We have noticed some reduction in the amount of traction that the mid-range threads have gotten recently, and we're not the only sub that has this issue - there's a recent post in /r/science that has announced they're canning AMAs that their AMAs no longer get the traction that they used to.

Generally, on the internet there's a 90:9:1 rule, which is that for every one person who regularly interacts with a forum (e.g., posting lots, or always upvoting), there are 9 who occasionally interact, and 90 who almost never interact. This kind of goes with, say, the recent Belgian comics thread at the top of the subreddit (to use the latest example); at present, it has 1586 upvotes, and (according to the data about individual threads we see as mods) ~18800 views. In contrast, the Short Answers to Short Questions sticky thread only has 11 upvotes, but it's actually had ~4400 views.

So this Belgian comics thread has only been viewed by one in every twenty subscribers. Some of the other 97.5% will be people with inactive accounts - maybe a very sizeable proportion of them. Some people will simply never see the thread because of the algorithm, or because they're only briefly flicking through what's at the top of Reddit. Some people will decide they're not interested in that topic and not click through if they see it in their feed (maybe right now they just want some nice pictures of cats, not heavy stuff about how bad the Holocaust was, which can be fair enough). And some people will see the thread on their feed and assume there's probably no answer yet and they'll check back later. Additionally, the thread's only been around for 13 hours, and maybe it will get more views as more people check Reddit for the day, especially as Europe and then the East Coast of the US wakes up.

In contrast, a smaller thread - the kind you're referring to here - is likely getting more dedicated /r/AskHistorians readers, by and large, who deliberately/regularly come to the /r/AskHistorians frontpage to learn things, or for whom /r/AskHistorians is a big part of the select subreddits to which they subscribe. Not every reader is going to be one of these more dedicated readers, but they're the ones who seriously keep the place going, because they're the ones who do report the bad posts so they can be [removed], who do answer the questions to our standards where they feel capable, who link to old posts to help answer questions, who do upvote the Monday Methods threads. These readers are our lifeblood and we are so grateful to them all! We generally remove many, many, many more bad comments from threads that have 1000 upvotes than from threads that have 100 upvotes, and not just because they're seen by 10x as many people. And honestly, we're happy that 18k people, or even 1000 people see some good research explained well...famously, the majority of academic journal articles have downloads in the single digits, so the smaller amount of people - by Reddit standards - is still lots more than would otherwise know about some of the very interesting historical research that we have the ability to showcase.

Additionally, stickied threads don't automatically mean that a topic will get upvoted, and I recall something about Reddit changing the algorithm to disadvantage stickied threads a while ago because mods in particular political subreddits were abusing them. As mods, we actually tend to let threads we intend to sticky live in the wild for a bit before stickying them, as this seems more effective.

I can speak somewhat in terms of voting, is people vote on what they're interested in, which on Reddit tends towards the interests of 20-something, white, straight, North American males. This tends to be military history, especially the world wars, Roman history, medieval history, and North American history. The personal questions about Adolf Hitler that have been answered here would fill a textbook, and they tend to get a ton of upvotes.

Now take the rest of history, far fewer people are interested in Mesoamerican shaft tombs, or Chinese eunuchs, or vocal classification in Romantic-era German repertory opera, so people don't upvote those, and they get relegated to the back pages (and there are flairs who are well versed in each of those specific areas). I did a really lengthy answer about the development of the Baroque flute, but people don't upvote or comment because it's a pretty specialized response in an area that few people on Reddit are interested.

Now compare that to most other subreddits, they're typically extremely specific in their scope, so everyone in /r/carpentry or /r/gameofthrones or /r/trees are going to nearly all share the same interests, whereas we have 10,000 years, and the entire history of all civilizations on Earth to cover, and most people just aren't interested in most of it.

Well, I can only speak as a random reader, but while I see many interesting questions here daily, I do not often see any answers to them, and then mostly just the "previously answered" links, and you can't exactly vote for two year old threads. By the time I get a break a day later, I completely forget which question it was I wanted to see the answer for and just skim the new ones.

So I guess the problem is in one part that there are too many new questions to track and two that the threads get interesting two days after they started (for the non-historian readers that is), getting buried under new ones. Maybe put an "answered" flair we could browse? Manually tracking them would become annoying fast, because of all the notifications for twenty deleted posts before an actual answer.

I assume by participation, you mean upvoting threads and/or answers?

I mean, I answered this question about the Gestapo yesterday that was on the front page of askhistorians briefly and didn't make it to all. The thread has 23 upvotes, my answer has 24 upvotes and according to our mod data, the thread has 1.4k views. That's about the number of people who are active in this sub right now if reddit numbers are to be trusted.

The purpose of this sub is after all to get answers to questions and what we have observed definitely is that with a higher number of subscribers, we have seen an increase in the number of questions asked while the number of questions answered has not increased in the same way. The top 50 threads of the sub still receive an answer in about 90% of all cases while the overall rate of answers is slightly less than 50%. This is due to the fact that there are far more people with questions than with the expertise to answer them.

Given that we receive hundreds of questions every day maintaining an answer rate of slightly less than 50% for all of them is a pretty good rate of engagement given that some of these questions are unanswerable or from concerning an area that we don't have any experts on due to the demographics of reddit, we are doing pretty ok.

Our concept is a bit different from many other places in reddit and hence the engagement that matters is people asking questions and people answering them.

Speaking as a frequent reader, I have to say that I rarely upvote posts here. Usually, I use upvotes/downvotes to help bring more visibility to good content. On AskHistorians, however, the only content that exists is good by definition, as everything else gets deleted by mods. This means that upvotes lose part of their value, as you'll usually only have a few responses left standing per average thread, after the mods have done their purging.

I love this sub but I never upvote anything on any sub

I pretty much just check the Top posts every other week/month, personally I find the modding goes overboard and find myself reading far more mod comments than actual comments when I check the hot feed.

The concept of AH is fine, the application of it is the issue. There just don't seem to be enough historians around to answer all the questions.

Its a sub dying because of its own silo mentality design flaw.

How do you solve it?

Make it open to all people to contribute, official historians get a background shade on their posts, or other signifigent flair that shows they are an authority.

Gone is the time of Experts vrs plebs, knowledge isn't siloed any more but open to all people.

For example the current post asking about the difference between doctors in the 1940's and present, may under relaxed rules get posts from doctors, relatives of doctors, etc. Afterall who "officially" is an historian of doctors?

The application is wrong, its strangling the sub, its either fix it or die.