#“I run the world’s largest historical outreach project and it’s on a cesspool of a website.”

For those of you who may not have seen my last post, my name is Sarah Gilbert, and I wrote half of my dissertation on AskHistorians. For those of you who are interested in checking it out, it can be accessed here. I've written three posts highlighting some of my findings and this is the second.

In the last post I briefly touched on challenges associated with sharing knowledge in AskHistorians. In this post I’m going to address what I see as a major source of those challenges (and others): the divergence of reddit's norms from those of AskHistorians, and the technical features of reddit that enable, and even exacerbate, these challenges. As with the previous post, before I get into the details of the cultural and technical impacts of reddit on AskHistorians I’m going discuss aspects of my own experiences on reddit that impact this work.

Positionality

The prior post provided a brief overview on the methodology I used in my dissertation work. Since this post is long and the data sources and analysis are the same, I’m not going to include that information again. However, my position relative to the work shared in this post is a bit different. To recap, positionality is a process undertaken by qualitative researchers so that they can be more aware of and attempt to mitigate biases that might come from demographic characteristics and lived experiences. I have both demographic characteristics and lived experiences that influence how I’ve framed this post, and even the fact that I chose to write it. As a woman user of a site that hosts misogynistic communities, I identified with the experiences of other women and felt a great deal of empathy towards participants who were affected by sexism, racism, and bigotry. While my identity as a woman likely led to some bias, I believe that, overall, my experiences as a reddit user played a positive role in conducting research in this space. Truth be told, metasubs are my guilty pleasure, and I find controversy that relates to reddit itself fascinating. I have a good idea of how reddit and its culture has developed over the years because I was there (since 2012 anyway), with metaphoric popcorn, as many of these developments unfolded. Much of this post was not written as an outsider looking in, but as a reddit user (and AskHistorians reader) myself.

This post is organized in three main parts: first I provide an overview of AskHistorians’ norms and describe how these norms establish the sub as a public history site. Next, I provide an historical overview of reddit’s norms, primarily as they pertain to speech. Finally, I describe how reddit’s norms and technology are both problematic and advantageous for AskHistorians as a public history site.

The development of AskHistorians as a public history site

A common joke made in meta posts (usually on AskHistorians’ birthday or in reference to the 20-year moratorium) goes something like this: “so in x years will someone write the history of AskHistorians?!” It’s a good joke– however, an early history of AskHistorians has already been written by u/agentdcf in this post. It’s fascinating and I recommend everyone take a look.

However, for those who might want to avoid falling down an AskHistorians rabbit hole, the takeaways from his post that are most relevant here are:

• For the first six months AskHistorians was, for all intents and purposes, lawless: flair was awarded based on an honor system; rules weren’t formalized, at least not in writing; answers often veered from the topic of the question; norms developed so that answers were long, detailed, and well sourced; and moderation was light, relying on users to enforce community norms through voting.
• In 2012 the sub underwent a fast period of growth: those who appreciated the long, detailed, and well sourced answers began to share them on aggregation subs like DepthHub and BestOf, which drew traffic and subscribers (side note: this is how and when I found AskHistorians). Between March and May of that year, AskHistorians began its ‘Eternal September.’
• Rapid growth necessitated change: The influx of new users meant that not all of them enculturated existing norms on their own. This led to the development of rules to formalize these norms, and the establishment of a mod team to enforce them.

So, while the strict set of rules we know to today weren’t established from the beginning, many (such as providing in-depth, well-sourced answers; avoiding jokes; and maintaining civility) existed informally though the norms of the community right from the beginning. It’s also these rules and norms that allow AskHistorians to function as a public history site.

What is public history? According to The National Council on Public History, public history is defined as “history beyond the walls of the traditional classroom” (n.d.). I’m in no position to go into more depth about what is, or isn’t public history, as that’s not my area of expertise. However, in our interview u/mimicofmodes described why AskHistorians stands out as a public history site:

. . . it's the most direct method of public history out there. At a living history site you have site interpreters . . . between the public and the curators/researchers; a book is a one-way street, as is a museum exhibition, whether the recipient is passively taking the information that's handed out and possibly unable to get the specific information they're looking for.

