Hello everyone and welcome to the 20th installment of our continuing series of Rules Roundtables! This project is an effort to demystify the subreddit and also to gather your feedback to help improve it! We aren't just covering the hard and fast rules though, but also looking at other aspects of the subreddit and the community. This week, we're looking at the (in)famous "[removed]" 'comment graveyards' that are common in the subreddit and why that is the case.
##Eternal September
As any long time reader knows, and any new arrival on the subreddit quickly finds out, many comments in /r/AskHistorians end up getting removed. In any decently sized internet community Eternal September is an enduring issue as new users continue to arrive, and /r/AskHistorians is no different. It has long been the policy of the modteam that any comment which don't comply with the rules and expectations of the subreddit get removed, which in many threads can result in the seas of [removed] comments. Most users expect this, and for many it is perhaps even the hallmark of the subreddit, but nevertheless, we often find ourselves fielding questions about why the rules are enforced in the way that they are.
##Curation of a Space for Quality Contributions
The core reason behind the removal of any and all posts which break subreddit rules is that our aim is to create a space in which people who can best answer your historical questions want to participate. As such, the philosophy of this subreddit might be boiled down to "No answer is better than a bad answer". The expectation of our users - both flairs and lay-readership - is that the answers in the subreddit will be a certain level of quality, so part of creating that kind of space is removing content which doesn't belong. Those just simply aren't what /r/AskHistorians exists to provide a space for. The rules, which we have spent much of the previous installments of this series exploring, all exist for important reasons, so there is no compelling reason to not remove comments which break them.
It also goes beyond simply 'removing what doesn't belong' though. It is an inherent limitation of the reddit platform that posting early is often a key factor in an even marginally decent post quickly establishing itself as the top response in a thread. The flip side is that the kind of in-depth, comprehensive responses which are the hallmark of this subreddit are not something that can be written in the same timeframe as a three-sentence, off-the-cuff, wild-guess. If a thread gets popular, when one "answer" goes up within ten minutes, and the other goes up in ten hours, the first one up will long since have gotten the attention, while the latter comment may languish.
Yes, when it comes down to it we're talking about meaningless internet points, but it is still important to respondents. Everyone here volunteers their time because they love history, and love sharing their knowledge, and knowing that other people read and enjoyed an answer is what makes putting the time and effort into writing and research worth it. We have polled our flaired users in the past, and chatted with many of them countless times over, and time and time again, it is impressed upon us that it is because they know that they don't need to compete with slap-dash comments and wade through unneeded clutter that they keep coming to /r/AskHistorians and keep contributing.
And to be sure, this isn't idle speculation either. While we are 'removal happy' as anyone, we still have threads where an answer which is quickly written but just barely manages to meet the threshold to remain sits atop a thread, hundreds of upvotes and dozens of follow up responses while one which is much more in-depth, but posted hours later, sits all but ignored with a few upvotes. I'm sure many a flair has a tale of woe along those lines. So obviously, we can't entirely eliminate the problem, as we can't keep removing everything in the hope that a better answer materializes to replace it, but we can do our best to minimize such an effect.
Now, objections to this approach usually fall into a few broad categories, which I will address in turn:
####"Let the Upvotes Decide"
To some, moderation should be the minimum required amount. Presumably, in the case of /r/AskHistorians, the rules would more be guidelines, and it would be up to the body of redditors to decide on whether responses meet them, and to upvote or downvote accordingly. Now, putting aside the above matters of cultivation, there is a much more straightforward reason we reject such an approach. Namely that the upvotes often don't do a very good job! Certainly, we often see rules-breaking comments get mercilessly downvoted in just the short time that they are visible before removal - I've seen dozens of downvotes happen in the span of a minute or two - but we've also seen clear rules-breaking posts quickly rise up in a thread before being reported and dealt with by a mod. Simply put, sometimes it works, but sometimes it really doesn't. For people who do want such an approach, we recommend /r/AskHistory or /r/History, but in /r/AskHistorians, as discussed above, our aim is to reward knowledge and effort, rather than mere speed and wit.
####"Just Mark or Highlight the 'Good' Stuff"
A suggestion we sometimes hear, sort of an attempt to split the difference, is to not remove very much stuff, but to sticky or otherwise highlight the response(s) that stand out the best. The actual merits of this approach aside (much of which are addressed in this previous Round Table on "Answered"/"Unanswered" flair), it is unfeasible from a technical standpoint. Reddit's built in comment-sticky feature is limited to mods' posts only, and any system which we could implement would be a CSS hack. It would require manual editing of the CSS for every answer so noted, and the essentially impossible workload aside, it wouldn't work for users of Mobile Apps, or anyone with sub-CSS disabled.
