As I said to someone else not familiar with AskHistorians about 30 minutes ago:

We ask that answers are on a level a historian can provide - in-depth and backed by good sources. The rules are strict in order to provide good answers, which will help the questioner contextualize and truly understand what they are asking. And that happens a lot, but it takes patience, because writing such answer will often take many hours and requires the right expert to see the question. The rules can be read here and you might also be interested in this Rules Roundtable. The comments in the thread were 90% asking about the removed comments, insulting the mods and the rest was simply not an answer which we can acccept (unsourced speculation).

The reason it seems that we over-moderate, is simply because a popular question hits /r/All and with that comes an influx of people not familiarized with AskHistorians. These are the only threads which require this kind of moderation, because we adhere to our set standard for answers, no matter how many people scream at us in the comments.

/u/agentdcf is the one who deserves to answer this question, because they've done the work to reconstruct the sub's early history. (Primary source archival research, y'all!)

AskHistorians transitioned from "let the upvotes decide" to strict moderation extremely early in its history, roughly summer 2012. An early AMA went poorly when AskHistorians was the target of a now-banned subreddit's prank. It became apparent that upvotes reflect whether people like what they read, rather than whether what they read is correct and responsible history.

Over the next couple of years, a swiftly growing mod team worked out in more detail what the boundaries of acceptable answers were. The biggest developments have been the rule against copy/pasting from another source (while crediting it properly, of course!) and the ban on just pulling the Wiki article. This practice is backed up by our census. Nearly everyone who asks a question in AH has already done rudimentary research, typically reading Wiki but sometimes even more. This makes sense--it takes less effort to Google a phrase and click on the first link (usually Wiki) than to type a full question with extra detail in your reddit app of choice.

By early 2014, we're pretty sure, AskHistorians had reached the point where all top-level answers reflected the subreddit's reputation of high-quality, in-depth and expert responses (which had been acquired on the basis of "the good ones" being posted to r/bestof and r/DepthHub, while others in the sub were not so great).

The decision to require all responses, not just top-levels, to adhere to AH standards came later. That was a reflection of our awesome userbase! It's because we DO see such great and educated commentary in follow-up questions and responses, including when non-OP-answerers jump in to help with follow-ups. :)

I want to get a bit into what sort of answer we're interested in providing on this sub, and what we're not interested in providing. This sub has a mission to provide people with a place to ask questions about history and receive accurate, in depth and well-sourced answers. These can be mini-essays, not-so-mini essays, or novella length treatises on the conversion of the Southeast Asian archipelago to Islam. They can also be five-sentence answers that get at the heart of a question, even if they don't expand beyond it, provided that they are accurate.

Frankly, there are a a million places on the internet and thousands on the internet where one can get 'any old answer' about a historical question. We're not interested in being another one. And that's for several reasons.

1. This sub would become superfluous. I mentioned, the internet, and reddit, are full of places to have quick discussions of history and quick answers. Any good organization or brand knows keeps to their core identity, and accuracy and comprehensiveness is ours. Beyond that, we feel that we are really fulfilling an unmet need, and often the askers of the questions really appreciate this - they will often say things like 'I know how to Google, but I came here for a serious answer' and they appreciate that this is a place where they can do so.

2. Short, decontextualized factoids do not teach people about history. History is about interconnections, systems, inter-related developments. And yet often casual students of history mostly see it as a series of stats and facts. I should know - I am completely self-taught, and I thought about history like that for a very long time. So often an original question may be a simple request for a fact, but it would be irresponsible of us to stop there - it is our role as historical educators (amateur and professional) to show things in their context. Because of our format, and because people often ask some pretty fundamental questions, we can only point to the larger context without fully expanding (literally, many questions here have had books written about them - our answers are already summaries of a topic!). But it is critical that we do contextualize questions and answers, because if we don't we're not really doing history. But beyond this, I really believe that by answering the questions of enthusiasts in a historically sound manner we can introduce history buffs to more rigorous methods of historical thinking. I really believe that anyone can study history in a serious way, and I hope that we inspire people to do so.

3. Finally, there's what I'm going to pretensiously call the 'education-entertainment complex' - this is the world of pop-documentaries, podcasts, and dodgy websites that exists not to satisfy serious curiosity or to inspire more in-depth study, but to provide entertainment. Remember those de-contextualized facts that I mentioned above? That's what these places offer. As far as I can tell people don't watch the History Channel's latest Hitler thing (okay, back when they were the Hitler Channel and not the Ice-Road-Alien Channel) because they're passionate about history, they watch to fill the time. Similarly there's a lot of websites that present facts so that people can read them as a way of wasting time. Now, I'm not here to pass judgment about entertainment. But this sub is the work of volunteers - mods and contributors (flaired and not) and we put a lot of work into it. My 'low effort' answers take between 45 minutes and 1 hour to write. Many of my answers take 2 hours or more. I'm not doing that to provide amusement to the idle - I'm doing it to educate the curious and the passionate. People like me. Now, if folks who are browsing and come upon my answers are entertained, that's fantastic. I hope that folks that come here from r/all learn something. But if what folks are looking for is an instant dose of 30 seconds of amusement I'm not tailoring my answers to them and we're not running the sub for them. I want this to be a sub for those who care deeply about history and care about getting it right. We do not, and we will not, change our course or lower our standards to the benefit of casual browsers and to the detriment of those asking the questions.

I'd provide an answer to this question but it violates the twenty year rule and I cannot provide outside documentation to support my assertions. ;)

In all seriousness, this is no more tightly modded than other academic subs. The deleted answers are either incorrect, fail to meet community standards, or aren't directly answering the question.

The tight modding of this sub is why it is a favorite of mine.