Supporting the mission of public history is incredibly important to the people who manage the sub: in fact, contributing to public history was not only the motivation that was most frequently described by mods, but it was also most often described as their primary motivation. In my interviews with them, mods described several reasons why AskHistorians’ role as a public history site is important. First, they see that AskHistorians provides justification for the study of history:

The humanities does, as a whole, a very bad job of justifying its continued existence. . . We need to do a better job of that and I see AskHistorians as . . .a stepping stone towards a resolution of being public intellectuals, being public historians, justifying our reasons for our research. And I think the ability to bring in both enthusiasts and hobbyists, and professors, and master’s students into a history project, one of the larger history projects that’s on the Internet is my reason I guess, for doing that (Josh).

There are a few keys points I’d like to highlight from Josh’s statement: first is that the sub’s popularity is demonstrative of a widespread interest in history– and not just any history, but good history. Although funding for the study of the humanities is decreasing and humanities departments at universities are downsizing, interest from a massive audience shows that history is important to people. Second, is that AskHistorians is egalitarian. While its rules and norms may mirror those established by academia, anyone who is interested can participate, even if it’s as a reader.

Second, mods described how AskHistorians can help combat disinformation spread by bigoted groups:

I do see this enormous, really problematic, deeply dangerous, in my opinion, misunderstanding of history, often a misappropriation of history by political groups and people with often very nasty agendas. And I see AskHistorians as basically the best historical outreach program that basically anyone has come up with so far. And I’m more than proud to be a part of that, just for the mission it represents there. It’s teaching millions of people who might never have given a hoot about history all about it (u/Elm11).

That AskHistorians can do this is tied to its rules and norms and their enforcement. As one former mod put it,

The AH mod team sees the deletion of such bad comments as ‘curating the sub’, akin to pulling out weeds so flowers can grow.

The weeds are off-topic discussion, anecdotes, jokes, abuse and harassment, and poorly sourced or misinformed responses. The flowers are comprehensive responses that get to the heart of questions asked.

A short history of ‘free speech’ on Reddit

The rules that establish AskHistorians as a public history site are in direct contrast from the norms of the wider reddit-community. In AskHistorians, all rule-breaking content is removed. While it’s certainly not universal among all subs, there exists a general expectation on reddit that content promoted and hidden should be determined by users through voting, and otherwise, speech should be free from sanctioning. In this post, when I discuss free speech this is what I mean– I’m discussing reddit-style ‘free speech’ where speech should be free of consequences, not freedom of speech as guaranteed by the US Constitution. Reddit users’ expectation that speech on the site should be free from consequence exists for a reason. The idea of reddit as a bastion of free speech comes from above: the admin and their (lack of) policies. The following is a general timeline of speech related policy development.

• 2005: Reddit is founded; there were no official limitations on what kind of content could be shared.
• May 2011: The first site-wide rule is created when administrators officially announced that posting personally identifiable information would result in being banned from the site. The announcement came after Gawker published an article detailing an incidence of reddit-style vigilantism that targeted an alleged scammer.
• October 2011: Media outlets, such as CNN and Gawker, publicized r/jailbait, a subreddit dedicated to posting sexually provocative pictures of young, often underage, women. After it was revealed that the subreddit had been used to exchange child pornography it was removed by administrators (Morris, 2011). To my knowledge this is the first instance of a subreddit being removed by the admin.
• October 2012: the creator of r/jailbait and a host of other pornographic subreddits, u/violentacrez, was doxxed on Gawker.
• October 2012: In a leaked communiqué to moderators (and shared on Gawker), reddit’s then CEO, Yishan Wong defended free speech on reddit, saying:

We stand for free speech. This means we are not going to ban distasteful subreddits. We will not ban legal content even if we find it odious or if we personally condemn it.

Nonetheless, the trend of removing offensive subreddits continued. However, subreddits were not banned for their content; rather, they were banned for breaking other site-wide rules.

