#“I didn’t know I had the same question until I heard someone else ask it.”

About a year and a half ago I posted this thread asking why you participate in AskHistorians. That thread, follow-up interviews, and a whole lot of lurking became the basis for half my PhD dissertation in which I explored why people participate in online communities. If you want to see the dissertation in all of its 300+ page glory, you can access it here. At long last, I’m sharing some of the results of this work through a series of three posts – this is the first. Since AskHistorians is a place to learn about history, this post discusses what and how we learn through participation, and some of the challenges faced by the sub when it comes to knowledge exchange. The next will discuss AskHistorians’ position on reddit and the last the experiences of the mods. But before I get into the results, I want to provide a bit of background information first.

Methodology

The methodology I used to learn about participation in AskHistorians was somewhat ethnographic and results were derived from a variety of sources, such as:

• Interviews: I conducted in-depth interviews with 18 AskHistorians community members as well as exchanged emails and private messages with an additional 4 people. The interviews lasted an average of an hour and thirteen minutes. 9 were with mods (plus 3 former mods), 6 had flair, and 4 were lurkers.
• My recruitment post
• Observational data: It was my job for a while to read AskHistorians posts. Not gonna lie– it was pretty awesome! While I read a lot of questions and answers, I mostly read Meta posts, Monday Methods, as well as the round table discussions on AskHistorians’ rules.
• A full comment log of a highly upvoted and controversial post that included removed comments
• Secondary literature: I drew from news media, blogs, and peer reviewed literature written about reddit. I also used sources created by AskHistorians' mods themselves, such as conference presentations and this podcast (which you should totally listen to if you haven't yet).

To analyze the interview data, I used a process known as coding where I read (and reread over and over again) the interviews looking for common themes to describe and explain why my participants were motivated to participate in different ways. If needed I pulled in observational data and secondary literature to supplement and sometimes explain what I had learned through the interviews. For example, if a participant recalled a particular thread, I would read it to understand more about the context of their recollection.

Coding can be a pretty subjective process, so to help identify and mitigate bias I engaged in a process referred to as reflexivity, in which researchers examine how their beliefs, values, identity, and moral stance affect the work they do. A brief introduction to positionality can be found here. Since my position relative to the topic I’m discussing is different for each post, I’ve included a section on positionality in each one. Of relevance to this post is my experience as an AskHistorians user. I’ve been a lurker since I discovered the sub in 2012. I have a bachelor’s degree in history, so when I first found AskHistorians, I thought I might be able to provide an answer or two, but quickly realized I had nowhere near the expertise as other community members. Thus, as someone with an interest in history but not the level of knowledge required for answering questions, I found that I shared a lot of the same learning experiences as the other lurkers I interviewed.

One more quick note before I move onto the results. The quotes I’ve used mostly come from the interviews, but I’ve also included a few public and removed comments. Public comments are linked and attributed to the user who made them. Removed comments are not attributed to anyone and are quoted with all spelling/grammar errors retained. I contacted interview participants whose quotes I’ve included and let them choose how they wanted to be attributed in the posts, e.g., with their first name, username, or pseudonym. If I didn’t hear back I used a pseudonym.

Now, without further ado, the results!

Learning through participation in AskHistorians

One of the things I love about AskHistorians, and that was reflected in the interviews and meta posts, is that learning through the sub is so often serendipitous. Some variation of: “I didn’t know I had the same question until I heard someone ask it,” was a common refrain. Often this statement was made in reference to learning new topics. The people I interviewed described how they would have never thought to ask about things like the history of strawberry pin cushions, how soldiers treated acne during wartime, or succession in the Mongolian Empire. However, serendipitous learning was also expressed by experts with regards to their own areas of expertise as well. For example, several participants, such as flaired user, u/frogbrooks, described how questions encouraged them to look into their own subject areas from a different angle or take a deep dive into an area they’d previously overlooked:

A couple of the responses I’ve written have opened doors to new topics that I otherwise wouldn’t have read much about, but ended up being extremely interesting.

