President Obama made an appearance on Reddit this last Wednesday with an AMA (Ask Me Anything), answering questions from users for thirty minutes. At the peak of the event, there were over 198,000 users who were attempting to view the President’s AMA.
In just a couple of hours, the President gained over 17K points of comment karma. Based on stats from the RescueTime user base, he also had a pretty significant impact on Reddit’s server load (and other users’ page load times).
We saw that many users spent more time viewing Reddit’s heavy load outage page than they actually spent on the AMA page itself.
We looked at the aggregate user’s Reddit time broken down between viewing the outage page and successfully viewing the AMA page. Here’s what that data looks like:
The guys at Reddit posted a blog today giving some other great statistics regarding the event. They added a total of 60 servers to try and keep up with demand, but still had problems due to their load balancers not being able to keep up.
Overall this was a great opportunity for Reddit and the community at large, I would love to see on-going AMA sessions with the President on a monthly basis (regardless of who that ends up being!). Perhaps as an addition to the “Weekly address”?
