I see so many interesting questions that never have any answers
Go to /new and read the questions there. By my quick skim half of the are unanswerable gibberish. Another quarter are interesting but are extremely specific so the majority of people have no way of answering them. Another quarter are broad, interesting and answerable but still require a decent amount of time and effort to address. Lets run through some of them.
Nonsense questions:
Does the copy of Mein Kampf made of cows hide and stainless steel binders that was put in a sarcophagus still exist?
What is this talking about? Maybe this is a thing, maybe not, I have no idea. I'd say I'm pretty well versed in WWII and history in general. I used to be flared here. (shameless plug for my WWII podcast)
When and why did Muslim countries stop using the the Quran(Koran) the source of all essential and true knowledge?
What is this question even asking? I'm not sure the person asking even knows what it is they are asking.
Now lets move on to super specific and difficult to answer questions:
What was banking like in the Ottoman empire in the 16th - early 19th centuries? How was it different from western Europe at the time?
Are you writing a Phd thesis on early modern banking? B/c thats the kind of in depth and specific knowledge you need to answer this. How many PhD candidates do you think are just browsing reddit waiting for someone to ask this exact question?
The Tale of the Heike contains a story describing the first official enemy of Japan's imperial court: a long-legged spider with superhuman strength. How would 13th Century Japanese listeners have interpreted this story?
Again, how many people would really know the answer to this?
In 1590 the future Shogun and current Daimyo Tokugawa Ieyasu traded 5 provinces for the 8 of the Hojo. Did Ieyasu take his current samurai and inherit the Hojo samurai? I just don't understand how the logistics of this would work given the feudal system in place.
More super specific feudal japan stuff.
Specifically regarding population, city planning, citizen identity, and political narrative, what were the biggest differences between Bronze Age city-states in Greece and Mesopotamia?
Who would even be able to answer this? There are like 3 English speaking people in the world that have this kind of knowledge at their fingertips.
Ok, now for questions that are actually answerable.
Who were the Triarii and how were they different from regular old veteran soldiers?
Pretty reasonable only 13 minutes old though. Will probably get a response. There are tons of people interested in republican Rome and this is a specific question with a specific answer.
History of "goose-stepping" in military parades?
Good question. Topical, specific, but has a lot of potential answers. There are lots of users with loads of knowledge about early modern European militaries.
Why were the Dutch so successful in the early colonial period, and why didn't their power last?
Another good one. OP is asking for a thesis about a specific topic but isn't too specific.
Why did the introduction of European firearms have such an impact on warfare in Africa and the Americas?
Another decent one. Very broad, if somewhat obvious, question.
So what is the point I'm making here? Its that asking a good question is just as important to getting a response. If the question is too vague or too specific it probably wont get an answer. But also it has to be interesting. "Who Were Some Important Chinese Figures In The Vietnam War?" isn't a particularly interesting question so it will probably go unanswered.
Actually, statistically speaking, we have a response rate of about 0.38 (or 38 percent, put another way). You can find detailed stats here, compiled by u/Georgy_K_Zhukov:
As to why we have a response rate of 0.38 and not higher, there are a number of factors, which I will shamelessly steal from Zhukov in their response here:
Everyone here volunteers their time to write because they enjoy it, but it isn't our job. Even the mods aren't hunched over our screens watching the new queue 24/7, and most users maybe check in once a day at most to see what questions there are. So in the first, we might just totally miss that the perfect question showed up. Or maybe we do see it, but dangit, we just don't have the time to answer it today! Or maybe we do have the time, but the source we absolutely need to do so was leant to a friend. Plenty more subreasons fit in here, but the short of it is, just because someone on here might be able to answer it doesn't mean they can at the time. Also similar in this is if there are multiple questions in the same broad topic. If, say, multiple questions about dueling were asked in a day, I probably only have time to answer one at best, so an overload of similar questions can also cause issue.
