We can get stats on the number of removed comments and on visitors. Over the past 3 months we've removed 19560 comments. Roughly the same period last year saw 20823 comments removed. Number of unique visitors and pageviews over this period was about equal compared to the last year (3M and 12M respectively).

Of course what we'd really want to compare it to is the number of comments made and questions asked. Unfortunately there's no way to get this information other than asking a Reddit admin to run the numbers.

So there has not been an increase in removed comments, and the number of views is about equal, but we can't say anything about the total number of comments.

(Note that though the stats say there's not been an increase in removed comments, it's still possible to discuss ideas to improve this sub. We'd all love more answered questions :-)

Let's try some data from a specific thread.

This currently has about 284 upvotes and 18 comments, of which 3 are not removed, 1 of which is my comment explaining to someone why their comment was removed. That leaves us with a grand total of 2 public comments.

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4suayo/how_far_back_in_history_does_the_act_of_pricing/

The breakdown on why comments were removed is as follows:

Wikipedia/other bad source: 2

Jokes: 1

Speculation/no source: 8

Complaints about poor quality comments: 4

Recently the sub has had several topics, related to sexuality, food, and especially contentious subjects, hit the FP. The fact that 1) they seem particularly interesting even to those who may not know much about history and 2) the fact that people feel they can contribute something from their personal knowledge, likely lead to the flood of poor quality comments. Posts with tons of points about sticky issues (pun intended) or otherwise sensitive issues also act like magnets for trolls.

Another issue is that if a knowledgeable person does not reply quickly (flairs and well informed non-flairs have lives too, guys) a front page there is additional pressure to posts something, anything. This is where the flood of comments that 'something is better than nothing' come in. The issue is that a wrong answer is worse than nothing, at least in this subreddit. Mods have worked hard to cultivate an environment in which people can feel a degree of trust that they're not being misled. If you study anything, physics, history, chemistry, etc., you acquire a certain responsibility to the public to promote truth and understanding. Allowing people to be misled is a failure to meet that responsibility. As such it doesn't sit right with many of us, hence the rules.

Hope this answers your question. I'm not a veteran mod so I can't estimate if this is worse/better than it has been in the long run.

One thing that we generally point out in this type of thread is that we tend to get about 100-120 questions per day, depending on the day of the week. Of those, we remove maybe five or ten for breaking various subreddit rules, but we're actually fairly lenient about questions because we assume they're being asked out of a genuine desire to learn. (We do actually personally approve or remove every question that's posted here on the sub.)

Of those 90-110 or so that remain on the sub, it seems like about one a day hits r/all and starts climbing -- we kind of joke about it on the mod-team, like "ok boob thread is going to be the /r/all thread today" or whatever.

The posts that you see that have the enormous number of removed comments are almost always those that hit /r/all and start rising.

Now why are those problematic? I have a few theories:

• Because those are on r/all and many users browse that way, they tend to attract a lot of "drive-by" users who don't realize they're in AskHistorians and so just post jokes, memes, or one-word answers

• An increasing number of users are on mobile (either apps or the mobile Reddit site) and so they don't see the nice bright orange warnings on the sidebar about reading the rules before posting. They just see something interesting and respond to it like it's another Reddit thread.

• When there's a thread with a lot of upvotes and comments, people tend to expect the there will be content there, and so if they don't see it they get frustrated and post complaints about the removed comments. We remove those, but that exacerbates the problem to an extent -- every post about removing comments that's itself removed grows the number Reddit shows. (There's probably some sort of mathematical tipping point to this.)

• There's also the fact that we have an amazing user base who is very used to the rules of this sub, and will take it upon themselves to correct bad behavior. That's awesome but we'd really prefer you just hit the report button, because then we end up removing the non-mod comments to declutter.

• And -- believe it or not -- we do get comments thanking us for the moderation policy in threads like that, which we remove too as they aren't answers. (We don't do that in meta threads, though, so send your love and/or Amazon gift cards our way.)

So that kind of sums up the /r/all issue, but it's important to remember that we have at most one thread a day that tends to attract a lot of moderation time, and most others don't need to be tended to as much.

Now as to the overall question of are there less answers, I don't know about that. It certainly seems anecdotally like we're having a quiet summer, but it's also summer; and our user base does have a large number of academics among it who don't need an excuse to procrastinate on grading are taking time off, or in the archives, or out doing history/archaeology work or whatever.

I've noticed in some subs that the message box includes the posting rules. That way the rules are right in front of the poster when they make a reply.

Have the mods ever considered this?

So I don't think you are wrong in your observation, but I'm also not sure it is something to get too concerned about (yet, of course). When a thread is particularly high-volume, we report threads ourselves to "mark" them for close attention. The volume of marked threads the past week or so has been higher than normal, something we have commented on among ourselves. But, as /u/Polybios pointed out, numbers are roughly comparable to the same period last year, so memories are short, but I think this might have happened last year!

So I would hypothesize, although I can't support with hard data, that we might be victims of "summer reddit", as some people term it. Namely, higher volume of younger posters during the day, when normally they are off in school! Compound that for us specifically, many academics are taking their vacations right now which means slightly less volume of active experts so longer waits for a good response.