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Comment by pdovy | Hacker News Reader

The quality of the questions on Bernie Sanders' AMA were pretty good, but it was informative only because he didn't shy away from answering the interesting questions.

One of the Chicago Mayoral candidates did an AMA in the recent election and it was pretty abysmal. The good questions were skipped and the other answers were evasive. In that respect, Reddit lacks something an in-person interview can deliver (with a good interviewer) - the ability to push back on a non-answer and not be ignored. You also can't catch someone off guard on Reddit, really - the answers are going to be very carefully curated.

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So a really interesting question would be: can a candidate who is unafraid to answer questions honestly compete well against a field of candidates who try to only tell people what they want to hear? Is it possible to change the game such that not alienating anyone is less of a priority?

EDIT: Thinking about this more, it may be important that we play multiple iterations of this game. During primaries, candidates are much less concerned about alienating voters from the other party, and are much more concerned about straying from the positions mandated by their party base. In the general election, they often have the opposite incentive.

If we only had one round of campaigning, it could be much easier for candidates to delineate their true beliefs, though whatever voting system was used would still be vulnerable to some form of strategy.

In principle, yes, but not when the means of media distribution (campaign ads, debates, etc.) are controlled by parties with obvious conflicts of interest.

In other words, the debates will always be pathetic so long as they are run by companies like FOX, NPR, and NBC. Companies with plain political interests.

This, more than anything else, needs disrupting.

I think there's some value in knowing that a candidate is refusing to answer a specific question. It becomes especially obvious when that question is voted to the top and is left unanswered.

I also don't see anything wrong with the answers being carefully curated. Although, I assume by curated you mean watered down to the point that they're giving nonanswers. I've never liked how in live debates candidates are given only a few seconds to come up with an answer to what are usually tough and difficult questions. I'd rather them take the time to sit down and think about it.

Reddit should implement some kind of "AMA score" for every AMA. Those that evade questions, give vague answers etc will get a lower score and their future AMAs won't generate that much interest.

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