This week, President Barack Obama visited the well-known unoriginal-content-spreading site reddit to reach out to voters. Obama, who has always been on the cutting edge of social media with such endeavors as “Tweet Me Some Money” and “Let Me Spam Your Facebook Timeline with My Drivel,” took to reddit as a new and edgy way of interacting with voters. As a result, the website immediately crashed.
Once reddit was able to get their site functioning as well as it ever did, the President spent a half-hour answering questions of reddit users, at least 3% of which are likely voters in the upcoming election after you factor out minors, non-Americans, and people who can’t be bothered to drag their asses out of their parents’ basements to vote.
The President’s “Ask Me Anything” session received over 4,000 comments or questions in the first 15 minutes; given this opportunity, the President carefully selected the top 10 most provocative, controversial, or important questions of the day, including “what’s the recipe for the White House beer” and “Who’s your favourite basketball player” (the latter obviously being a foreign impostor, based on the superfluous use of the letter “u”). While answering these tough questions sadly left him with insufficient time to address less weighty issues such as unemployment, abortion, international trade, and global climate change, he still satisfied the needs of literally dozens of reddit users who were dying to know what time he eats dinner at the White House (6:30, if you didn’t know).
Following the session, media outlets began breathlessly reporting the results. MSNBC analysts began a ten-hour, live analysis of the results, with particular focus on his cool-kid meme reference at the end. Conversely, Fox News launched into a blistering critique of the President’s use of a website known to house pedophiles, rapists, and other scum and villainy.
The AMA session, as well as the immediate media fascination with the results, has led Mitt Romney’s campaign to plan a similar approach. “Next week, Mr. Romney and Mr. Ryan will be engaging in a public chat on Myspace!” the candidate’s Geocities page trumpeted. Anonymous sources within the Romney campaign have admitted that Romney will disclose the reason for the discrepancy for his alleged time as CEO of Bain Capital, 20 years’ worth of tax returns, and his position within the LDS church, while Ryan will discuss why he’s such a blatantly lying douchecanoe. It is anticipated that this information, once buried in the dusty nether regions of Myspace, will give the campaign more credibility. “We can say, ‘Listen, we put all this information out there that you asked for,’” the anonymous source said. “It’s not our damn fault you couldn’t find it.”
Reporters attempted to reach Tom Anderson, founder of Myspace, for comment via his Google+ page; however, the social media mogul was in Nepal, attempting to climb a mountain he characterized in a photo tag as “almost as big as my stacks of money from when I sold the world that piece of crap website.”