Barack Obama / Reddit
President Barack Obama is seen at the keyboard in a photo submitted to Reddit as part of the website's "ask me anything" live chat verification process in late August.
By Rosa Golijan
"Reddit, this is important," the caption on a link to the Obama campaign's website declared on Tuesday.?"I'm checking in because polls will start closing in this election in just a few hours, and I need you to vote," a comment made using President Obama's account elaborated.
On election day, he made the social sharing site his final campaign stop with a plea for Reddit users to "go out there and cast [their] vote, whatever [their] political persuasion."?Obama made sure to play up his prior "Ask Me Anything" visit to Reddit, of course:?"I want to thank you all again for the reception you gave me in August for my AMA. Good questions."
"See, even on election night, even the president can't escape Reddit," a Reddit user replied, referencing the site's notoriously addictive nature. "Now I know that there's no way the President posted this himself," another user added. "You can either be President of the USA or on reddit; there simply aren't enough hours in the day to do both."
Whether the comment and post came from Obama himself or a member of his campaign staff, many Reddit users reacted just as they did when?Obama held an "Ask Me Anything" (AMA) live chat on Reddit?in late August?? with a mixture of personal responses and political debate. (It does seem, however, that most of the anti-Obama sentiments were quickly downvoted heavily by Reddit users.)
It's not particularly surprising that the Reddit post quickly received enough "upvotes" from Reddit users to rise to the site's front page and hang there, as polls around the country began to close. By 9:30 p.m. ET Tuesday, the post had received over 7,500 upvotes and over 5,200 comments.?
Obama's August appearance on Reddit did even better in the end, amassing?8,338 upvotes and 24,327 comments. That post led to such high traffic levels on Reddit that many users actually had issues loading the site. After the AMA, Reddit was briefly taken offline while a status account on Twitter reported that the site was "cleaning up after the president's visit. ... We'll be back ASAP." There appear to have been no such traffic or server issues this time around.
This, naturally, didn't stop one Reddit user from writing, in response to the election day post, "BREAKING: Obama crashes Reddit, forcing millions of nerds to go vote out of boredom," in reference to the prior incident.
Reddit wasn't the only place where Obama did some last-minute campaigning, mind you. His campaign continued to actively cover Facebook and Twitter, as well as YouTube, Google+, Tumblr and many other online channels.
By comparison, the Romney campaign has had a fairly quiet day on the social media front ? Romney preferring to do his last-minute campaigning in person. Romney did have some presence on Facebook and Twitter though.?And even though his online presence was plain, Romney did see some solid responses from supporters. Over 9,000 Facebook users shared one of his reminders to vote while nearly 166,000 "liked" the post. "Yes," wrote more than one Facebook user in reply. "I voted."
Want more tech news?or interesting?links? You'll get plenty of both if you keep up with Rosa Golijan, the writer of this post, by following her on?Twitter, subscribing to her?Facebook?posts,?or circling her?on?Google+.
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