Practicum #5 Reddit

Reddit has a forum called IAMA which is a forum of people stating: I am a... and they say if they are a fireman, a male prostitute, or a celebrity. They then field questions from the reddit community. Some of these are pretty lame and possibly not even real, but some of them are very interesting. The celebrity posts are the most popular even though the celebrities are often not that big. Recently reddit has had the voice of Helga from the cartoon "Hey Arnold," the guy who plays Abed on NBC's show "Community," and Ken Jennings from Jeopardy fame. Many questions are actually answered as the person fielding them just sits by their computer for most of the day. Reddit is not that large of a community so users can feel good about getting attention from the creator of the post, but it is a large enough community that celebrities use it and reddit users have successfully requested for specific people to appear on the site. Within the IAMA forum some people post IAMA requests, reasons why they should come to the site and create an IAMA post, and people upvote the request post and comment in agreement. If the request post becomes popular enough, the person they are requesting, if a reddit user, might see the request. For some of the more famous people requested, I believe their publicist probably hears about the request and tells their client. Sometimes it's the publicist or assistant fielding the questions and answering in the actual person's name.