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I’m Bill Gates, co-chair of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. AMA

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11–20 of 150 posts

Re: I’m Bill Gates, co-chair of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. AMA

#11
post #8

It been an hour and still no response from Bill, Obama was much more prompt with the replies

The original post is from over an hour but answers should start now: "I’ll be answering your questions live, starting at 10:45 am PST"

yup he's replying now...very damn punctual... #Respect... posting an hour before replying is certainly clever...

Re: I’m Bill Gates, co-chair of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. AMA

#13
post #12

I really wish reddit had a better interface to see the questions and Bill's answers all at once without scrolling through random comments. Why hasn't reddit's AMA been surpassed by a dedicated AMA site with a user interface designed for AMA?

You will be able to use http://www.topiama.com when the topic will have been crawled.

Re: I’m Bill Gates, co-chair of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. AMA

#14
post #12

I really wish reddit had a better interface to see the questions and Bill's answers all at once without scrolling through random comments. Why hasn't reddit's AMA been surpassed by a dedicated AMA site with a user interface designed for AMA?

Chicken and the egg problem.

Re: I’m Bill Gates, co-chair of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. AMA

#15
post #6
post #3

I wish Reddit implemented a more...un-arbitrary way of calculating upvotes. Gates currently has 6,211 net upvotes, with a total of 11,500 upvotes. That's already almost half the net upvotes of what Obama got: http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/z1c9z/i_am_barack_obam... But Obama's IAMA got 239,221 upvotes total. Which means he got 225K downvotes...which I guess is feasible, but for all we know, that was just an ar…

"For all we know"? They explicitly state [0] that upvotes and downvotes are fuzzed, it really isn't a matter of some weird machination. [0] http://www.reddit.com/wiki/faq#wiki_how_is_a_submission.27s_...

Yes...I don't think I was clear enough about what I meant, in a statistical sense. I know that upvotes/downvotes are added artificially. I'm saying, it's hard to gauge the real ratio of upvotes to downvotes with this fuzz.

The FAQ you linked to gives this example: a submission with 5 upvotes and 3 downvotes may be tweaked to say 23 upvotes and 21 downvotes.

So the net number of upvotes remains the same. But the ratio of approval, a statistic that is prominently listed for each submission, changes:

     5 / (5+3) = 62.5%
     23 / (21+23) = 52.5%

I thought I had also read that, in earlier implementations of the fuzz, upvotes were either removed, or downvotes added, so that doing an all-time view of popular posts would not completely consist of new posts (because the reddit user base is much bigger than it was several years ago, so a relatively mediocre post could garner more upvotes than a very good older post).

Re: I’m Bill Gates, co-chair of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. AMA

#17
They've already said it on Reddit; but, he has to be the fastest Reddit AMA that I've ever paid attention to. He's responding to so much, so quickly; and a lot of the questions don't seem like ones he could pass off to someone else, not to mention the wording, etc seems consistent throughout.

Re: I’m Bill Gates, co-chair of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. AMA

#18
post #7

It been an hour and still no response from Bill, Obama was much more prompt with the replies

I think it's smart, so the good question float top.

I didn't even think of that. Good on him.

Though it looks like he won't get to answering this popular question: http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/18bhme/im_bill_gates_c...

Re: I’m Bill Gates, co-chair of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. AMA

#19

Post-Microsoft Bill Gates is a much more interesting person. I'm not a Microsoft fan, but I have a huge amount of respect for how he's choosing to spend the money he made. Interesting contrast to Larry Ellison, for example.

It's kind of crazy when you think about his goals of eradicating some diseases completely. Totally. From the face of the Earth.

There are definitely worse ways to spend your time and money.

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