Illustration: Reddit Wieger Wamelink had never heard of Reddit. The new communications manager of Wageningen Environmental Research Moniek van den Eertwegh asked him if he was prepared to host a Ask Me Anything (AMA) session on his cultivation research in martian soil. The online AMA session last Friday yielded a lot of questions. Eventually, because it remained eerily quiet during the one-and-a-half-hour (written) question session.
Americans
‘After that, there was a sudden rise in activity,’ Wamelinks says, ‘when it was evening in the United States. I remained at my keyboard until 11.30 pm. And on Saturday and Sunday I also regularly returned to the site to answer questions. Even some early this morning. Reddit apparently has many working Americans amongst its members. This is something to bear in mind while planning a time slot.’
It is a real science community; you don’t get any nonsense questions
Wieger Wamelink, WUR ecologist
Wamelink is not the first Wageningen researcher to use Reddit to interact with the public. He was preceded by virologist Wim van der Poel a little less than a month ago with AMA session on the coronavirus. The online communication specialists of Communication Services launched the idea of using Reddit.
‘That went really well’, says Moniek van de Eertwegh. ‘Which is why I thought we might give it a try. Reddit allows you to reach a broad international audience. We are still discovering how we may use this. For Wieger, it was an excellent opportunity to draw attention to the crowdfunding for his research.’
No Twitter
The session on Friday had a learning curve. ‘It is a real science community,’ says Wamelink. ‘You don’t get nonsense questions, it’s not like Twitter. It is also a place where you can divulge publications, some of my publications had apparently already been discussed on Reddit: the participants knew my work.’
The fact that an AMA session is not announced until an hour before it is set to take place is a distinct disadvantage. ‘That makes it difficult to promote the event’, says Wamelink. You are stuck with more or less coincidental visitors. However, there is a huge potential audience. Wamelink’s AMA was listed in the -space subreddit, to which some 17.7 million people are subscribed. You can find the session here.
