a more HN-
native AMA-like thingy might be. I feel like this is an area where we could do
something interesting.

One thing I mean by "more HN-native" is placing the emphasis more on substance
than celebrity. An idea we've tossed around is to invite people on to discuss
specific work they've done, or even to commission them to write a new post
about work they did, and then come here to discuss it.

"Work they did" might be a paper or an open-source project or anything the
community finds interesting. We would invite them, not to answer _anything_ ,
but rather to explain and answer questions about this specific work.

The minute you say "ask me anything", the focus becomes the individual, and
diluted that far, the topic becomes unsubstantive (though it can still be fun
as entertainment). But focus on the work—that seems like the HN way to go
about it, and potentially exciting.

~~~
thenomad
That sounds extremely interesting.

Are you considering invite-only for these, or simply running them in the same
way as Show HN?

~~~
dang
Don't know. This is really just thinking out loud.

~~~
thenomad
Could always start out open and move to invite if the quality's too low or the
quantity's too high.

FYI, I'd certainly be interested in doing one if my projects / areas of
expertise would be of interest. (tech-driven hacker-mentality filmmaking).

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brudgers
Because

1\. The publicizing of AMA's requires a lot of meta discussion and threads and
one of the things that makes HN HN is frowning upon the promotion of meta
discussion.

2\. HN tries to be somewhat meritocratic, and AMA's are intrinsically tied to
celebrity.

3\. AMA's happen spontaneously from time to time on diverse topics, e.g. some
project hits the front page and the author shows up in the discussion thread
or a company hits the news and the founders show up to answer questions.

4\. HN would turn into Reddit, which incidentally is the only acceptable meme
on HN.

5\. HN has a specific business purposes for YC. General internet interest does
not appear to be among them.

6\. Without coordination, the Ask HN page would be flooded with AMA's. e.g.
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5250690](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5250690)

~~~
nostrademons
On point 2: AMAs initially started out as a way for people to share what
mundane thing about them makes them unique. It was much more community-
oriented than celebrity oriented. The problem is that once this scaled beyond
a niche community, people didn't want to read about other folks that were just
like them, they wanted to read about celebrities who were willing to mingle
with the common people. r/casualiama is much more like what r/iama started out
as, and is IMNSHO more interesting.

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kzisme
I personally think that it would be nice but the deeper discussion normally
removes the need for AMA's imo.

------
S4M
sama (Sam Altman, president of YC) did an AMA here couple of months ago:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9238839](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9238839)

------
kluck
What is an AMA?

~~~
oniony
There is a subreddit called /r/iama where people can say "I Am A <noun>, Ask
Me Anything" and then answer (or not) the myriad questions asked of them.

It is, perhaps, not too much of a stretch to say that it is this particular
subreddit that transformed the site from a venue for engineering types to the
mass market beast it is today. For better or worse.

~~~
nostrademons
It's a bit of a stretch. :-)

The techie overshadowing was already underway nearly from the beginning.
r/politics had displaced r/science and r/programming as the most popular
subreddit by 2007 [1]. r/nsfw was the most popular subreddit in 2006. Indeed,
one of the major impetuses for the creation of subreddits was to get all the
damn political content and soft-core porn off the front page so that the
science & techie types could have their own community.

r/IAMA was itself a spin-off of r/AskReddit, which was filled with frivolous
questions at the time. It wasn't created until 2009. I'd argue that the
creation of Hacker News in 2007 was really what transformed Reddit from a
venue for engineering types to a mass-market beast. Before then, the
programming types would hang out on r/programming, but afterwards, a good
portion of Reddit's programmer userbase migrated to Hacker News.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_Reddit](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_Reddit)

