You could also argue that hundreds of joke posts or rambling, unsubstantiated opinions would also make the sub unusable...
While it's true that there is the rare, occasional highly upvoted post without a good answer, it's definitely not the standard. As the statistics compiled by /u/Georgy_K_Zhukov show, the top 50 threads of each month (which includes just about everything you'd be able to see from r/all) had an answer rate of 92% over 2017. In other words, far from being "unusable", our sub consistently provides high-quality content, and is working exactly as intended. A constant stream of good answers is showcased in our weekly Sunday Digest, on Twitter, and on Facebook.
The difference between us and other subreddits is not that we get no answers; it's that it takes a little while for a good answer to be written. There are many obvious reasons for this. Few people have the expertise to write an answer based in historical research; of those people, few are browsing reddit; of those people, not everyone can be expected to have the time or energy to write a lengthy response. So, instead of seeing a thread on your front page and getting immediate satisfaction when you click on it, you may have to leave that link blue for a couple hours before it has any content. However, a good answer usually appears within 8 hours, meaning that you'll rarely even have to wait till the next day to read that answer.
We are often surprised to hear people demand that we lower our standards in order to provide readers with content and make the sub "usable". After all, we don't remove comments as some kind of internet power trip. We remove them because they do not provide a sufficient answer to the question. Lowering our standards means providing you with bad information. It is greatly preferrable to have a thread with no answers, because our readers would leave a poorly moderated thread with an actively worse understanding of history. You wouldn't ask a school to lower its standards so that any rando off the street can teach your kid geography. You wouldn't ask your favourite podcast to stop having expert guests and consultants just so its episodes can appear faster. Why ask us to allow more comments, or to allow you to see the deleted comments?
In any case, if you don't like the way we do things here, there are other subs where standards are lower and where you can get a quick fix of short, more easily digestible replies with less grounding in research, such as r/history or r/AskHistory.
This is a sub that requires well cited/ detailed responses. Sure a lot of posts do not get answered but the OP always has the option of posting the question again at a later date. Worked successfully for me awhile back.
You are reading the sub the wrong way. The only enjoyable way to read this sub is to focus on the answers, not the questions. That means reading the sub through the comments page (/r/askhistorians/comments), not the front page. That way, you will only ever be exposed to excellent answers, instead of being frustrated clicking on interesting questions with a (mostly temporarily) empty comments section. And you won't have to keep clicking those questions blindly to see whether the situation has improved.
Bonus: you can see some of the latest crap* comments that haven't been removed yet by the mods and you'll know that you aren't missing anything when next you contemplate a "comment graveyard".
Do you think detailed and cited answers grow on trees? Seriously, how do you expect every single thing to be answered? Do you think there is a team of historians working in shifts? No, it’s a few historians donating their time when they can. You’re totally misunderstanding the point here.
You’re not supposed to expect every question to be answered, the historians here are few compared to the constant stream of mostly dumb questions that comes in, so they donate their time to answer what they can for free and we are glad they answer any at all.
Well some of us are glad, others apparently misunderstand the idea of the sub and feel they’re entitled to have historians on call 24/7 to type out detailed answers to any random thought for nothing in return.
That would be unfortunate. This is a great sub with lots of really good answers. But I can understand the frustration of trying to read it. There are lots of posts with deleted comments and a lot of the answers are on older posts that aren't on the front page anymore, so very few people see the answers.
Has anyone considered tracking answers as they come in? I know the mods here don't want to point to questions as answered bc there isn't a final word in history but if people are frustrated, some sort of tracking could maybe help?
A couple of suggestions of other ways to read the board - although admittedly these aren't much help from the Reddit front page:
-for occasional visits, look at Top posts from the last week or month; that way you'll see more posts with full answers
-read the comments feed (i.e. r/AskHistorians/comments)