Like much of the modern world, you and most everyone you’ve ever met has spent some, if not a huge amount, of time on the internet. It is, after all, nearly 2015, the year that Back to the Future has promised us hoverboards, inflatable jackets, and instant re-hydrating pizza. With the popularity of the site Reddit, it’s a safe bet that you’ve spent some time there as well, even if inadvertently, and possibly got lost in the depth of one of the most popular corners of the massive website, the AMA (Ask Me Anything) section.
AMA’s are simple, most of the time, and the celebrities and unique personalities, including current President of the United States Barack Obama who was the subject of the most popular AMA of all time, that the subreddit tends to attract often bring surprising answers to some of the strangest, and most insightful, questions you can imagine. However, sifting through the flotsam of an AMA can be a headache in of itself. Reddit has the answer.
Released this week is the AMA app, developed and released by Reddit itself, which is going to bring the often chaotic nature of the popular AMA into an easy to manage and readable format.
The biggest function of the AMA app is the ability to sift through all the comments and only show the ones that the original poster (or OP if you’re in, or not in, the know) has responded to. This gives the entire process a much more flowing and interview like quality. It doesn’t degrade the often hilarious outcome of multiple responses in a single comment thread, but simply helps you sift through the rambling garbage that many of threads can easily become.
With an easy to navigate interface and even quick tips advising you as to how to navigate the app upon your first use of a particular function, it even allows the classic upvoting and downvoting that Reddit is known for. Inline responses and comments can be made easily and two separate views, one allowing you to see only questions that’s have been answered as was explained above, and questions that have yet to be answered, are right at the forefront and can be accessed quickly with just a press of a button. Each AMA is also sorted into categories, allowing you to further narrow down your interests when it comes to the question and answer format that the subreddit represents.
Reddit is really onto something with this interesting approach to one of their most popular highlights. The app, already out for iOS and slated to be released later this week for Android, is almost guaranteed to draw a newer crowd to the already popular website. In addition, with quiet and subversive advertising, a hallmark of Reddit itself, the more mature approach in the sleek little app will definitely help the classically free website raise their profit margins significantly. With over 6 million redditors following AMAs alone, it’s no wonder they chose the subreddit to be the focus of what is obviously a test to see if a full Reddit app is viable for the company.
Look for the Reddit AMA app on the Apple App Store now and on the Google Play Store later this week.
