Hey there,

If you've come to the thread and are wondering why there's no answer yet: we have found that it takes an average of 9 hours for a good answer to appear on a popular thread - properly researching and writing an answer takes time. Additionally, it's very early in the morning on the East Coast of the US at time of writing, so a fair few historians who could potentially answer have yet to have a morning coffee, let alone start looking at primary and secondary sources.

In other words, patience, good people. If you want to be reminded to look at this thread later, please see this really awesome Roundtable post for a list of ways. And if you're wondering why Reddit never shows you an AskHistorians thread with answers, consider sorting your Reddit home feed by 'Hot' rather than 'Best' - 'Best' seems to give precedence to newer posts (which are less likely to have an answer on this subreddit, of course) and threads you haven't already looked at (e.g., it'll show you something else next time you log in, even if this thread is still getting lots of upvotes because there's an actual answer now).

If you're wondering what's in the 35 removed comments at the time of writing, there was a comment comparing Reagan to the mental capacities of a much more recent Republican President, which got a fair few responses. There's also a few one-or-two sentence attempts at answers, and a few people wondering where all the comments are, or simply posting [removed]. None of this comes close to meeting the standards in our subreddit rules. All of these comments get removed on /r/AskHistorians because the huge majority of our subscribers really do want accurate, comprehensive, in-depth historical answers based on good historical practice and high-quality sources. It's amazing how many downvotes and reports an obvious shitpost can attract on a popular thread on /r/AskHistorians within minutes, thanks to our readers (if you see it, report it!)

On /r/AskHistorians, we want people answering questions to be able to explain not just what the basic facts are according to academic research, but why we know that these basic facts are right, and to put those basic facts into context. This is why we encourage the use of primary and secondary sources in answering questions, rather than tertiary sources like Wikipedia, podcasts and textbooks.

In other words, on /r/AskHistorians, we'd rather have no answer than bad attempts at answers. By removing the short, quick, bad answers that would otherwise crowd them out, the well-researched in-depth answers (that take people time to research and write) are more likely to be seen (see this graph for more detail). The downside to this is that we have to remove a lot of shitposts and comments wondering what happened to the removed comments. The upside is that our contributors consistently post amazing stuff to /r/AskHistorians (which we collate the best of every week in our Sunday Digest), and daily on our Twitter. Alternatively, if you want to discuss history without these constraints, /r/history or /r/askhistory might be more appropriate subreddits for you than /r/AskHistorians.