I'll go in there and there will be a brilliant, in-depth, comprehensive answer linked, and it's got something like five upvotes. This is a problem because it suggests to me that nobody is reading these responses, that the wealth of knowledge on this sub is not being disseminated efficiency.

I don't think this is a great criterion. I read a lot of material in this subreddit that I don't upvote, especially in or via the features. This is part laziness, but also part acknowledgment that, unlike perhaps the rest of reddit, there's no real need here to vote "the good stuff" to the top of the page (...if only because the excellent mod team viciously deletes all of the garbage!). Am I alone in this behavior?

If you, specifically, want to find answers, have you tried sorting by Top instead of by Hot? This seems in my limited experience to give more active threads.

Random hypothetical that is absolutely in no way a guarantee that I actually would do this since it would take a fair bit of time which I am not committing to just yet... If I created some sort of Weekly E-Blast drawing from the Sunday thread, would people subscribe to that mailing list?

You might try browsing the new comments feed. This thing is sort of a 1337-mod hack, this feed isn't linked anywhere on any subreddit tabs like /new/ and other stuff. This feed helps the twitter team spot good answers that got posted long after the question fell off the front page. Here in the morning when everyone's getting to their offices and doing questions before their real work, lots of good answers. (It also helps us pick off crappy comments sub-wide at lightning-fast speed without the trouble of going into individual threads, pew pew pew.) But it's a strange and disjointed view of the sub, so it takes some getting used to!

Because history, I am rapidly learning, is not just about having the answers, it's about knowing what questions to ask. I don't know what questions to ask, and I don't feel like I'm exactly alone in this.

Oh bless you. This is an important and difficult thing to learn.

This seems like the sort of thing the tumblr and twitter accounts are well positioned to solve. I know links to especially good posts are (or were) often tweeted, giving a more real-time collection of the best content than the (excellent) Sunday best-of digests.

By design, it doesn't have standards as high for the questions.

I've been telling /u/Georgy_K_Zhukov that we need an AskHistorians Inquisition to enforce a higher standard but he keeps ignoring me ..... ;-)

Yesterday the "trivia" thread had an amazing, heartbreaking post by cordis_melum on the Peoples Temple dead.

Thank you for the compliment. I hope that it helps to challenge the popular perception, just a little. That would be enough, if you don't have additional follow up questions. :)

You are right, but I don't see a way to fix it other than to continue on this path and just try to work with what we have. Like you said, the format of Reddit isn't particularely suited for academic discussions or pedagogic exercises.

There are a few reasons as to why this is the case and I don't see an easy solution for any of them. You already mentioned the first one. There is a big overflow of questions which have already been answered extensively in the FAQ. There is also a disproportionate interest in Ancient Rome and Nazi Germany, which excludes many flaired users with irrelevant fields and exhaust those who are actually well-versed in the subject.

On the other hand, a lot of the questions are extremely broad or general knowledge. These questions often lay bare the great divergence between academic and popular knowledge. I'd say that to answer half the questions I encounter, even if I have the appropriate knowledge at my disposal, I have to start by correcting their assumptions and by giving a short tour of of basic tools and methods of historiography. I don't think we can avoid this. I mean, the guidelines are very well-written and they include a list of some of the most common historiographical fallacies, but the majority of users don't read the entire thing before posting their question. I doubt we'd get any visitors if we'd make that mandatory.

Yet, even if the question is good, you would still have to be lucky to find that one guy who is specialized enough to answer it. History is a very elaborate field, intertwined with all kinds of other academic fields and sub-fields. This often leads to individuals who often have very focused knowledge, some might even say "niche". Look at my flair for example. I'm specialized in my flair, some very specific famines and ecology. I try to browse the subreddit when I can and sometimes I get a moderator message to point me towards a specific question within my field, but it's still a rare occurence and we actually have to work to find the right questions. Still, even if it's a question within my field, I still might not feel comfortable enough answering it without some more research. Research which I don't always have to time to do. I think that I've probably answered more questions regarding historiographical methods and even Global History than questions about my actual expertise.

The amount of work some of the mods do is truly impressive and we should be thankful to have them, they make this subreddit work. However, I don't think there is any amount of work that can amend these really basic structural problems which are inherent to Reddit and academic knowledge.

Regarding questions being asked repeatedly - I agree it's annoying and at times excessive, but I also feel like exclusively forcing people to the sidebar and FAQ would be even worse.

One of the biggest mistakes a person can make regarding history--which both historians and the general public have made repeatedly in the past--is to assume that a given question is settled, finished, and not worth re-examination.

In the general "what caused the American Civil War" section of the FAQ, I had the top comment on three of the five listed threads once upon a time. Now I have one. I'm actually glad because my stuff was replaced by better answers.

More broadly, American history is currently undergoing a fascinating and renewed debate regarding the economic aspects of slavery and the history of American capitalism in general (see, for a big example, Sven Beckert's new book Empire of Cotton). The results of these debates will, in the future, surely change the answers to Civil War and antebellum related questions on this sub.

Perhaps there's a middle ground where the sub can be run smoothly without sacrificing the benefit of revisiting "old" questions.

DID THE NAZIS REALLY HAVE PLANS FOR A LUNAR MOON BASE?

DID VIKINGS REALLY DRINK AND RAPE SO MUCH THEIR BLOOD WAS 45% ALCOHOL AND 210% RAPE?

But seriously I always see the above two questions in different iterations at least once a day.