I know this might be removed (All Mighty Mods, show mercy on my post) but I feel like someone needs to say this.
I'm getting really tired of every time somebody posts a question, a dozen other users comment on with their "Hey, if I may attach my question to yours!" I understand that sometimes we get tangent thoughts when we see big questions, but the whole point of posting on this sub is that you, the users, ask your own question. It just feels like when I post a question and the first ten comments are people asking their own questions on my post, they are simply stealing my post's light.
I'm sorry if I sound a bit envious here, but when I make a post I want historians to come there and answer MY question. If you have an additional question, it's simple enough to create your own post and link to mine or whoever else made you think of that question.
(Steps off soapbox) sorry for the rant everyone. I love this subreddit and I get tired of seeing this stuff.
Someone posting a follow up question doesnt impact your original question's chances of getting answered. If a historian has opened your post to answer, they're not gonna stop and instead answer a follow up. What does happen is that follow up questions can also get answered, as someone answering the original, question can answer related ones as well, increasing the amount of learning and knowledge sharing in any one post. Sorry, this sub is about academic learning, not attention seeking, and the current rules maximize learning.
I'm sorry if I sound a bit envious here, but when I make a post I want historians to come there and answer MY question.
This seems like a disingenuous point, if you're getting follow up questions you're normally also getting an answer. Now I'm not inclined to say you'll never get 4-5 well written, cited and prepared responses but generally as a mean we have a limited number of individuals with the time and knowledge to make answers. If someone has a follow up question it's often because it's for an individual redditor with the expertise and courtesy to respond in the first place.
Often the reason why follow up questions happen is a topic excites the brain and gets them thinking of questions that may not be worth completely independent threads but can add further clarity and quality to the answer they're responding to. This kind of just seems like a nothing burger.
I don't want to say too much right now, but yes, we have discussed the problem of pre-emptive follow-up questions. We haven't tried to come up with any statistical analysis to figure out the exact effect of numerous follow-up questions on the eventual answer to the OP question, but quite frequently these comments are basically suggestions of what the answer to the OP might be, or are questions that the answer to the OP would almost definitely answer as well, or, as you say, should probably be their own posts to the sub.
However, bear in mind that most of the people seeing your post aren't even clicking through and are just upvoting it from the main sub page or r/all! So they're not effectively stealing your post's thunder (though I won't deny that it's frustrating to get the notification of a response and have it just be a follow-up question).