####"But Isn't Something Better Than Nothing?"
Not here it isn't. This subreddit is built on the idea that questions should be answered in-depth and comprehensively, and while we know that not every question can get answered, we don't believe that relaxing the rules in a way to facilitate such a goal would serve the interests of the subreddit. As we often say in the removal reasons, there are many other places people can go to get their questions answered, both on and off reddit, but when they come here we assume that they are here for an informed response from someone capable of engaging with the sources, and providing follow up information. If they wanted someone to summarize Wikipedia "because there are no other answers here", well, they likely know Wikipedia exists and they could have gone there themselves. If they wanted to just read whatever the top hit on Google was, well, its 2016 and my 89 year old grandmother uses her iPad with aplomb, so it is safe to say most people are capable of a simple web-search themselves.
So simply put we'd rather no answer than a poor one, and we remove comments which break the rules, even if that leaves a thread barren.
###You've Sold Me, But Why Not Have a "Non-Answer Chat Goes Here" Automod Post?
This is a recurring solution that gets suggested, an Automod post which would go up in every thread and says something like "If you don't have a complete answer, respond only to this thread". Several subreddits, most prominently /r/PhotoshopBattles, do something of this sort. While it does have some things to recommend it, we nevertheless are not particularly inclined to adopt such a solution, for several reasons.
Most importantly, allowing non-answer speculation or discussion to go on, even in a specific, limited space, would not be conducive to the environment that we seek to cultivate in /r/AskHistorians. The analogy might be imperfect, but it is similar to why, in your school lectures, the back row isn't designated as the "Sit here to crack jokes and chit-chat" row. We don't want to see people making clever one-liners in our subreddit, we don't want to see long strings of uninformed speculation. Simple as that. It isn't the space we are striving for. While providing a quarantined space for those might alleviate those concerns to a degree, in the best case scenario it would be a distraction in the thread, and also reduce the general tenor of discourse in the subreddit.
Regardless of what this space would look like, it has serious drawbacks. If the space is one where users can simply post their jokes and anything else barely related to the topic, any 'insightful discussion' that users might hope it would allow for will be drowned out in short order. If the space is moderated, but with a "lighter touch", then such an approach is asking the moderation team to add a considerable burden to our workload. Keep in mind that people already post jokes and non-contributive responses as it is, and they will certainly do so in considerably more volume if such a space is provided, no matter how clear its purpose is made, so it doesn't solve in any way the "seas of deleted comments" we are so famous for.
##Summing It Up
So that is the long and the short of it. In a perfect world, everyone would follow all the rules perfectly, and we'd never remove anything, but new users arrive constantly, well-intentioned respondents overestimate the quality of their comment, and yes, some people just willfully ignore the rules. We remove those comments in an effort to curate a space for informed discussion and quality answers, as their presence can be a distraction in the best of cases, and quite often serve to disincentivize or drive off users capable of writing them. Our aim is not to be exclusionary, as we welcome any and all to contribute within the rules regardless of academic status or achievement, but it is to be restrictive, and ensure that this subreddit continues to serve as a place to AskHistorians.
I'm sorry, this submission has been removed because it is soapboxing, promoting a political agenda, or moralizing. We don't allow content that does these things because they are detrimental to unbiased and academic discussion of history.
So I have an addendum to add, which was a bit superfluous for the main post as it was already getting long, but I thought some illustration might be useful, so here are some examples from threads that were trending on the subreddit recently, and thus saw a lot of activity:
The first comment posted read, literally, "Eurocentrism and propaganda". This was followed by "Racisium and white pandering. Sorry suburban", and "There were a lot of "advanced" (when I say that I mean they got weapons from the British, French etc) African tribes and they are depicted as civilized. Therefore the Zulus being less advanced are portrayed in more primitive clothing." A few more of similar, rules breaking calibre follow, at which point we start to see the "What on god's green earth happened here? EVERYTHING IS GONE" comments.
As noted here, and in the mod post we made there, you need to have patience, and it paid off, but it took seven hours from thread to post.
In this case, it took fifteen hours, but hopefully I'm not alone in believing this response was worth the wait, and better than simply allowing the several comments recommending nothing more than a Dan Carlin Podcast that came in first!