Another recurring theme was that AskHistorians made learning about history accessible. Several participants described having an interest in history, but not necessarily the means to get into it in any depth. For example, some didn’t have access to primary or secondary resources, while others described not having the time or energy to try to search through books to find the exact information they wanted. Accessibility was not only important to people who wanted to learn more about history but couldn’t– it was also important to those who thought they hated history based on how it had been taught in school. The interesting questions and engaging writing styles of AskHistorians’ panel of experts helped some of the people I interviewed realize they actually liked history after all, such as lurker, KR:

All the history taught in class beyond the ancient Greeks was super duper boring . . . [but] it turns out I actually really love history, and the sub made me see that.

Not too surprisingly, learning about the past was important to everyone I interviewed; this is, after all, a sub dedicated to discussing history. However, new historical knowledge was not the only thing participants gained. For example, people described learning more about how history is practiced professionally, and the methods historians use. This was expressed not only by total history novices, but also by those who majored in history, such as Jim:

I’m learning more from Reddit on historiography than [from] my teachers.

Jim’s statement also reflects my own experience: as a history major (albeit 15 years ago) I also learned more about historiography and historical methods from AskHistorians than I did during my degree. On the other side of the coin, AskHistorians also provided experts with a way to learn more about how the broader public understands history. For example, u/CommodoreCoCo, a PhD student, said:

I’ve really learned a lot about how the public perceives history and how, in some ways, it’s been taught to them incorrectly and what misconceptions they have, which is absolutely important if we want to interact with them better and teach them better and train better historians for the future.

In AskHistorians, experts and laypeople come together and meet each other’s needs: laypeople learn things they want to know from experts, which illuminates for experts topic areas that are missing or need to be better addressed.

While most people described learning new information through participation in AskHistorians, several described learning more about other things, such as negative aspects of human nature. These lessons were not learned after discovering terrible things people did in the past; rather, participants described learning them by seeing the prevalence of racism, sexism, and bigotry on reddit as well as seeing how questions reflect biases, often in an attempt to justify bigotry. Each of the people I spoke to who described learning more about the negative aspects of human nature were mods. For example, when asked what he’d learned, Josh responded:

I guess I’d had a rosy-eyed view of humanity and thinking that people are mostly good. And I do think that people are mostly good, but I didn’t think that people could be so malicious. I don’t know if I want to go so far as to say evil, but hurtful to other people and that’s one of the sadder things, but I think it’s one of those things that have made me more mature as a person.

However, non-mods were among those who described learning how to detect bias in question asking, such as Oliver:

after a while you get used to the moderators or the person responding saying, ‘you’ve made this assumption here and this is how the question should be stated in my opinion’ and that’s one thing that’s helped me being able to recognize a loaded question, because I find myself often asking, not just in history but in other situations in life . . . [learning to detect bias is] one way that’s helped me in this turbulent time, kind of go, what is this person really saying: is he making underlying assumptions or questions or anything like that? It’s a helpful tool.

Why learning about history is important to AskHistorians users

When I asked participants why learning about history was important, a common response was that learning about the past provided a way to better understand the present. Participants described wanting to know why things are the way they are, and then going back and back and back– deep down that rabbit hole I’m sure many of us know all too well. Further, participants, such as Oliver, were also hopeful that learning about the past would help make the present world a better place:

I just kind of look around and go man, if everybody just knew the history of this or that, or of this family or the history of their neighbourhood, things would be so much better!

Learning through participation in AskHistorians was described in overwhelmingly positive terms, even when learning more about negative aspects of human nature, which, for example, was often described as contributing to personal growth.

One last thing I want to highlight before I move on to describing why participants share their expertise is that the learning that happens through participation in AskHistorians is social. We learn not only from what the experts tell us in response to questions, through debate, or in requests for follow up information, but also by watching them in action. Oliver’s quote above showcases how practical, real-life tools, like detecting bias, are learned by watching mods and flairs in action. The “teaching” side isn’t always intentional, overt, nor require subject-specific expertise, and the learning that happens in the sub extends well beyond history.

