I'm 4 years old. AMAA.

March 5, 2011 8:46 AM

Q: what is best in life? A: Eating cake. I mean spending time with my family.

A gosh darn cute Reddit AMAA featuring a 4-year-old.
posted by Foci for Analysis (41 comments total)

So sometimes my wife will come in and do dramatic readings over my shoulder of whatever IRC channel I happen to be in. She'll do all the voices, super seriously. I think if I got her to read that thread aloud we might find ourselves approaching some kind of cute-nerd-apogee.
posted by Jofus at 8:54 AM on March 5, 2011 [3 favorites]

AMA gold.

Check out Ken Jennings with special appearance by his old roommate Brandon Sanderson.
posted by Ad hominem at 8:57 AM on March 5, 2011 [3 favorites]

FINALLY, someone willing to address the Dragon issue.
posted by The Whelk at 9:01 AM on March 5, 2011 [6 favorites]

This is so oddly awesome. Even the snarky adults are won over by the innocent charm of the 4 year old. Thanks for posting.

The answer to the Voight-Kampff question is perfect.
posted by hippybear at 9:03 AM on March 5, 2011 [1 favorite]

WRONG!

Conan! What is best in life?
posted by 7segment at 9:17 AM on March 5, 2011 [2 favorites]

Hmm, SIDT actually proved useful for once.

JK, I'm not mad at him for getting boatloads of karma. Good for him for using his talents to make a well-liked novelty account. As I lack knowledge of stereotypes, drawing skills, knowledge of statistics, or vast hoards of porn, I don't think that will ever work out for me.
posted by mccarty.tim at 9:22 AM on March 5, 2011

Sometimes Reddit is amazing. Thanks for this.
posted by jet_manifesto at 9:29 AM on March 5, 2011

Q: what is best in life?

ANSWER.
posted by Fizz at 9:31 AM on March 5, 2011

the Voight-Kampff question
posted by memebake at 9:40 AM on March 5, 2011 [7 favorites]

I would be the king! And I would kill everybody else except my family.

Hey-o!
posted by everichon at 9:41 AM on March 5, 2011 [1 favorite]

I love this.
posted by sciurus at 9:46 AM on March 5, 2011

Very cute. Also, the number of times "Despicable Me" was mentioned exceeded my threshold for word-of-mouth recommendation and I had to obtain a copy to watch.
posted by DU at 9:46 AM on March 5, 2011

That kid is awesome!
posted by shothotbot at 9:52 AM on March 5, 2011

cake > killing people > parents > *
posted by spamguy at 9:52 AM on March 5, 2011

Sometimes Reddit is amazing. Thanks for this.

Where else would you find scumbag Falkor

Well I guess just about every other site on the internet, but I found it on reddit.
posted by Ad hominem at 9:54 AM on March 5, 2011 [4 favorites]

Q: What's the first thing you think of when you wake up?
A: I don't think about anything when I wake up.

This! Before I was blind but now I see!
posted by asymptotic at 9:55 AM on March 5, 2011 [1 favorite]

This kid deserves parents that also like cake. Then he can eat cake and spend time with his family.
posted by madcaptenor at 9:55 AM on March 5, 2011

Worth it just to learn about badger badger badger. Undoubtedly a monster hit in dance clubs I'm too unhip to know about.
posted by msalt at 9:56 AM on March 5, 2011

Actually, the kid's answer ("Dragons") to his take on the economic climate made me think back to this comment here on the blue about the foreclosure crisis. This kid may well and truly be The Kwitisach Haderach.
posted by KingEdRa at 10:02 AM on March 5, 2011

Spending time with my family.
(click through to get the right timestamp)
posted by you're a kitty! at 10:03 AM on March 5, 2011

I want to do a question-by-question comparison with the little girl's thread.
posted by Night_owl at 10:27 AM on March 5, 2011

It's funny, because I spend basically no time around kids and don't even think I like them. But when I read that AMA, the first thing I thought was, "So THAT'S why people have kids -- 'cause they're fucking hilarious!"
posted by Afroblanco at 10:50 AM on March 5, 2011 [11 favorites]

Is this supposed to be some kind of reboot of Axe Cop?
posted by oneswellfoop at 11:49 AM on March 5, 2011

If/when I become a father, asking my kid non sequitur questions will quickly become my one and only hobby.
posted by dixiecupdrinking at 11:51 AM on March 5, 2011 [2 favorites]

Are you bored of this now? Yes, I'm bored of your face.

Smiling ear to ear over here. Fucking great.
posted by dry white toast at 12:34 PM on March 5, 2011 [3 favorites]

Q: what is best in life?

ANSWER, THE MUSICAL.
posted by Robin Kestrel at 1:02 PM on March 5, 2011

Q: "Magnets, how do they work? A: "They get paper clips to come to you."
posted by shoepal at 1:33 PM on March 5, 2011 [2 favorites]

hippybear: Even the snarky adults are won over by the innocent charm of the 4 year old. Thanks for posting.