Finally this thread, while the first comment up:
Actually in 1604 James I King of England, and VI King of Scotland wrote an anti-tobacco pamphlet where some of the health harms tobacco produced were covered (warning, the writings contain racism against American Indians). Of course this was pipe smoking, not cigarettes. And it doesn't seem to have stopped the English from smoking. But it's evidence negative health impacts were identified early on.
might have been at the very beginning of the right path, I hope that it is self-evident that it doesn't quite meet the standards of the rules. Likewise the several comments removed which were based on "I/my parents/my grandparents remember those days, and [...]", of which we removed many, and then a number which posted useful images but did nothing to contextualize them or utilize them as part of a larger answer, as required by the rules. In the end, the thread saw multiple responses that fulfilled the requirements though!
So anyways, hopefully that provides a bit of a peek at what we're talking about about, and illustrates that on /r/AskHistorians, usually good things come to those who wait!
At its heart, there are competing systems of knowledge (epistemologies) behind the contentiousness of this rule.
"Let the upvotes" decide is basically a populist approach to knowledge. Wisdom of the crowd and all that. "We know what looks good and right to us," sort of thing. Sometimes that works. When you are trying to estimate the number of gum balls in a jar, for instance, crowd-sourcing works really well. But you wouldn't do that for something like brain surgery. "Upvote if you think that's the cerebellum and we should cut it."
"Heavy moderation" by contrast is basically an argument in favor of the idea of expertise, that is, that there is knowledge that can only be acquired after long periods of study, after training of the mind, as a result of experience, etc. And specifically this forum is about formal, academic expertise (even if not all participants or flairs are academics — it is about a model epistemology, even if the correlation between the model and the reality varies). Academic expertise in history is about certain norms about source usage, assumptions about good and bad methodologies, and heavily rooted in a broader community of scholarship. The downside for this model is that it is explicitly a "gatekeeper" approach: only some people "matter" when it comes to this form of expertise.
Now I think it's clear where I throw my lot in (I'm on the side of the academics, as irritating and squirrelly as they can sometimes be), but it's worth noting that you can take or leave various epistemologies as you want. Nobody is forcing anyone to read anything on this subreddit nor does it command such immense attention that one should be overly concerned about its comings and goings. If you want to talk about history without the burden of academic expertise being forced upon you, then check out the other subreddits about history that are not as heavily moderated. This sub is not AskHistory but AskHistorians, an explicit allegory to the epistemological model that underpins it, one based on the idea of expertise.
You might ask, why not both? Shouldn't truth out? And yes, sometimes it does out — sometimes it is clear in a discussion between an expert and a dunce who is who. But when it comes down to non-experts evaluating the conversation, it can become an exercise in rhetoric and sophistry. It becomes about who knows how to be more persuasive, not who is more true. And as we all know from experience, persuasiveness and truth are not mutually overlapping in many instances. This is one of the reasons academics don't like to take part in "debates" against pseudoscientists, cranks, deniers, whoever, because debates can quickly descend into clever appeals to the crowd as opposed to actual attempts at ferreting out truth. (No comment on recent debates of note...)
If you're thinking, gee, this sounds like it is not an issue limited to history, you are right, this is a major issue with the idea of expertise as well, and there are many common challenges to these notions of expertise, most notably by people who find themselves on the "outside" of the community in question. To quote one such frustrated source from a few years ago: "And I don't wanna talk to a scientist / Y'all motherfuckers lying, and getting me pissed." It is just worth noting that these issues are decidedly not new — they are as old as formal knowledge and expert societies themselves.
I really have never understood why this issue seems to be the most contentious one on the sub. As if seeing an interesting question with a bunch of comments and then seeing that they've all been removed is somehow an affront to the answers you're entitled to. As if flairing a question as "unanswered" would be some enormous time saver.
It's an issue with Reddit. It always has been. It costs 2 seconds of your day to go "oh well" and hit the back button.
Get over it.
I'll add a post I bookmarked from /r/history as an example of why we remove so much.
How did Hitler get along with the Vatican, while killing Jews?
Top answer, with 1217 upvotes and gold: "Vatican was in pure survival mode, they wanted to ensure that after all the killing was over that they would still exist."
We don't base our rules on conjecture and assumption, but on evidence that shows what happens without our moderation.
I, for one, look at questions, decide they are interesting, open the comments, see a list of nothing but [removed]... and grin. It cuts down on wasted time.
Another thing to remember is that upvotes are not just worthless internet points. It also means an answer will be seen first. And there is a large amount of people on reddit who read the title, read the first comment, then move on*. Even to these people who are only barely interested I'd personally not want to leave a bad answer, or worse a wrong answer. Even the original questioner might not return to the thread to check out the new and better answer, especially if it comes as a rebuttal which results in no mail warning. I'd hate for someone to come in and, for example, ask why samurai were so loyal and leave after reading that they were brainwashed on war tales and the bushido code and not know it's bullshit.
