The Best Reason to Visit Reddit Is No More
We often give popular link-sharing site Reddit a hard time for being a hive of pale overexcitable nerds, but there is one reliably interesting section of the site: Ask Me Anything, where the famous and unknown alike take questions from random commenters. Unfortunately it was just shut down.
It seems like the moderator in charge of the section got fed up with a rash of impostors pretending to be, among other things, a terminal cancer patient and a Game of Thrones actress. If you showed up with a good story and a quick keyboard, chances of duping thousands of people into believing you had a fabulously interesting life were good. In a final post, the moderator wrote, "The main reason behind this is that the community has become too large… the quality of the posts has gone downhill."
It's too bad, because there were some genuinely interesting threads to come out of the section, if you took everything with a grain of salt—including conversations with Rep. Anthony Weiner (pre-Weinergate), Jeopardy champion Ken Jennings, former Facebook interns and current, miserable McDonald's employees. Reddit administrators must be pretty upset too, since just a couple months ago they boasted about the popularity of the section, which had 400,000 subscribers at the time it was shuttered. If Reddit's corporate overlords at Conde Nast are paying any attention (doubt it), they can't be happy about it.
We guess it will be resurrected in some way. The also popular—but for different reasons!—"Jailbait" section, which was shut down last week, has largely sprung back, this time named "teen girls." Love finds a way.
Update: Looks like the "Ask Me Anything" is back. Although knowing Reddit, someone will probably reveal it was all a hoax and never existed in the first place.