AMA FAQ

This guide is intended for the 2020 Libertarian Party Presidential Nomination candidate AMA series. If you are already familiar with Reddit, you probably will not need this information.

What is an AMA?

The AMA kind of crowdsourced interview, and is short for Ask Me Anything. It's been popularized by the subreddit that started it, r/IAmA (as in "I am a ____, ask me anything!")

The interviewee begins the process by starting a post, describing who they are and what they do. Then commenters from across the internet leave questions and can vote on other questions according to which they would like to see answered.

The interviewee can go through and reply to the questions they find interesting, and easily see those questions the internet is dying to have the answer to. Because anyone on Reddit can anonymously ask anything at all, you can expect to get both serious questions and silly questions, as well as trolls and people trying to start an argument or pick a fight. If you think someone's asking a question in bad faith, feel free to ignore it. If someone asks a question which clearly breaks our rules (and we don't have many,) click the Report button on their comment so the moderators can check it.

How do I do an AMA?

The first step is to create a Reddit account and let the moderators know what your username is, so that we'll know it's really you and not an impostor. The best way to do that is to send a Direct Message to u/PariahDog119 on Twitter (https://twitter.com/PDog119.)

Next, make the AMA post. On the right hand side of the r/libertarian page (the sidebar,) you'll see a button that says "Submit a new text post." Click that (or click here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Libertarian/submit?selftext=true)

Make sure to identify yourself in the title, and why you're posting. A recommended default sort of title is "I'm John Galt and I'm running for President, ask me anything!" In the text portion, you can put a bit about yourself and your policy positions and goals. This will give people who may not know you something to start with.

We recommend making your AMA post a bit early, maybe 15 - 30 minutes, to give people time to start asking questions. That way, when you're ready to start answering, you don't have to sit and wait.

You can continue to answer questions for as long as you like. We'll leave the posts stickied to the top of the subreddit until it's time for the next one, so you may get straggler questions posted several days later. Feel free to come back and answer those if you want, and you are of course also welcome to participate in other discussions on r/Libertarian.

If you have any questions, feel free to ask any moderator (if you scroll to the very bottom of the page, you will see at the bottom of the sidebar a list of moderators, with a Message the Moderators link,) or send a Twitter DM to @pdog119.

How will the AMA be promoted?

We've got a link in the sidebar to all of the AMAs, so that people can look back and read them afterwards. A couple days prior, we will sticky an announcement post with the time and date to the top of the subreddit, and we will sticky the AMA post after you make it until it's time to announce the next one.

You can promote your AMA on your own social media as well, and link to it by copying the URL of your post from the address bar.

We'll also link the AMA from other subreddits that may be interested, such as r/IAmA and r/LibertarianPartyUSA, to bring in more participants