Hey there,

Firstly, if you want to PM RemindMeBot to be reminded of this thread in a day, click here.

If you've come to the thread and are wondering why the comments have been removed, put it this way: on /r/AskHistorians, we'd rather have no answer than a thread cluttered with bad answers, jokes, and people saying "where are all the comments?" or discussions of modern politics. Further such comments in this thread may result in bans. 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). Despite this heavy moderation (or perhaps because), 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 - and that 90%+ of popular threads get an answer (it may take a little longer in the case of this thread seeing as it's currently in the middle of the night in much of the Americas where many historians who might be able to answer the question are).

If you're wondering what's in the removed top-level comments at the time of writing, there's nothing that meets the standards in our subreddit rules - there's a couple of anecdotes, 2-3 people saying "I'm not an expert but..." before writing a paragraph without sources, a bunch of people saying, "Remind me" etc, and a couple of people opining with no evidence whatsoever. But the huge majority is just people saying some variation of '[removed]', or asking why everything is removed. 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!)

Unfortunately, the downside of encouraging in-depth and comprehensive answers is that we have to remove a lot of shitposts and comments wondering what happened to the removed shitposts. The upside, however, 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.