Here is a link to our FAQ question on exactly this topic. What is specifically relevant is this statistical look at answers from /u/Georgy_K_Zhukov. As you can see, with the top 50 upvoted answers, 92% receive an answer while overall a bit less half of all questions get an answer.

The key here is that answers take time, specifically that it takes time for someone with expertise to see a specific question within their wheelhouse, to research the answer, and finally to write the answer. As you can see from the statistics post, it can take anywhere from an hour to over a day for an answer to appear. This is the way it is when it comes to providing in-depth information. People will read up on a subject and then write a text comparable to a short essay and doing that is something that can't be done within 15 minutes.

Basically, in order to receive a researched answer, you need a bit of patience.

As for why we delete answers that are not in-depth, informative, and researched: This is the very purpose of this sub. We are not a sub for discussion or for speculation or for jokes. There are literally hundreds of other subreddits for that. But this subreddit is for getting in-depth and well-researched answers for questions. And this has gotten us to over 800.000 subscribers and several hundreds of question a day. While we'd also like to get more good answers to questions, 92% answer rate on the top 50 most upvoted posts is – I'd say – working as intended instead of this sub dying.

On the contrary, this sub is up to 835,000 subscribers which indicates an INCREASE from our last milestone.

The mods will know better than I how steady that growth has been, but clearly all these deleted comments aren't really affecting subscribers.

If your tired of seeing "x comments" and they are all deleted, try browsing r/HistoriansAnswered instead. There is a bot there that looks for answers that have stayed up long enough on this sub (and presumably meets the mods guidelines, though they are only human) and posts the links on that sub.

If more subs ran like this I would be out of a job as a roving asshole. I use reddit for release. This is the cleanest sub I have ever found so far. Keywords in the title brought me here. My respects to the crowd of historians, I won't return unless I follow your rules. Peace

I gotta admit I'm allot less interested in this sub now that nearly every post I click on is an interesting question and 100 deleted comments