• June 2013: r/n*****s was banned for brigading and vote manipulation (Todd, 2013).
• September 2014: r/TheFappening, and spinoff subs were banned for copyright infringement. In this blog post, Yishan Wong again made a statement supporting ideals of free speech and placed responsibility for determining content seen on the user-base:

We uphold the ideal of free speech on reddit as much as possible not because we are legally bound to, but because we believe that you – the user – has the right to choose between right and wrong, good and evil, and that it is your responsibility to do so.

• May 2015: Reddit admins create an anti-harassment policy. In the policy, users who are harassed are encouraged to contact reddit’s admin; however, the announcement does not outline what, if any, sanctioning harassers will face.
• June 2015: r/fatpeoplehate (along with 4 smaller subs) is banned for breaking the anti-harassment policy. The decision is unpopular– the announcement post was heavily downvoted, although gilded 33 times, and reddit users began circulating a petition calling for then CEO, Ellen Pao’s, resignation. They also began harassing and threatening her.
• July 2015: Steve Huffman, CEO and cofounder, makes a statement that seems to walk back on the ideal of free speech:

Neither Alexis nor I created reddit to be a bastion of free speech, but rather as a place where open and honest discussion can happen.

. . . despite a seemly contradictory statement made by cofounder, Alexis Ohanian in May that year:

We made reddit so that as many people as possible could speak as freely as possible.

• August 2015: r/C***Town and several spinoff subreddits, were banned because they:

exist solely to annoy other redditors, prevent us from improving Reddit, and generally make Reddit worse for everyone else (Steve Huffman, 2015).

This decision is largely supported by reddit users– the comment in which the ban was announced was highly upvoted and gilded 16 times.

• October 2017: Site-wide rules are updated, taking action against content that “encourages, glorifies, incites, or calls for violence or physical harm against an individual or a group of people” or encourages the abuse of animals.
• November 2017: r/incels is banned as a result of the new policy.

So, to recap, reddit has an evolving relationship with the ideal of free speech. Typically this relationship is reactionary as admins take action after receiving bad publicity, rather than when they become aware of the problem (this long-held belief was confirmed in this interview with former admin, Dan McComas). While more recently administrators have relaxed their hardline stance on reddit as a bastion of free speech, actions ostensibly limiting some forms of speech (such as hate and violent speech) have not been rationalized by an appeal to morality (i.e., hate speech is wrong and we don’t want it on our site) but to appeals to law, personal privacy, and site growth. Whatever their reasons for removing subs may be, a recent study by Chandrasekharan et al. (2017) found that these actions had a generally positive effect on reddit, finding a site-wide decrease in types of hate speech associated with r/C***Town and r/fatpeoplehate after the subs were banned.

Nonetheless, ‘free-speech’ remains the norm and prejudice and bigotry continue to be problematic for reddit and its users. This, in turn, affects AskHistorians.

Challenges of maintaining a public history site on reddit

In this comment, u/Elm11 describes the effect of reddit on AskHistorians:

culture and popular perception of Reddit absolutely does have an impact on our activities. Reddit shapes the people who come through our door, the questions which are asked here, the issues which arise in threads on /r/all.

His comment highlights the major themes I’m going to highlight in this post: how the differing norms and upvoting system affect new users’ enculturation into the community, and how reddit’s demographic (and its technology) shapes the scope of the sub.

Guaranteeing quality in the context of reddit-style ‘free speech’

The key to ensuring that users get high quality responses to their questions is in the rules (posted in full in the wiki). Anyone who’s interested in why AskHistorians has the rules they have should check out the wiki. It includes what each rule means, what forms of sanctioning will result should the rules be broken, and links to discussions explaining why each rule was developed. On the other hand, reddit has guidelines in the form of reddiquette; however, sanctioning for violating these guidelines is only indicated for three actions: posting personal information, off-reddit requests for votes, and spamming. These broad guidelines have the advantage of allowing considerable freedom to establish how subreddits are run. However, it also means that subreddits themselves are not required to have rules beyond the guidelines established by the site. In many cases, particularly subs with millions of subscribers (r/science being a notable exception), rules are generally pretty lax. The problem isn’t so much that reddit has loose guidelines and that many subs follow suit; the problem is that when loose guidelines are framed as ‘free speech,’ moderation is seen as censorship. For many reddit users, such as the one who made this removed comment, any and all censorship is bad– site destroying bad:

