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Comment by achompas | Hacker News Reader

Why would I want HN to be a megaphone for Famous Joe Blow X when I'd much rather have him actively participating and helping out in the threads with the rest of us?

Because the odds of getting Famous Joe Blow X to run a HN AMA are much, much higher than getting him to become an active HNer. We're talking about a one-time commitment versus extended involvement in our community.

Look at the roster of AMA guests on Reddit. How many of them are active Redditors? It's non-zero, but not substantially so. And yet, by participating in AMAs, they enrich Reddit's community.

EDIT EDIT: removed some belly-aching

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> by participating in AMAs, they enrich Reddit's community

That's the part I'm skeptical of, at least keeping in mind what community means in the HN sense. They don't really seem to be part of the Reddit community at all; they're more like the "content" that the Reddit community is discussing any given day. What's more interesting about the HN community to me is that some pretty accomplished people are actually part of the community.

Given the quality of questions/answers in a typical AMA, I'm not even sure how it's different from just linking to an offsite TechCrunch interview. Is it just some kind of fuzzy feeling of having participated?

I agree, I think the fuzzy feeling sums it up. Celebrity AMA's are some of the most unenlightening things I've ever read. You get some obvious questions about obvious subjects and the answer is usually some variation of 'yeah that was great'. It should be no surprise either - its a conversation started with no premise. If someone consequential to an issue decides to comment on that issue it can be very very interesting. Hackernews still has that to some degree. Even if its gone, can we not resurrect it as this zombie?

> they're more like the "content" that the Reddit community is discussing any given day.

I think this sums them up nicely. This is also why I feel they would be out of place in a forum centered around discussion, like HN.

You could see an HN AMA as one person chiming in on multiple discussions in a short time (which may be much more doable for them), this depends on the questions asked, of course. And that is something HN hopefully regulates by itself.

Just since the 'setup' is the same, it doesn't mean the results will be the same. HN as a whole vs Reddit is proof of this on itself, I would say.

That's not a half-bad idea at all, actually.

"Because the odds of getting Famous Joe Blow X to run a HN AMA are much, much higher than getting him to become an active HNer"

However, if Mr. Blow is not going to be active on HN anyway, what is the advantage of an AMA on HN over one on Reddit? And since the goal is to have Mr. Blow answer questions, what evidence is there that he is more likely to do so on HN than Reddit?

What makes HN great is not really fucking smart people answering fifteen questions of varying quality in 90 minutes. It's RFSP spending 90 minutes answering one really good question.

> EDIT: wait what, downvote? For speaking the truth?

Calm your self:) It can happen easily by accident from things like small buttons on mobile devices.

Your comment has a positive score, isn't that enough of a positive signal?

The down arrow makes voting pretty much impossible on mobile devices. Can I get 18 downvotes here so my karma will be below 500 and I won't have to put up with the down arrow anymore?

There are various HN interfaces people have written specifically for mobile. There's http://hckrn.ws/ and http://ihackernews.com/ for starters.

A quick google search reveals https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/news-yc/id434787119?mt=8 for iOS, which includes a "confirm votes" toggle setting. There's https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.rickylaish... for android as well.

I won't quote the belly aching, but it's relevant. Would reddit's AMAs work without "vigorous" downvoting?

Can the possibility of one-time commitment reduce extended involvement ‘rate’, or otherwise negatively affect community (attract unexpected public, possibly)? Taking into account differences between the audiences of HN and Reddit.

i think a fair few are active redditors but they dont use their anonymous accounts for their AMA for obvious reasons. Perhaps not Woody Harrelson.

Of course there is the reverse, where Will Shatner didnt want to do an AMA as he intended to stick around on a daily basis as opposed to a "one night only" type of event. That sort of thing seems to be what HN would prefer (if it wasnt will shatner but someone more useful).

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