(CNN) -- When President Barack Obama decided to take questions directly over social media he didn't turn to his 28 million Facebook fans, or his 19 million Twitter followers. Instead, he turned to a website called Reddit where popularity is measured, fittingly, in votes.
"Hi I'm Barack Obama, President of the United States," Obama posted on the site by way of introduction. User Druken_Economist posted "moderators and admins have confirmed this thread; this is actually President Obama." Several other verification items also confirmed it, including a tweet from the official Barack Obama Twitter account and a photo on Reddit of the president seated at a plain wooden desk, staring into an Apple laptop in front of a single lamp.
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In roughly 30 minutes, Obama waded through hundreds of questions, answering only 10 on a wide range of topics including balancing life and family, and protecting Internet freedom. His unexpected online appearance caused a traffic surge that temporarily locked users out of the Reddit site, said general manager Erik Martin in a G-chat interview with The Verge. At one point, more than 30,000 users were on the page with more than 200,000 concurrent visitors, Reddit posted on Twitter. Martin said it was its highest traffic day ever.
High profile people have been interviewed before, including Larry King, Jimmy Kimmel, Ron Paul and Stephen Colbert. The two most popular Ask Me Anythings before Wednesday were astrophysicist Neil Degrasse Tyson and "Jeopardy!" champion Ken Jennings.
Redditors, as they are known in the online community, seemed mostly welcoming.
"9 minutes and already 200+ comments," wrote user KoreanTerran. "Good luck, Obama. You're going to need it."
User DirectCharge posted "ONE OF US. ONE OF US."
Others wondered how he came to the decision to participate in an Ask Me Anything or AMA. Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian told AllThingsD in an e-mail that it wasn't complicated. "There are quite a few redditors at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave and at the campaign HQ — given the prominence of reddit, it's an easy sell."