11,000 upvotes. All the comments are deleted because of censorship. This post is a ghost town. Reddit is dead. R.I.P

The full log shared with me by the mods was a thread in which the vast majority of comments were removed. The conflation of moderation and censorship was a common theme in the removed comments, with several people expressing their belief that the mods had gone mad with power, even going so far as to compare them to dictators:

Mods on this sub read too mucb about Hitler, huh?

The majority, however, ask where the comments are or complain about how many comments are removed, like this one:

wtf happened to all the comments here?

and this one:

Everything is banned on this subreddit? What is this cancer mod work?

Occasionally, in meta discussions, users will express their dissatisfaction with the moderation style, such as one user in my recruitment post, who stated:

I'd just like to see all the answers and let community votes do the decision making, personally.

Most regular AskHistorians readers support the rules and their enforcement; in fact, this census showed that 91.6% believe the mods’ efforts are just about right. Nonetheless, users new to the sub and a minority of regular users are more supportive of reddit’s ‘hand-off’ approach to moderation. While letting the upvotes decide is congruent with reddit’s free-speech norm, interview participants described three reasons why this doesn’t work for AskHistorians, and those reasons are tied to the sub’s mission of public history.

First, comments posted first are likely to receive the most upvotes (see this post, by u/llewellynjean for more info). Because well sourced responses can take hours to write the highest quality responses are easily buried by lower quality but quick to write responses. This is frustrating for readers and experts alike. For example, when describing why he likes AskHistorians, Matt (a lurker) highlighted the importance of deleting low quality responses:

I don’t want to have to search through a bunch of people making Alexander the Great puns. I like going in and seeing one really good post from a flaired commentator . . . and then a whole bunch of crap deleted underneath – that’s beautiful! This is a wonderful part of the Internet!

As is reflected in his first sentence, good information can be difficult to find amid jokes and other comments that neglect to fully or reliably respond to the question. Highly upvoted yet poor quality answers are also frustrating for flaired users, such as u/MrDowntown:

Something that I’ve encountered a couple of times in the last year to my frustration is that I won’t see a question for three or four hours and then somebody once had a college class that read a chapter about this topic will have given what I would consider a C- answer. Something that is only tangential to the central question that’s been asked, but by the time I get to the question they have been upvoted 30, 40 times, and my, what I think is a better answer [only] 8 or 10 people see it.

This leads to the second reason free-speech/let the upvotes decide doesn’t work for AskHistorians: most users are not experts in history and thus not qualified to assess the quality of a given response via upvoting. Not only is seeing poor answers more highly upvoted than your own answer frustrating to experts, allowing users to determine what they think is the best response by upvoting can promote and propagate harmful misinformation, an example of which is provided by u/commiespaceinvader:

The frequently brought up argument that the ideas of Holocaust deniers will be easily defeated in the „free market place of ideas“ is to me as someone who deals with the subject an incredibly misguided one since: A.) lying is always easier than debunking lies. People who deny the Holocaust will simply say „crematoria don’t produce smoke! it is all a lie!“ and for those debunking them, it is necessary to actually make an argument based around how crematoria actually work, which is not something most of us have ever expected to deal with. And B.) it assumes that all people are rational and will follow the better argument (hello again, white, male, patriarchal notion of knowledge), which as current politics illustrate is decidedly not the case. People will believe what fits their world view.

Another issue (also reflected in commiespaceinvader’s statement) is that not only may non-historians not be able to fully assess the quality of responses, but that voting often reflects users’ biases. This was also observed by Mills (2018), who, in his study on political advocacy on reddit, found that highly upvoted comments often reflect users’ consensus on a given topic.

This leads to the third reason letting the upvotes decide is problematic: in a system where voting determines what content is seen and what is hidden, and where voting often reflects bias, this means that the biases held by the prevailing demographic are those that will be promoted. Reddit, and AskHistorians, is predominantly young, white, and male. This affects not only what’s upvoted (and thus seen) but also what questions are asked. In other words, upvoted questions and answers often reflect interests and assumptions typically associated with young, white, men.