You may have missed the part where 44% of redditors voted it down instead of up.
posted by paisley henosis at 2:20 PM on March 5, 2011 [2 favorites]

Well, reddit is a foreign country to me, so I overlook anything on the screen which doesn't have immediately apparent meaning to me. I came for the Q&A, was enchanted, and found that the flow of the AMA seemed to charm those participating.

I did miss that, but do I care? No. I was happy to have read it (reddit?), and don't care that 44% of the people on that website voted it down. Maybe the reddit mods would have deleted it, if such a thing existed. But I found a lot of the questions started out a bit snarky and then the responses created goodwill in those following the interview.

In my book, that's a win.
posted by hippybear at 3:24 PM on March 5, 2011

These are so awesome.
posted by odinsdream at 3:28 PM on March 5, 2011

Q: What is the scariest thing ever?

A: A green man changing into aliens who can shoot things out of his mouth and throw up and the throw up can turn into guns and start shooting people.

Repeated for emphasis.
posted by byanyothername at 3:55 PM on March 5, 2011 [1 favorite]

Actually, Reddit's counting system is seriously messed up. It's a known issue. Reddit tends to have the number 66%, and everyone has their own theory, when it's probably a mixture of factors. Some people say the code is buggy. But the one that sounds most reasonable to me is people who downvote for self-promotion, coupled with reddit's tendency to misrepresent numbers to prevent gaming the system.

How does that work, you ask? People attempting to self-promote often downvote everything but their own submissions and comments (either by hand or via a bot) to attempt to get their own submissions to rise up the page. And if a page is close to or below 50%, it doesn't show up in the first place unless the subreddit is really starved for content.

And sometimes a subreddit gets targeted so that new content won't appear outside of the "New" section. /r/Atheism has that problem from time to time. Ironically, though, this increases a subreddit's rank, because it shows more activity, which is a key part of the algorithm that picks the default subreddits, so it's just a foolish idea that backfires due to the counterintuitivity of how Reddit actually works.

The Admins also have explained that some numbers on reddit are misrepresented to a degree to stop spambots from gaming as effectively as they would with real numbers. Apparently, too much transparency and the thing gets easy to game. This even happens on reddits that people would not have any reason downvote, like CarlHProgramming, a free course in learning C programming and basic computer science released via Reddit posts.

In this case, I think it's a mix of self-promoters wanting their own posts to be higher up on AskReddit, and the fact that the anti-spambot trick is in effect.

tl;dr: Normal Redditors aren't downvoting this kid as much as it appears. The anti-spam tricks and people trying to promote their own posts are probably the biggest factors.
posted by mccarty.tim at 4:03 PM on March 5, 2011 [3 favorites]

That said, I totally don't mind reddit doing that. The ranking system is open source and works legitimately with the real numbers that are behind the scenes, while the spam and antigaming code are closed source, so people don't interpret ways around that code. So content that's been upvoted for real still gets to the front page.
posted by mccarty.tim at 4:05 PM on March 5, 2011

Very cool, and despite spending quite a bit of time on the Internets, I'd never seen the IamA section of Reddit. Tons of good stuff in there.
posted by Sifter at 4:13 PM on March 5, 2011

Ad hominem: "Check out Ken Jennings with special appearance by his old roommate Brandon Sanderson."

For a practicing Mormon, Ken Jennings sure does curse like a sailor. His reddit name is "WatsonsBitch."
posted by l33tpolicywonk at 4:13 PM on March 5, 2011 [2 favorites]

mccarty.tim: tl;dr: Normal Redditors aren't downvoting this kid as much as it appears. The anti-spam tricks and people trying to promote their own posts are probably the biggest factors.

[](/lol "I only have an account for commenting on f7u12")
posted by paisley henosis at 4:37 PM on March 5, 2011 [1 favorite]

Ugh, I knew I made a mistake somewhere. I meant IAMA, not AskReddit.
posted by mccarty.tim at 5:04 PM on March 5, 2011

I don't even like kids, and I want to hug the internet for making this happen.
posted by jenlovesponies at 5:39 PM on March 5, 2011 [1 favorite]

A green man changing into aliens who can shoot things out of his mouth and throw up and the throw up can turn into guns and start shooting people.

Does every topic have to be about Gadaffi?
posted by msalt at 6:23 PM on March 5, 2011 [3 favorites]

A green man changing into aliens who can shoot things out of his mouth and throw up and the throw up can turn into guns and start shooting people.

Someone let their kid watch Zardoz.
posted by dirigibleman at 8:39 PM on March 5, 2011

I routinely ask my nephew random questions in a serious tone of voice, because you just cannot top the off-the-cuff answers that children will give you. Even people who don't enjoy children usually like this when it's done in a conversational (and not a "isn't the kid adorable") type of way. Children rarely realize that they're very different from adults, and will approach these types of conversations with the same type of gravity that grownups do, as long as you don't let them see you laughing.
posted by LiliaNic at 7:28 AM on March 6, 2011 [1 favorite]