Why participants share their expertise

Needless to say, while learning through participation on AskHistorians may not always be about history, it is most of the time. Therefore, the sub’s success depends on the contributions of experts. The reasons for sharing expertise were varied, and participants often described several factors that motivated them to share. First, participants described sharing expertise purely because they can, a sentiment known as self-efficacy (Bandura, 1997). For many participants, self-efficacy changed over time. Some described feeling more comfortable answering questions on a wider range of topics as they learned more through school or on their own. Conversely, others described learning more and realizing how much they didn’t know, thereby decreasing self-efficacy and their comfort responding to questions. In one case, a participant revoked his topic-specific flair in favour of the more general, “quality contributor flair.” And on the subject of flair, getting it was also important to several participants who saw the merit-based process of earning flair as representative of a history of high-quality contributions. These participants described flair as an important mode of recognition for having knowledge in their subject area and for their contributions to the community.

Another motivation for contributing expertise was seeing errors that needed to be corrected. Correcting errors was also often the impetus that inspired people to make their first ever comment on AskHistorians. For example, when recounting his first post, former mod u/edXcitizen87539319 alluded to the popular xkcd comic, saying,

It was a case of ‘somebody’s wrong on the internet’ and I had to correct them.

Similarly, others were encouraged to participate because they saw that they held expertise in a particular topic area that no one else seemed to have, for example, mod, Anna:

I realized there wasn’t anybody out there who was going to answer them but me. So, I basically filled a gap that I had self-identified.

Most of the time gaps were identified in a given topic area. However, one participant saw how he could fill a gap with particular source material: Oliver, who wasn’t a flaired user or mod, had inherited rare books written about a former president, so when a question came up, he was able to use these books to write a response to a question. His answer got accolades from the OP and was shared on that week’s Sunday Digest.

Self-efficacy, earning flair, correcting errors, and filling gaps were all important motivations for sharing expertise. However, the next two were the most highly valued: helping and bringing enjoyment to others and promoting historical thinking. When people described sharing their knowledge to make people happy, it was often accompanied not only by a sense of personal happiness but also a sense that some good was being done in the world, as is reflected in this quote from u/TRB1783:

If I’ve taught someone today, I’ve done a good thing. You know, something in the real world. Something that matters.

Tied in with the idea that teaching people something new is a worthwhile endeavor is that sharing expertise can be used to promote historical thinking, particularly to an audience that may not have in-depth experience with the humanities and historical methods. AskHistorians was viewed, and valued, as a public history site, which I’ll address in detail in the next post. Before that, however, I’d like to quickly touch on some of the challenges of sharing expertise on reddit.

Challenges

Sharing expertise was described as an overwhelmingly positive experience. However, several participants described challenges as well, mostly in the form of rude or aggressive pushback and abuse. Because such comments are often sent via PM or removed by the mods, much of this pushback is unseen by the vast majority of users. Here’s a slightly redacted example of some of this pushback and abuse that was directed at a user who responded to a question:

Christ have you ever thought about changing or removing the stick up your ass? Its sad when someone who claims to be a historian can’t seem to remove his perspective and bias from 60 years later and impose it on a historical context . . . because you are such a prissy uptight know it all you feel compelled to place your tight assed point of view onto it. Grow up Sheldon.

Obviously, the people who make comments such as these are responsible for them. However, there are social, cultural, and technical constructs of reddit that enable them. In my next post, I’ll discuss these factors and how they affect participation on AskHistorians.

Reference

Bandura, A. (1997). Self-efficacy: The exercise of control. New York: W.H. Freeman.

Shout outs

I'd like to send a full-on, heart out thanks to everyone in the AH community. Your questions, comments, and even upvotes all helped inform this work. I'm extra thankful to those who took time to respond to my discussion thread and chat with me about their participation, and the mod team for their continued support of my work. I'd like to extend a special shout out to u/AnnalsPornographie and the mods who read and provided feedback on my posts.

And last but not least, I'd like to thank my advisors, Drs. Caroline Haythornthwaite and Luanne Freund for all their input into my dissertation work.