*Source: my butt.
I'll say -- as a big fan of the subreddit, and as someone who has as a major academic goal to get a flair here -- that the current system, flawed though it may be is one of the major reasons that I'm able to find consistently trustworthy answers. Of course, major props to the spectacular moderation team on this subreddit.
Would you be able to elaborate on why some posts show up as [removed] but others simply disappear?
In many cases the [removed] posts have reasons posted by the mod in question commenting on why it was removed (not always though) but the disappeared posts don't (by definition since there's no post at all) have any explanation.
If there's no explanation for a modding action that runs the risk of being taken as arbitrary.
I have a follow-up-question:
Why not just hide the [removed] comments?
Upon some inspection, the <div> the removed comment sits in has the .deleted class, so shouldn't something like
.deleted
{
display:none;
}
in the subreddits css do the trick? Yes, it would only work for those with the css on and not on apps, but still, that would be better than nothing, no?
As everything that I write, this is in a grave danger of being completely stupid, but I was thinking about something:
First of all, you guys are all doing a tremendous job in keeping this place an incredible source of information and educational joy. I've got zero problems with the rules or your approach. In fact, I admire both of those. And I also like that you're not deaf to feedback and that you do indeed provide some space for general discussions in the free for all friday threads.
However, I do think that lots of people have an itch and need to say things which are on topic, yet not up to the quality standards. I can confirm based on my own experience that there's kind of a "black market" with answers going on, through the personal messages. I have received several messages (one just 5 minute ago) that start with "This would get removed, but I wanted to tell you what I know..." or some such phrase. And I have sent at least one message like that myself - a person expressed general interest in Czech history, so I pointed some stuff they might find enjoyable to read more about). Now, those SHOULD get of course removed if they'd pop up in a normal question thread, as they are not comprehensive enough or even relate personal anecdotes. But have you considered surveying maybe few trending topics that week and putting up a thread that could perhaps look like this: "So, NON-historians, what do you know and think about: Napoleonic Warfare?"
I think this could let people who maybe know enough about a very specific subtopic, which has a low chance of coming up in a question or does not make for a long answer, to, shall we say, release pressure. I also think it could help the educational purpose of this sub, in letting the experts look at and maybe correct popular misconceptions.
Obviously, it'd be a work load on top of the existing one. Just a (rambling) thought.
Why do so many questions, especially fairly new ones, have a single, removed, comment? It's so common I rarely bother checking the comments of a question with a single comment. To be clear, I'm not asking why said comment gets removed, since I suspect these comments aren't very good, I'm just wondering why a single bad comment apparently pops up very quickly on most questions. Are we plagued by a spam bot? Are there people camping out to jump on new questions with bad comments?
i'm not sure how many people will be checking this after a few days so I made a secondary meta post for a small tip that i think helps alleviate some of the problems raised with browsing /r/askhistorians
Essentially you can search the comment sections of all subreddits directly by adding a /comments to any sub's URL (thus reddit.com/r/askhistorians/comments).
it's not a perfect solution but it does help you find posts that have answers especially when not on the front page. I often use a mixture of skimming frontpage and skimming through /comments to get the most out of this sub.
it also helps answer /u/ProbeOne concern on the rules round-table
This is especially pertinent to the discussion at hand as most threads end up clogged with deleted replies. A thread with a quality reply and five followup questions looks identical at face value to a thread with six deleted spam posts advertising mens hair gel to hapless hairless historians.
the spam posts will not show up in /comments but the followup questions will and will help the answered question stick around a bit and for highly upvoted posts to distinguish between ones with answers and ones without them.
With all honestly, this subredit's what ends up doing is to connect the common people AND other historians with, well, historians. If the sub does not maintain its quality threshold then we would come back to the point where professionals are inaccessible beings from another dimension (unless you're another professional in the same intellectual circle) and that would ultimately just hurts historical inquiries by the general populace and with that all the meaningfulness of this subreddit.
We want to attract historians or anyone with equivalent knowledge for a given answer, and with that said, we don't want to make them lose their time and removing low-quality comments is one of the best ways to archive that.
I would like to reiterate the often stated issue. It is easier to go outside of /r/AskHistorians and read a twitter account than it is to sift through dozens of threads per day looking for excellent answers.
We still desire and need a mark applied to questions that have received thorough answers.
This is especially pertinent to the discussion at hand as most threads end up clogged with deleted replies. A thread with a quality reply and five followup questions looks identical at face value to a thread with six deleted spam posts advertising mens hair gel to hapless hairless historians.