Also, for better or for worse, visibility matters. As demonstrated, being highly upvoted almost ensures an answer, while having no upvotes puts you at the mercy of the devoted. Many flairs browse the new queue, or use IFTTT, and mods sometimes send alerts for good questions we see, but if a questions doesn't get upvoted, no matter how amazing it might be, it can easily get missed. When users complain about the same stuff showing up on the sub, we always like to remind them that there are 100+ questions every day, and there are always novel and unique ones being asked. the best thing you can do for them is upvote them early to try and give them the boost to the top.
That, though, is speaking to the generalities of the subreddit. There are a number of factors which come into play aside from that, especially relating to the way questions are asked or the topic of them, and while I didn't keep detailed stats for all of this, it certainly is based on general observations I made from the tons of threads scanned while working on the statistics.
Some questions are just not that interesting. I don't want to come off as being mean about that, but it is simply true. I don't care what Hitler's favorite breakfast cereal was. Maybe someone does, and asked the question, but I don't care enough to scan through a bunch of Hitler books and find out. This also applies to questions which are, well, easy, for lack of a better word. By that I mean ones which you easily can answer by Googling, and what Google tells you probably is the most that can be said on the topic. My go to example is when someone asked a few years ago, "What was the name of that big tank battle in the Gulf War"?, which would have been answered much quicker plugging the exact same phrase into Google. Simply put, a lot of the people answering questions here want to answer interesting questions, and it often just doesn't feel worth the time and effort to write a response for something like that, and it absolutely shows with the questions which don't get any response.
In a similar vein, and again, I don't want to come off as being mean about this, but some questions are just bad. I mean that differently from easy or simple. The question might be poorly phrased (If it looks like no thought is put into the question, why would we put thought into an answer?), it might be written rudely (If you are sounding like a jerk, why would we help you?), it might make no sense (hard to answer if we don't get the question!), it might be questionable (This is AskHistorians, not LectureHistorians, as we say. If you sound like you just want us to confirm your biases, then we'll likely stay away period).
The question has been done to death. A great example of this is "Were Nazis Socialists?" That is a question which we seem to get at least once a week. I've seen it multiple times in a single day even. I would say that despite the fact we have several excellent answers on this topic from the likes of /u/kieslowskifan and /u/commiespaceinvader and even myself if I may be so humble, the response rate for that question is nevertheless below average. When I see it, I rarely can even feel bothered to bother linking to the FAQ for it, let alone contemplate writing a new answer for it. Sure, we allow repeat questions here, and sure, we don't believe any answer is the final word, but that doesn't mean the repeat question is getting a new, awesome answer every time.
Finally, it should also be noted that some people ask questions there just isn't a good answer for, and "We don't know" can sometimes be the hardest thing to write. I wrote this recently to be something of an example of why it can be so complicated, in this case explaining why it is hard to say what Hitler thought about a specific event, and demonstrating that while we can nip around the edges of the topic, it is nearly impossible to get to the very center.
There is one other category of question that is likely to go unanswered (maybe a sub category of "bad"). Suspect questions - I see these a couple times a week. These are the questions that seem to have some sort of skewed slant, or are blatantly trying to invite discord or target areas of history that are well known for their controversy. Some can be answered, and are, usually the ones that are easy to deal with factually, others get dealt with by the mods. But about once a week you read one and the phrase "not touching that with a ten foot pole" immediately enters your mind.
There's only so many historians with free time on Reddit. Not everyone is an expert in everything.
Not to be rude myself but do you understand how much effort it takes to write a good answer? And how it is all done solely by historians volunteering their time? And how few of those historians we have here, relative to how many questions come in?
It’s just not realistic to expect every question to get answered, as they are answered by people with jobs and families who generously use some of their free time to write up answers here. Frankly people should be thanking them for taking the time to answer anything at all, rather than expecting them to be on here working full time.
It kind of baffles me how someone could see this place and go “why haven’t they gotten to every question!?” unless they’re under the assumption that the historians are paid and on call.
The reality is a lot of questions have already been answered before. I seem to recall a post recently about getting more people to help by linking older answers to newer questions which I think would be a benefit to the sub.