Hell even askscience and askhistorians started going that way.

I believe there was a r/casualAMA sub for that

$$$

No-one really does that in !askmeanything@lemmy.ca either, which makes me think it’s just there isn’t demand for it.

As a general rule, if someone only talks to you because it's part of their job, they probably don't really want to talk to you.

AMA should have a rule that questions should be answered in sequence, maybe requiring the host to confirm they ignore questions before they move on to more "flattering" ones

Otherwise, its AskMeOnlyWhatIWantToAnswer.

Kinda defeats the purpose otherwise

Sounds like a question for r/askreddit 😁

I would rather talk about Rampart.

I think Gary Sinese does them just for fun. He's a pretty regular poster on reddit.

She said she loved me!

Why would anyone take that abuse voluntary?

there used to be. AMA's on reddit used to be insanely popular like a decade ago, even casual ones from everyday people that had an interesting aspect to their lives.

Now no one cares.

Because there's no community driving it to be better.

Way back in ye olden times of Reddit, when enshittification hadn't quite set in yet, there were a lot of AMAs by people who were out there just looking to talk. Sometimes they were famous people who had projects going on, sure, but there still wasn't that sense of 'I am here to talk about nothing but my project'. They might tell funny stories, give actual useful information about getting into their career fields, or answer interesting questions about their project.

Sometimes it was more random. "I am a [specific and unique job]" or "person who had [unique life experience]. AMA". Even with planned and scheduled AMAs, there was a sense it was truly off-the-cuff and spontaneous. In fact, that was the general sense of the site still - a bunch of people there to chat, not just to "raise visibility" for a project of choice.

There are a lot of opinions about why and how this changed, and there are probably a few inflection points that can be named. But the broader answer is that individuals and companies recognized an opportunity to get free advertising, and used it - and nobody was there to stop them. Nobody wanted to step up and say "Hey, we've noticed a lot of AMAs which seem to be purely for advertising purposes. Stop it."

And - I'll stress - this is not a Reddit-unique thing. Any community can die or be coopted if they're not managed. Reddit just happened to have a large enough audience to make it happen.

money

That Lemmy one is quiet, but if you look through the past year there's been some really interesting ones on there - which seem to follow the older "I have an interesting job or life experience" pattern.

"Bring on the questions on Rampart!"

The one I remember is Brie Larson doing an impromptu AMA close to around 2010. Back then she was mostly unknown.