It's a quite the conundrum for us too.

The number of subscribers and questions has steadily increased over the years. The number of flaired users has about stayed the same somewhere in the 300-400 range. Of those, many are answering questions even on obscurer topics – however, those answers are some which the majority of users probably won't see. As we can see in the Sunday Digest and also on twitter – ways we try to alleviate the lack of visibility for some answers – there are magnificent answers in certain areas that never received more than one upvote in a thread that about 500 people read. 500 people is still a larger readership than the average article but the impression that there is a small number of flairs stemming a lot of answers also results from certain questions getting upvoted that are in the wheelhouse of certain flairs so people see these flairs more than others.

At the same time, we are actively trying to recruit new people: The twitter account has less readership than the sub but brings in more experts as far as we can tell. The podcast has reached put to experts who'd otherwise would have never set foot on reddit.

The thing is that we are fighting an uphill battle against reddit as platform and every hour of effort – twitter, facebook, the weekly theme, the Sunday Digest, every AMA – represents an hour of work we put in this voluntarily and that we can't spend otherwise. The 36 of us put a lot of time and effort in and in order to increase that further, we'd need to expand further but finding people who have the time and inclination not only to answer questions here but also to mod this place is also related to the problem of retaining and diversifying the team at large.

We are really trying with a variety of content, features, and a lot of work behind the scenes but in order to be really effective about it, we'd need a paid outreach position and that we can not afford and have. We'd like to do even more and by reshuffling some stuff, we will most likely soon-ish but there is a limit to such an operation when only based on volunteer effort and trying to go against the grain of the platform at large.

As far as my experience goes, I am not sure there is an especially effective strategy the moderation team could follow in order to attract experts - scholars in particular - beyond keeping a decent and friendly environment and maintaining the standars of the sub; things that are already done.

The problem is that, as an (alternative) outlet for proper scholarly work an internet forum is never the best choice; even if there is a chance more people are going to read it. The attracting part seems to be the fact that one can discuss and elaborate over issues that aren't that frequent in their professional experience, to create answers to questions they are unlikely to be asked otherwise but still allow for an engaging experience in drafting an answer as well as reading it.

History is a hobby for me. Therefore I have a tendency to address a lot of matters that are discussed thoroughly in scholarly work (albeit my own unscholarly way) - but I doubt those posts would be as forthcoming if those arguments occupied the most part of my professional day. I would probably look forward to write about something else.

What I am pointing at is the fact that the experience of crafting an answer, while time consuming and at times even unpleasant, is still a free choice. The reward is in the experience - the same way the reward for running a marathon is running a marathon - and that's not something that can be incentivised by the mods, unless they begin paying the flairs a salary!

There are questions I really like to answer. And questions I'd rather not. Frankly, and not to put any blame on those asking, there's questions I could probably answer and I don't and on the other hand questions I need hours of research to put something together and still enjoy answering.

It's inevitable for content to be driven by users. But it's also very hard to guess what an expert would find engaging; talking about their work exactly may appeal once or twice but there are so many great answers that come out of the left field - and are probably the defining positive factor of this community - that one should not assume (for many flairs I would be hard pressed to guess what specific field they covered in their educational course).

It's not that the mods aren't trying though; and I know that their attitude is more proactive than mine (such a high treshold I am setting here!).

I am fairly confident that AH is not doomed - post a nice comment if you liked an answer, retweet something you liked, download the podcast and maybe recommend it, ask weird questions and patiently await for a surprising answer.

I'm a new flair who spent a decent amount of time lurking here and I'll hazard to say you're preaching to the choir. The range of questions is definitely limited to reddit's rather monotone, monochrome demographic, and AH seems to draw primarily from that demo. I know I'm among them.

There's an immediately obvious drawback a person might have to grapple with when pitching AskHistorians to a less meme-savvy colleague, and that's reddit itself. On balance, I consider the value of this subreddit and a few others a worthy trade-off against the misogyny, racism, etc so forth of much of the rest of the site, but others might not. The mods here are a good shield, but the unwary could easily find themselves drowning in a sea of shit when pursuing their other interests here. The Westworld sub had a nice multi thread event over Evan Rachel Wood's Twitter account, for instance.

I get the sense that there is an outreach effort to diversify flairs, and that's great and necessary, but with the caveat of what I wrote above I'd encourage everyone who values this sub to send others this way. Contextualize it though. "Hey, have you ever found a $50 bill with a little dog poop on it? It's still $50, right?"

And I'd also encourage our lurkership to speak out. Ask that question about 15th century Italian cobblers that you've been sitting on. I promise people are looking for those. Even if the top up voted question of the day is what Rommel thought of Patton thinking of Rommel, you have a better chance of getting an answer than not asking it.

So tell your mom to ask stuff here, I guess is what I'm saying.

Edit: note that my "non-mainstream" example is accidentally about 15th century western European male(?) professionals.

As just about the newest flaired user (who, sadly, has done absolutely nothing for diversity), I can't speak from experience of what has been done or suggested in the past about panel composition. I suspect it's a chicken and egg problem - a lack of diverse questions means a lack of diverse flairs means a lack of diverse answers. Which is a pity, because so much (most, in my opinion) of the best history writing is done on spaces and subjects that have been traditionally sidelined.

Getting scholars involved should be an easier sell than it seems to be. Generally speaking, most of us really like talking about our subjects. It's also getting much more common to be encouraged to seek out non-scholarly audiences for our work ("public engagement"), and as a result we tend to put a lot of effort into writing blog posts and the like that get an audience of a few dozen readers - the sheer scale of this subreddit compared to other online forums for sharing research is staggering. One issue is quantification - unless you're a mod, you can't see how many people read your answer and that makes it harder to use as evidence. If you want to justify your Reddit use to a hiring committee, statistics would be useful...

One suggestion I'd make is broadening the use of the twitter account. There's a big community of historians on twitter, and perhaps as well as showcasing our best answers, we could also use it to dangle interesting questions like bait (2,000+ people want to know how medieval peasants tied their shoelaces! can any #twitterstorians help us out?). This is in no way a criticism of the current tweeters - I really like the tone and content of the tweeting, and it's a big part of why I got involved. But it doesn't seem to get the love it should from wider history twitter.

The elimination of 5 or so key flairs would send the Q/A ratio into the abyss.

Definitely true for the overall Q/A ratio; we have a few fantastic power users who answer a prodigious number of questions on a stunning variety of topics with extraordinary depth.

But there are also those flairs who, while they might be less active than those amazing handful, are nonetheless the only flairs who cover that topic.

Then there are topics where we simply have no flair at all. In my experience, those questions simply don't get answered. And I'm not talking about minor subjects. Until /u/Lion_and_Sun got flair a few months ago we didn't have anyone who was an expert in any time period for all of Persian history, all 3000 someodd years of it. As far as I'm aware we don't have anyone who is expert in any time period of Indian/South Asian history.

We have a very small handful of middle east experts.

So yes, the diversity of flairs is very much a problem. We're very thin on a whole lot of the world.

Edit: I should add, this is purely from the perspective of diversity of expertise. While my own specialty might be somewhat exotic, IRL I'm yet another pasty white mid-twenties American redditor. Identity diversity would be great. It's a double edged sword given that the content can skew towards memes or nationalism, but I've always thought we should consider working with some of the national subreddits like /r/Israel or /r/Arabs.