This is a place for laymen to come get answers about topics they'd like to know more about. By the very nature of this the overwhelming majority of these 328,407 readers and ~900 users here right now are not experts in anything. In fact I'd wager most people here have a high school and small internet accentuated understanding of history along with whatever was required for their GE if they're in University.

Most people here, frankly, don't know all that much. That's not meant to be derisive as there is nothing wrong with that as that's why we're all here but it is the simple fact; this is a place of learning and almost everyone is a learner. So a natural extension of this fact is that most of the voters do not and can not determine the accuracy of a post as they are, by definition, here to learn. Hell I can't determine the accuracy of a post about, for instance just in this thread, Mesoamerica and Historical Linguistics. That question on the front page now "When did the inhabitants of Italy stop referring to their spoken language as lingua latina and start referring to it as lingua italiana? What intermediary stages existed?" I know literally zero about and can make no educated judgement on which post is most accurate and neither can just about everyone else here.

For that reason we don't operate on votes alone. Redditors and people in general go for the "coolest" sounding answer or an answer which aligns with their bias' or preconceived notions. Someone who doesn't cite shit but makes a bunch of interesting sounding conjecture, bold font, and formatting will get 500 upvotes and gold while the guy who was concise, not flashy, and well cited will be a 3rd or 4th level comment with 20 upvotes.

We can't let, for a lack of a better phrase, "the mob" determine the content basically because most of us here are not experts on whatever specific topic is being questioned. For that reason we have a set of rules for everyone to follow to, at the best of our ability, maintain some level of quality control and make sure the only comments that remain in threads are well cited (or could be well cited if asked) and factual responses. That means that if someone makes an interesting sounding but completely unsupported answer and refuses to support it with evidence when asked then it should be removed regardless if it got hundreds of upvotes before mods got to it.

That pesky "Eternal September" feeling is usually linked to when we get a lot of traffic from non-regulars. We were a trending sub on the 15th (so featured on the front page) so that might be some of it. Traffic doesn't seem too unusually high for the 15th though, so I'm not sure. Add in a few interpretive/sensitive threads and yes, mod workload has been pretty high these past few days. I for one could use a nap.

But yeah, the short answer is that there were a lot of answers that were not up to snuff and needed to be deleted.

This is a concept discussed in several recent meta threads: the best answers to questions, as per the subreddit rules, do not always receive the most upvotes. For instance, my most upvoted comment in this sub doesn't contain a single source and comments about general trends I had some insight on for a question that didn't get any answer for a period of time. The thread happened to get upvoted, got some exposure, and my comment which sounded interesting and unique got votes. The mods can't control that. On the other hand, my more thorough and better sourced comments have few votes. This is a recent one I spent a good bit of time, but the question was poorly phrased, and so neither got much exposure. Likewise, even a comment selected for the twitter can only receive a fraction of the votes others do.

Why is this? Mods control the deletion of comments and questions that do not meet the subreddit's standards. Any redditor can affect what becomes top comments or threads. These bodies have different standards.

To tag onto this a little - there was a question up a couple of weeks ago I was following with interest about the treatment of minority groups under Nazism. The question seemed ok, the comments weren't that great and were being purged - but the whole post was deleted... I wish there was a way of noting why it was deleted. ie asked recently, already in FAQ's etc