Stand up and be counted! It's AskHistorians' fourth census!

by caffarelli

Gather round the spring bonfires, for an ancient rite of our people has gone unobserved for too long, and now we need your help to bring it back... We last took a census in October 2014, and that means the group portrait of you, dear readers, is now 18 months and 150,000 subscribers out of date! And the mods love you and want your picture on the break room fridge. So please help us get to know you!

#Please click here to take the census!

Edit 2: turned it off to responses after two days, thanks to everyone who participated and we hope to get the analysis posted in July!

Edit: The location question has all the countries in a pull down and sucks to scroll through on mobile. If you can do the survey on a keyboard please save yourself, otherwise skip that question if you don't want to deal with it, it's optional. And by popular request from last census we'll be leaving this open to responses for 48 hours this time.

Unconvinced? Reasons you should take this survey:

  1. It is timed to take you less than five minutes! There’s pretty much nothing else you can do in this subreddit in that time and not get deleted.
  2. Absolute lowest-effort way you can improve the subreddit.
  3. Only 8 questions are required, but there are also lots of optional text boxes and mods will read all your opinions. We use this information to see what needs to be changed, or what things should focus on. We also use the demographic data to answer questions about the sub from the media.
  4. Analysis and results will be posted in the subreddit!
  5. We can see how much we’ve changed (or not changed) with our growth
  6. It’s anonymous, you can tell the mods how much you love us without feeling embarrassed (meaning there are questions about moderation quality and style and we’d appreciate sincere feedback)
  7. You don’t need to be a regular reader or poster to participate, the opinions of lurkers and casual readers are especially wanted!

After you take the survey and are waiting to see the details you can whet your appetite with the previous census results.

If anything is confusing or broken please let me know in the comments!

agentdcf

I had to scroll ALL THE WAY TO THE BOTTOM to find my country, guys. So not cool.

KarlPilkingtonsBrain

I'm not a big fan of the available answers for the question asking how much of our Reddit time is spent on /r/AskHistorians. I like to browse here sometimes, enough so that it'd be a significant part of my Reddit usage, but nowhere near 25%. I don't feel like there's any honest answer I can give for that question.

AdelKoenig

The podcast question's answers were too narrow.

  • No, I don't like podcasts
  • No, I tried it but didn't like it
  • No, I haven't heard of it

People who have heard of it and like podcasts, but aren't interested/haven't gotten around to it yet/etc. had to write in here. I think the "don't like podcasts" should be a "not interested in this podcast" and a "no, but I want to" should be added in the future.

Also this is my first comment here. Do I have to go back and change my answers since I'm no longer a lurker? /s

Azulflame

The country selection is somewhat broken on mobile. I am from America, but couldn't scroll down far enough, so I ended up putting Argentina.

Lowbrr

TIL There is an AskHistorians Twitter and Tumblr, both of which I will shortly be following. That page made me feel bad, lol:

"...No I didn't know THAT existed either."

EDIT: I don't know who to contact for this, but the "Follow" button on the Tumblr doesn't appear to work.
It looks like it's being overlapped by the Search bar.

CitizenTed

The "other history resources" seemed to skip books. It may be because it is assumed all history buffs read books, which is a fair conclusion. But it felt odd that to answer "no" to so many questions about other history resources when 99% of my resources are books.

kieslowskifan

Upon reflection after answering the question on other history-related podcasts, I realized that http://backdoorbroadcasting.net/ really, really sounds like a porn site, someone should have realized this in the UK.

braden26

A few things. Is this is a census? Because it seems a lot more like a voluntary survey than a census. Also, some of the questions have poor answer choices, like one of the last where there are two yes answers with the only qualifiers being occasionally and frequently and then a two no with long qualifiers. It should probably just be a yes or no answer because the qualifiers on the two no's may not apply to everyone. Sorry if this is a little incoherent or rambly, I'm really tires right now...

BuckRowdy

I think this is a good idea. This is probably the most well run subreddit on reddit. I submitted one suggestion that I will post here and you can tell me if you think it's a good or bad idea.

Have you ever considered having posts flaired once they've been answered by a qualified contributor like some other subs do? Sometimes I see an interesting question and it will have 20 comments and I click on it, and it's 20 comments that have been removed. I think it would be nice to see a thread and instantly be able to see whether it's been answered or not.

luckynumberorange

Your country selection tool did not work well on mobile, I'm from the USA not Aruba.

isittimeforadrinkyet

Done. Relatively painless.

kiraella

Not quite sure what a research assistant qualifies as....I work part time as a museum coordinator which is easily defined but I didn't know if a research assistant for a professor at an archives counted as academia or as an archive category. I also volunteer at an archive and there was no place for volunteering either.

mythoplokos

A popular census! So Roman. Warms my heart to see this happening. Only, we're missing a question about everyone's income so we can separate the plebs from the rest of us.
^/s

GeneralFapper

As an European, those education options were really confusing

bananalouise

I asked multiple questions in the last three months, only one of which has been answered. What do I do with the question about whether my question was answered?! I want to credit the great answer I got and also register my disappointment that my other questions weren't answered. (Even though it was totally reasonable for some of them not to get answers because they were super narrow in scope.)

Folmer

It's not that I don't know how to report, I'm just always late

notaburneraccount

For those about to [give in-depth, quality answers that are not speculative and could provide sources if asked]

WE SALUTE YOU

1sagas1

When asked about education level, do history minors not count? I'm a non-history major, but I'm working on a history minor

khosikulu

So when are the results coming out? It's been a month, and I am an impatient stinky history monkey.