The people I spoke to highlighted a number of ways the question asking and voting patterns of the demographic affected their participation. First, those whose expertise falls outside the interests of the prevailing demographic described rarely having the opportunity to answer questions in their field and when a question did touch on their area of expertise, it may not be from the perspective that most interested them, as was stated by u/mimicofmodes:

Most of my questions are about menswear (which I honestly don't care as much about as women's and children's dress), why don't we wear hats, why do we wear ties, etc. etc. While there are plenty of women who know nothing about fashion history, if there were more of them in the sub, they might at least ask about more interesting whys (when did we switch from stockings to tights, what's the history of pockets in women's dresses, did women of all classes wear corsets) - and maybe the rest of the fashion history community would be interested in asking each other questions here.

This pattern of interest is described by moderator, u/sunagainstgold:

What is undeniably true, however, is the rarity of questions about women's issues (and swap in black, LGBTQ+, etc) and the patterns in which they tend to fall. Basically: rape, sex, marriage age, and rape. And rarely from women's perspective.

Similarly, when asked about the role of the demographic, moderator u/searocksandtrees responded:

I think what it reflects to me is that there’s a lot more boyish topics that come up, whether it’s war and weapons and video games, and then a lot of really insensitive questions about rape.

This pattern of question asking (i.e., questions are rarely asked and when they are, it’s without sensitivity) also applies to questions about the history of the global south, as was described by a former mod:

I hoped to use my position as mod to encourage people interested in African history, South Asian history, and other under-represented areas to get involved and apply for flair. However, there was never much success attracting people to apply for flair on those regions. I think that is because questions on those regions are rarely asked, and tend to receive fewer upvotes, so there is less opportunity for knowledgeable people to comment before the posts fall off the front page and are not seen by the sub's audience. In any case, my inability to promote those sorts of discussions and find more experts was disappointing.

This quote highlights that this is not just a factor of demographics, but also of technology. If questions about the history of under-represented areas and people aren’t upvoted because they aren’t interesting to most users, they will get buried by questions that are. And one more sociotechnical factor that exacerbates the issue: most people (64.5%) enter AskHistorians through their front page (including me). This means that most people are only seeing questions asked that have a certain amount of upvotes, creating a feedback loop of hiding and promoting questions that appeal users in the majority demographic.

In addition to the topics covered (or not) through question asking, the way questions are asked can also impact participation. In my last post I noted that some participants described learning how to detect bias from the way questions are asked. However, this bias can also, at times, discourage people from providing responses or continuing participation. That sentiment is reflected in this comment:

East African here. Most of us are not on Reddit and enjoy discussions on a different forum. Reddit in general doesn't have a good reputation.

I lurk quite a bit and would probably be able to answer a few questions, but the way they are negatively worded is a turn off. I find myself expending too much energy dispelling negative stereotypes so I opt not to comment.

u/Commustar provides a few examples of what this looks like. Questions like, “Why was Africa less developed when Europeans started colonizing?” and “What was Nelson Mandela really like?” make certain assumptions: first about what is considered ‘developed’ and what is not, and second that history and the popular press present Nelson Mandela in a false light. Others ask about Africa through a European lens, such as “what did European explorers think of the African societies they encountered.”

In circumstances in which biased or insensitive questions are asked, moderators are tasked with making the decision to let the question stand or delete it, and experts with the decision to respond to the question or ignore it. Moderator, u/Elm11 described deliberating whether or not to delete a highly upvoted, yet contentious question as the text accompanying the question contained a link to nude photographs of women:

We had a discussion about removing it because the pictures are incredibly . . . exploitative . . . And we just felt so shitty as moderators, because here was our community, which is meant to be giving people answers about the past, but what it’s doing is providing redditors with porn. And that’s what it ended up doing. And that’s why people have ended up looking at it and it’s it become a platform for these poor women to become humiliated again, like 80 years after the event. Again.

