Whenever I see a deleted post on /r/AskHistorians, I find my curiosity piqued.
Since I never see the original text, I can't help but wonder what happened to get it removed.
So, I want to ask the moderators:
As a ballpark estimate, how many of the posts that you delete do you feel are
people honestly trying to answer the OP (i.e. offering a one sentence answer,
using anecdotal evidence, echoing Wikipedia, or just otherwise "failing in good faith") versus
posts trying to just make a cheap joke versus honest to goodness trolls?
Obviously, the notion of "good faith" is slippery one, as is trying to ascribe motives to any given poster,
but I was curious about "gut feelings" on this. Feel free to define "good faith," "troll," and any other pertinent
term as you see fit.
And, as always, I want to thank the mods for their work here. It is greatly appreciated.
We've estimated in the past that we remove about 1/3 of total replies to posts, that is, comments; and about 8-10 percent of posts per se, that is, questions.
Of the questions, we almost always suggest a rephrasing or an alternate place to post it. We almost never remove a question for being poorly phrased (and if we do, we suggest a rewording); there are very few questions that are just utterly rule breaking.
Of the comments, it's hard to say exactly, but I would guess it's about 20 or so percent jokes or one-liners; about another 20 percent for just wrong information or answering the wrong question; and the balance are well intentioned but just don't rise to the level of a good answer, either because they're just or mostly a link or a quote, or that they rely on Wikipedia or a quick Google Books or Google Scholar quote. (Pro tip: starting with "I did some quick searching" or "after a bit of digging" is an outstanding way to get your comment removed.)
Most of the time if a comment is removed for lacking depth or being just/mostly a link or quote, I'll try to post a response suggesting what went wrong with it to try to see if the user can improve next time.
If you wanna sample some of the "mysterious" deleted posts, try reading the sub through https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/. You will notice quite a few unhelpful and sub-sub-standard comments pop up if you refresh often enough. And I suggest helping out the mods and reporting them.
In addition to what /u/LukeInTheSkyWith said, another thing to do is sort the sub by controversial and take a look at some of the 4(ish) year old posts before the current system was in place. If there was a way to sort by "older" I think this would give a better idea.