It’s now something of a celebrity rite of passage, as well as a downright pleasant way to while away an afternoon. But while it’s perfectly delightful to see Woody Harrelson faceplant at Q&A, we’ve noticed that there are several interesting requests piling up, just aching to become hours of entertainment. In fact, here are a few Read More
Reddit’s “IAmA” question-and-answer sessions can be thorny territory for celebrities brave enough to wade into the seething, snarking masses. Redditors who catch the scent of bald PR stunts can rhetorically (and gleefully) crap on promotions-friendly scripts and set them on fire. Comedian, author and Expedia.com naked traveler Michael Ian Black has just braved the wilds of the web’s premiere link aggregator and as far as we can tell, survived.
Reflecting on Woody Harrelson’s no-good, very bad Reddit experience a few months ago, Betabeat asked Mr. Black to comment on the session. Read More
Reddit’s increasingly popular “IAmA” section–I am a tech blogger, ask me anything–was briefly shut down yesterday after its creator got sick of policing its 465,000 members and the pranksters who pretended to be terminally ill patients or rape victims. “The /r/IAmA that I shut down (until incredable backlash), in my opinion is not that subreddit that I started two year ago,” moderator 32bites wrote. “I feel that the community has been flooded by people who don’t care about it at all …” Read More
If you want things done right, sometimes you have to do them yourself. Yes, Dennis Crowley, co-founder of Foursquare, and the public face of the company, wrote the original code that powered the service when it debuted at SXSW in March of 2009. But when Foursquare’s first hire, Harry Heymann, arrived at the company, he didn’t waste any time.
“I didn’t write the original version of the Foursquare code that went live with launch in March ’09. Dennis did that and it was in somewhat poorly written PHP (Dens will be the first to tell you that programming isn’t his strong suit),” Mr. Heymann wrote on Reddit’s IAmA this afternoon. “After Dennis and Naveen started the company in 2009 I was their first hire. I started by re-writing the entire server as fast as I could.” Read More
It’s awesome that the folks at Reddit keep doing our job for us. Today they put one of our favorite New York entrepreneurs, Joel Spolsky, in the internet hot seat. He quickly got the commenters fired up by noting in his bio that Fog Creek distributes all it’s profits among employees.
Reddit user Samdumb got the trolling started. “I think that’s misleading. You and your co-owner are both employees and are presumably receiving the vast majority of that money.” Read More
