Why every scientist should hold an AMA on Reddit and how to do it, step-by-step

Up until a couple of weeks ago, I wasn’t really all that familiar with Reddit. I had heard of “Ask Me Anything”s and had read through a couple before (this one with Elon Musk was fantastic!). But it had never occurred to me to hold one myself, and, to be honest, I thought of Reddit as a place on the Internet that could get kind of scary.

But our air pollution-focused org was a finalist in a competition for an award that included a public vote, and doing an AMA seemed like a great way to let people know what we were doing, attract them to our platform, maybe even get them to contribute their skills and ideas to our open-source community, and of course convince them to vote for us! The idea was inspired by another finalist organization, Open Neuro Lab. Their AMA looked like it had been friendly enough, so we figured we would give a try on r/science. It went really well, thanks to folks like Amrit, who coached us on how to approach it.

In the end, we didn’t end up garnering enough votes to make it to the next round of that competition we were in, but the AMA experience ended up being an incredible one for us.

Most directly, it brought five times more people than we have ever had to our org’s platform (see graph below), attracted new people into our community Slack channel, and a few folks even started working on issues in our GitHub repo for us while we were conducting the AMA.

The number of daily site hits that we have received lately to openaq.org via Google Analytics. That big spike coincides with when we conducted our AMA.

But the coolest thing was that we actually got to have a substantive back-and-forth on the science, tech, policy and philosophy of air inequality. It is also great that the AMA was archived, so that we can point others to it later. The exercise let us know what people were interested in talking about when it comes to air pollution, and we also got to share our work at a much higher level than we had been able to, to date. More broadly, doing the AMA made me appreciate just how many people are interested and eager to connect on a scientific topic, and like a lot of scientists, I am equally eager for finding meaningful ways to share science with the public. This was a pretty perfect way to do it.

Here’s some more on why hosting a science AMA is awesome, what exactly an AMA is, and tips for hosting your own science AMA.

Why hosting an r/science AMA is awesome for scientists

• You get to potentially interact with a lot of people from the general public around your science in real-time.
• At the same time, unlike a talk, you have a little more time and space to make your answers as substantive as you like, by including items like follow up materials, links to papers, detailed discussion, etc.
• Also unlike a talk, the questions that were asked and your responses are there for permanent viewing either on Reddit or where they are archived by The Winnower.
• In addition to just sharing your science, you get to find out what questions most often come to mind from people about your field and how people relate to it.
• If you’re working on open science or an open-source project, it’s a great way to attract more people to join your community.
• The AMAs on r/science are moderated by volunteers and they are excellent at keeping things friendly.

What exactly is a Reddit AMA?

An “Ask Me Anything” on Reddit is just a chance for people on Reddit (‘redditors’) to connect with an individual or group they find interesting in a substantive, interactive way through an online forum.

The details: An AMA is hosted typically on a “subreddit” under which the topic of the AMA falls. For instance, our AMA was hosted under the subreddit r/science, which contains all things science.

Here’s the subreddit where we conducted our AMA: r/science. It has more than 14 million subscribers!

We could have theoretically done our AMA under a different subreddit, and there is also a subreddit devoted entirely to AMAs.

The day of your AMA, the awesome volunteer moderators post your headline (ours below) and a longer introduction with extra information (here’s our intro).

Here was our AMA headline — which was more of an AUA: Ask us anything! You can see our whole intro here.

This appears online for a couple of hours in order to let questions start piling up and for others to up- and down-vote them.

Then, you swoop in with you/your team and start answering the posts. People may have follow up questions or get into side conversations separate from you. Typically, AMAs run for a specified time (e.g. 2 hours), and after time runs out, you’re done! AMAs on r/science are archived by The Winnower and receive a doi (e.g. our is at: https://doi.org/10.15200/winn.148362.20666).

How to sign up for an (r/science) AMA

• Pick which subreddit you would like to be under for your AMA. In addition to picking the subreddit that best fits your topic of conversation, consider things like the number of subscribers to the subreddit and check out previous AMAs to see the ‘tone’ and how well-moderated the AMAs typically are. We really enjoyed our experience on r/science because the moderators were incredible, and made the experience really positive.
• Once you’ve picked a subreddit, look for further instructions on how to host an AMA and to sign up. We can only speak to r/science, but they had a really nice “AMA Guidelines” doc that outlined who was eligible to hold an AMA, how to contact the moderators to hold an AMA, and what procedures they suggest to follow for scheduling and the day of the AMA.
• One surprising thing to me was that we were able to schedule with just one week’s notice (we were trying to do our AMA before the deadline for our public vote). I’m not sure if that’s typical, but there wasn’t a long process for getting approval nor getting on the calendar for r/science. It was easy. Here’s the current AMA schedule for r/science.
• One of the most important things in attracting attention to your AMA will be your headline. Craft it carefully, and it can be useful to get feedback from a non-scientist or at least someone outside of your field.
• Preferably before you submit for an AMA, know who your team will be for the process. Will it just be you? Will you recruit others to join you? Having a couple of folks besides yourself to help distribute the workload in answering questions and monitoring priority questions can be helpful.

Before the AMA

Alright, you’ve got your team together, you’ve got a snazzy headline, and you’re on the AMA schedule, ready to go! In addition to the guidelines provided by the moderators, here’s what we found useful:

• If you do have a team, have a plan for how you will communicate during the AMA. Our team communicated verbally via a video chat and also by text in a chat room so that we were clear on who was attacking which question. And if you already have a list of FAQ’s, don’t forget to share that with everybody in advance (here’s ours as an example).
• Brainstorm a list of questions you may get in advance. Especially focus on ones that you would find tough to answer or even a little uncomfortable. You may want to craft a few short answers.
• Block off your schedule entirely during the period you intend to commit to the AMA (include time before it actually starts so that you can get a head start on questions). This will take up your entire attention — don’t underestimate this.
• If you haven’t yet, check out previous Science AMA’s in r/science.
• Don’t forget to advertise your AMA amongst your social network!

During the AMA

• Once your AMA link is live the day-of the event but before your AMA officially starts, you can start seeing the questions roll in. It’s a good idea to start drafting answers to these questions so that you have a headstart for when the AMA actually begins.
• It’s natural to focus on the most up-voted questions, but don’t forget to check out new questions as they come in that might not have had a chance to get the same number of up-votes.
• Similarly, after you have answered a question, don’t forget to check in on it later to see if there were any follow up comments to respond to or questions to answer.

After the AMA

• Something I didn’t quite realize: The formal end of your AMA doesn’t necessarily have to be the end. Meaning, you will still be able to log in to your account created for the AMA and reply to comments/questions. It’s really up to you how long you want to spend on it. I ended up spending several hours monitoring and answering questions after the official ‘end’. You don’t need to do this, but it is good to you know that you can.
• At the end of your time slot, it’s polite to edit your introduction and let everyone know you’re done and to thank everyone and especially the volunteer moderators for their hard work!

Any other suggestions on how to hold an AMA? Write below!