Over the last several years, the IamA subreddit has gone from interesting curiosity to a juggernaut of a media brand. Its syntax and abbreviations have invaded the public consciousness like Wired's aged Wired/Tired/Expired rubric. It's a common Twitter joke now to say, "I [did something commonplace], ask me anything."

There's a reason for that. AMAs generate some of the most compelling stories on the web, or in any medium. There's a whole cottage content industry that merely repackages the answers from AMAs.

Something about the site—the venue, the community, something—licenses people to say and do things that they otherwise wouldn't.

Erik Martin, Reddit's general manager, likes to say of the AMAs that "there are no rules." But that is, itself, a way of trying to release people from behaving as they normally would. The space is, at least by declaration, a social-convention-free zone, and many of the question-answerers try to follow along, albeit less comfortably than the pseudonymous or anonymous.

In a world where every man on the street is so goddamn media savvy, each interview feels transgressive. The electricity is generated, I would contend, from the strange, murky recesses of the Internet where AMAs began.

The genius of the AMA: It imports the aspirational norms of honesty and authenticity from pseudonymous Internet forums into a public venue with 2.5 million subscribers.

The AMA as Genuinely New Media

Perhaps the most fascinating part of the popularity of the AMA is that it did not really exist before the modern (post-2000) Internet. Most social media forms find their roots in stuff people have long been doing. Word-of-mouth information sharing was the rule long before the industrialization of news production in the 19th and 20th centuries. Journalist Tom Standage dedicated an entire book to this premise, Writing on The Wall: Social Media—The First 2,000 Years.

But there aren't clear corollaries for the AMA in previous media or social culture. This is a new media form for our PR-managed, ultra-spun times.

"Real-time Q&A [was] rather difficult before telegraph/radio/internet," Standage told me on Twitter. Though there were Q&A communities like Théophraste Renaudot's in 17th-century Paris, they didn't have the structure of one person standing before an audience and answering questions.

Print and broadcast media never hit on the AMA format either. Sure, there were gameshows like I've Got A Secret, which invited on people with wacky stories, or What's My Line? But these shows were fundamentally about the TV celebrities guessing and not about the people who were invited onto the show.

Radio call-in shows mirror some aspects of the AMA, but WNYC is not in the habit of inviting cooks at Applebee's on the show to pseudonymously answer questions about their line of work.