I did an AMA on /r/science early in 2014 when the paper I'd been working on for most of my PhD came out [1], and it was a very fun experience - lots of great questions, good back-and-forth, and it meant that massively more people read my paper than would have otherwise. (It drove about 60% of the overall views to the linked Stanford press-release, and the comment thread itself had about 60,000 unique visitors).<p>I can testify to the /r/science mods doing a great job at making the AMAs possible, but it's still by no means a perfect process. Some things that helped make ours work were 1) downvoting trolls early - threads that could have been derailed were instead kept pretty vibrant. 2) setting aside enough time to do it - we basically wrote off a day of lab work and typed furiously instead. 3) Responding to the more critical comments - ignoring comments _really_ doesn't work. It's much better to wade in with your point of view.<p>[1] <a href="http://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/1ycd0l?sort=confidence" rel="nofollow">http://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/1ycd0l?sort=confide...</a>