Reddit has a recurring feature where notable (and not-so-notable) people can show up for an AMA (Ask Me Anything) interactive chat session. [2013-08-26 – Update: This probably isn’t too surprising but there’s some strong evidence that many celebrity AMA’s – including the Ethan Hawke one listed below – are actually done by a PR person, at least to some degree but higher than 0% involvement and perhaps up to 100% PR person acting as the celebrity with the true answer somewhere between these two extremes.]
BuzzFeed has a list of what they think are the Top 15 AMA’s of all-time. Another quick way to see which AMA’s were the most popular is to sort the /IAMA sub-reddit by its most upvoted links. But there are many that fly under the radar because they’re not conducted with top-tier names like Barack Obama, Bill Gates or Arnold Schwartzenegger.
Here are a few that were well-received because of the thoughtful, insightful responses the subjects prepared to a wide variety of questions…
- Stephen King
- Ethan Hawke (which had various sites proclaiming this AMA as having “won the internet”
- John Fogerty
As opposed to the best received AMA’s, you also have what is widely regarded as the worst celebrity AMA of all-time – Woody Harrelson who stopped by to promote his film “Rampart” but only responded briefly and obliquely while trying to get people to focus on questions about his new film instead of whether he screwed a Redditor’s friend after a high school prom over ten years ago!
Things quickly unravelled when one user asked if Harrelson remembered taking the virginity of his friend after their high school prom after party over 10 years ago.
Harrelson’s response was:’First of off, its not true, and second off, I don’t want to answer questions about that. Lets focus on the film people.’
Reddit users, who did not appreciate being told what they could ask questions on, reminded the star that the session was called ‘Ask me anything’ and not ‘Ask me anything about Rampart’.
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