Ultimately, they made the decision to let the question stand.

Questions such as the examples shown above arise so often that the mods have an explanation for why this occurs. u/sunagainstgold outlines the phenomenon in this comment:

. . . it illustrates a distinct empathy gap, a socially-conditioned inability to default-extend intellectual personhood to people "different than us." One of the absolute most-asked questions on AH is "Did ancient soldiers have PTSD?" Sometimes we get to hear questions about knights having PTSD, too. Anyone want to take a swing at, in comparison, how many times people have asked about rape survivors and PTSD? (And when you search for it, be sure to filter out the questions that ask about the soldier-rapists developing PTSD from massacring and raping civilians) [italics in original].

Above I showed examples of this empathy gap in questions asked. It’s also reflected in responses given – responses that are often removed by mods and thus invisible to regular users. A few examples from the thread containing the pictures of nude women include jokes like this:

Theyre going to get sandboxes.

and this:

A standard new England clambake , as done in French Indochina during the war.

as well as insults, such as this:

. . . In addition, women (and many men) were known to have an increased level of pancakes (a.ka. “flapjacks) in their diet during the war . . . hence the nature of the “pancake-tits” seen in the photographs

This ties back into why letting the upvotes decide is not a model that works for AskHistorians. The women at whose expense jokes were made and bodies ridiculed were real, living people. Allowing comments like these to stand would fail to exhibit compassion.

Effects on AskHistorians participants

Because boundaries between subreddits are permeable, there’s only so much clearly defined and strictly applied rules can do. Mods have no control over users’ voting practices, the content of private messages, or comments made on other subreddits. While the work of the moderators creates a safe space within AskHistorians, women and other minorities are nonetheless aware of the potential consequences of being minority on reddit. Of the six women I spoke with, four described altering their participation (e.g., through identity management and self-censorship) due to negative encounters they personally experienced or witnessed on reddit. For example, one lurker described one of her reasons for not actively participating in AskHistorians:

popular subreddits can be pretty hostile sometimes. AskHistorians is EXTREMELY well-moderated, but I just don’t want to deal with the unnecessary stress that comes with submitting a post.

As another example, one moderator described her rationale for participating, ostensibly, as a man:

It’s mostly because you get enough shit thrown at you as an AskHistorians mod without it becoming gendered. I mean I have received death threats and people threatening to murder my family not knowing that I even had a family. And I can just imagine what kind of disgusting rape comments and sexual harassment comments I would be getting if I was actually openly female. Some of the mods are openly female and I don’t know how they do that.

In an email exchange with one openly female mod, Ruth expressed that she did, indeed, receive gendered abuse once harassers realize she’s a woman:

Yes, I get the occasional nasty PM when it becomes apparent in a thread that I'm female--I don't hide it; I want people to know there are women hanging around.

In addition to altering participation on AskHistorians due to its location on reddit, participants also reported hiding their participation in AskHistorians from people they knew ‘in real life’ (or feeling embarrassed talking about it) because of reddit’s reputation. Despite participating in the largest online public history forum, professional, amateur, and student historians often did not feel comfortable sharing this with others. For example, when describing how he explained AskHistorians to a history professor at his university, u/Elm11 said:

you’re treading so carefully because you can’t just say, ‘look, I run the world’s largest historical outreach project’ . . . But I’ve gotta say, ‘I run the world’s largest historical outreach project and it’s on a cesspool of a website.’

However, this was not the case for everyone. AskHistorians moderators and panelists have presented on their participation in AskHistorians at multiple national conferences. Other participants included participation on their CVs. As u/sunagainstgold explained in her presentation at the National Council on Public History's Annual Conference conference:

The quality of work being produced on AskHistorians is often astronomical. We need to get over our own anonymous user accounts and claim it. 

