There are plenty of answers that stick around. Only complete answers with sources though. This sub has really the best material and it does that by culling out the bad stuff.
The vast, vast majority of removed comments never contained "any semblance of an answer" in the first place. They are overwhelmingly jokes, "Where are all the answers?" comments, and other uninteresting bullshit that you can find on any other subreddit, but, very happily, not on this one.
My response from the last time this got asked:
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.
Well, it is a moderation policy to not restrict anyone from posting a comment here, that is, it's an open subreddit: one does not need to be a member or have a flair in order to submit a comment.
We do that because we recognize that we haven't flaired every possible expert user on Reddit, past present and future, and hope that more will join the community here. The downside of this policy, however, is that anyone with a Reddit account can comment, the vast majority of whom are not subject matter experts. As a result, most comments fall far short of the standard expected, as laid out in the subreddit rules.
The moderation team is strongly motivated to present a high-quality forum. When you mix an open forum + high standards + a motivated team, the result is a high % of comment removals.
There are some usage tips in this similar thread from last week https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/8bwm95/i_am_ending_my_time_with_raskhistorians_im_tired/. Alternatively, there are dozens of history-related subreddits on this website, as well as forums all over the internet. This one has a particular mission; if it doesn't match your interests, take a look through these for something suitable https://www.reddit.com/r/HistoryNetwork/wiki/listofhistorysubreddits
This. It's embarrassing