Tech Trend 247

Republican Party nominee for president of the U.S., Donald J. Trump, made good on his promise and held a Reddit AMA (ask me anything) session late Wednesday.

And while many thought this would be a disaster, Trump and his supporters on Reddit managed to turn the normally open concept of the AMA interview into a very on-message experience.

Trump played this one smart. Instead of doing the AMA — basically an open-ended interview, where the Reddit community asks the questions — on Reddit's IAmA subreddit, he did it on the pro-Trump subreddit The_Donald. There, the subreddit's moderators could filter any unwanted questions, which is exactly what they did. 

The result was a fairly boring and short AMA session, with a total of 13 answered questions. Many of these were non-answers — to a question about NASA, Trump said, "Honestly I think NASA is wonderful! America has always led the world in space exploration."

And many of the questions were heavily biased in Trump's favor to begin with. When you get questions like, "We firmly believe Hillary will try and steal this election through vote fraud (...) What is your campaign doing to ensure that we have a fair election?" or "Are you getting tired of winning," the answers just flow. 

The few answers that weren't just phrases were pretty basic outlines of various aspects of Trump's proposed reforms. On a question about immigration, Trump essentially linked to the "immigration reform" portion of his website. To a question about Obamacare, the answer was a few pointers from Trump's proposed healthcare reform.

Trump also listed his favorite U.S. presidents (George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Dwight Eisenhower and Ronald Reagan, if you're wondering), endorsed "new media," as a "great way to get out the truth," and used the rest of the answers to highlight the shortcomings of Clinton and her campaign. 

Check out all of Trump's answers here.

Given the number of high-profile blunders during Reddit AMA sessions, it was probably prudent of Trump and his camp to keep this one tightly controlled. What makes Reddit AMAs interesting, however, is the unpredictability of the questions. Often, you'll see celebrities, politicians and other high-profile figures being asked very detailed, extremely well-informed or surprising questions, the likes of which you'll never see on, say, a live TV interview. If you remove that unpredictability from the equation, the result is just boring.