Strides forward and positive impacts

Although AskHistorians’ location on reddit is, at times, problematic for the sub, there are also advantages. While highly upvoted posts often expose the sub to disruptive users en masse, upvoting also exposes these new users to AskHistorians. This screenshot shows the impact highly upvoted posts have on subscribership (those spikes correlate with posts that hit r/all). Mills (2018) describes how ranking posts by upvotes creates a positive feedback loop because other users mimic what they see upvoted. In AskHistorians, mods have created a new “Great Question” flair that I’m hopeful will circumvent this phenomenon by providing qualitative feedback of what a good question is, rather than relying on upvotes alone as indications of quality. Further, regular features, such as Monday Methods, and [meta] posts highlight pertinent issues that may not arise organically through question-asking, such as this recent example on how ‘free speech’ enables Holocaust denial. Further, AskHistorians’ panel of experts, are, well, experts, in addressing misconceptions through their responses, such as this example in which u/chocolatepot explained why bras used to be pointy (spoiler alert: it’s not because women used to have pointy boobs!)

While questions and upvotes might reflect the interests of the majority demographic, the community itself is incredibly receptive to learning new things and rewarding comments that demonstrate divergence from reddit’s norm. For example, one commenter in my recruitment post stated:

Answers here have helped me inform my political opinion, my thoughts regarding issues such as LGBT rights and feminism (it was actually an answer here that made me fully consider patriarchy theory!), colonialism and and [sic] its very subtle effects on today's society, and last but perhaps most importantly, have had an influence on my overall thought process and problem solving.

Comments banning users for using homophobic slurs have been gilded, and one participant told me about how a very feminist comment she’d written was not only highly upvoted, but also submitted to best of.

AskHistorians’ success as a public history site may not only have a positive effect on individual users, but as described by u/restricteddata, on the rest of reddit and online communities more broadly:

AH is sort of a "killer app" for "what the Internet could be if people are willing to put the effort into it" and I think that's very positive. The fact that the rest of Reddit can be so awful in so many different ways only underscores the contrast — if Reddit can be made to be non-awful, what else is possible in the world?

Indeed, in a recent study AskHistorians was used as an example of a well moderated site in an attempt to identify abusive behaviour using machine learning techniques (Chandrasekharan et al, 2017). AskHistorians’ rules are derived from norms established within academic history and modified to include a broader audience. Thus, the exact style or approach may not work for all other subreddits or communities. However, in carving out a regulated space in which readers can access trustworthy information about the past, and engage with it through question-asking, follow-up, and debate, AskHistorians is an apt model for promoting civil discourse online and at scale. This could not be maintained without the monumental efforts of the mod team. Their experiences are the subject of the next, and last, post.

References (peer reviewed)

Chandrasekharan, E., Pavalanathan, U., Srinivasan, A., Glynn, A., Eisenstein, J., & Gilbert, E. (2017). You Can't Stay Here: The Efficacy of Reddit's 2015 Ban Examined Through Hate Speech. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, 1(2). doi: 10.1145/3134666

Chandrasekharan, E., Samory, M., Srinivasan, A., & Gilbert, E. (2017). The bag of communities: identifying abusive behavior online with preexisting internet data. In Proceedings of the 2017 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 3175-3187. doi: 10.1145/3025453.3026018

Massanari, A. (2017). #Gamergate and The Fappening: How Reddit’s algorithm, governance, and culture support toxic technocultures. New Media & Society, 19(3), 329-346. doi: 10.1177/1461444815608807

Mills, R. A. (2018). Pop-up political advocacy communities on Reddit. com: SandersForPresident and The Donald." AI & Society 33(1), 39-54. doi: 10.1007/s00146-017-0712-9

There is a famous quote by Socrates a quote often misattributed to Socrates complaining about younger generations:

“The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers.”

(EDIT: As /u/piper06w points out, this is actually not a quote from antiquity, but "a summary of general complaints about the youth by the ancient Greeks, as written in a 1907 dissertation by a student, Kenneth John Freeman")

Which kind of shows that this is just something that humans do. That makes me think: surely that means the reverse must also be at least as old then?

This information coming from the Wikipedia page on the duel, here. The Wiki describes this practice (it's not quite clear to me whether it's referring to 'intending not to fire' or 'deliberately missing') as being 'against the Code Duello,' but I don't know anything about the Code or how widely it would have been adhered to around the turn of the 19th Century in the US.