I'm sorry if there is a better way to submit a question like this to the sub. My question to mods and subscribers is this: Would there be some way to assign priority to sourced answers and verified subject matter experts, while still allowing us common folk (non historians, retail workers) to speculate and talk about anecdotes?
This sub is moderated so tightly that it seems like legitimate answers could be sent to the top and all silliness would sink to the bottom of the thread. This would allow the general public to participate in a post (without being deleted) and provide the opportunity for them to learn from an educated opinion at the top of the thread.
I am not married to this idea but is there any other type of format that could provide similar platforms to both the laymen and the experts? Is there a way to do this while keeping the integrity of this sub?
Ideas/requests along these lines get raised frequently on AskHistorians when popular threads fail to receive an answer on the, shall we say, preferred schedule of people clicking on the thread (rather than the actual schedule of the knowledgeable person taking the time and care to get their facts, sources, and quotes straight and to write up an in-depth, comprehensive answer that the people clicking on the thread want to read).
And the answer is no. We will not do that. /r/AskHistorians is a place for in-depth, comprehensive, expert-level answers to questions about history. If you want wild-ass guessing and Wikipedia quotes without attribution, if you want "Well idk about the Middle Ages but I heard this podcast by Dan Carlin about ww2 and he says...", if you want "I think 2+2 is 5, right?" and a thousand redditors to then come up with reasons why 2+2 is indeed five because if someone guessed it, it must be right? You have the entire rest of reddit.
There are two big reasons for reserving AH for actual answers only. One is moderation cost. The mod team does not have the numbers or the desire to moderate garbage "discussion" threads. The second is the culture of reddit. People are willing to write those long, in-depth, comprehensive answers on Ah because they know those answers will get read. They can have confidence their answer won't be buried beneath 163 "idk about the actual question but I played a video game and" comments. They trust that people clicking on the thread will come for their answer, not for the level of conversation they can get in AskReddit or r/asoiaf. (Not knocking those subs, both of which I enjoy browsing).
If you want a reddit experience of speculation and all-comers' discussion, where 2+2 might well be 5 or 6 or 12, you've got basically all of reddit. You are 100% free to post AH questions to /r/history or /r/AskHistory where you can have that type of conversation! Really!
But if you want answers about history, /r/AskHistorians is and will remain your dedicated forum.
I may be in the minority (though I would be somewhat surprised if i am), but I love the way this sub is moderated. I may come across as blunt, but so be it: If you want less strict moderation, check out /r/history or /r/AskHistory. /r/askhistorians is strictly moderated, sure, but it's openly strictly moderated. The rules are enforced and enforced fairly. I don't come here because I want someone with a layman's familiarity with something, or because someone took AP US History and is tangentially aware of the topic at hand. To use the second world war as an example: I took AP US, and I've read the Beevor histories and the Keegan histories. I've served in the US Navy, and both of my grandfathers served in the pacific in WWII, one as a sailor, the other as a grunt, so I would consider myself to have a more than a passing familiarity with a good number of topics on this sub, but I don't consider myself to be any kind of wellspring for information for these incredibly complex topics.
Aside from what else has been said, it also should be noted that this:
it seems like legitimate answers could be sent to the top and all silliness would sink to the bottom of the thread.
Isn't actually possible. Mods can't force sort threads. There are 'CSS tricks' but they are imperfect, don't work aside from Desktop, and soon won't work anyways once the redesign rolls out.