What is the history behind this, why do you/they do this. It is so over reaching it feels like to me?
Hello, and thank you for reaching out to us via a META thread with your suggestion that we not remove comments. While we always appreciate members of the community coming to us when they have thoughts on how to improve the subreddit, we are unfortunately limited in what we are capable of implementing, both due to the self-constraints imposed by the mission of the subreddit, as well as the limited architecture of the reddit site.
As such, while this is an idea that has been suggested before, it is also one that in discussions by the mod team in the past we have decided would not be a workable feature for the /r/AskHistorians subreddit. And of course, while we are quite proud of the community we have built here and happy with the state of the subreddit, we realize it isn’t for everyone, so would encourage you to also check out /r/History or /r/AskHistory as that may comport more with the kind of ‘history subreddit’ experience that you are looking for.
For a fuller explanation we would direct you to the META section of the subreddit’s FAQ, which includes several entires that address this and other issues including:
We would also encourage you to check out the feature on ‘Subscriptions and Reminders’ which can go a long way in helping in the use of the subreddit.
Thank you!
While I agree with the overall direction of the modding, I must point out that sometimes the overall quality can make casual but informed commenting a bit daunting.
Eg, many people browse through mobile which does not lend to lengthy replies. So do I and when I encountered a question on the Ottoman Empire's politics of movement I was somewhat sceptical on replying. On one hand I could offer an actual academic reply on how this could be different within the same groups but as I was writing it, I half expected it to get deleted because it leaned on the briefier end.
I am not advocating relaxing the rules but just offering some insight from the other side.
Try r/History. They seem to be less strict.
I just want to learn some history and see different peoples takes.
That's great, and exactly why we remove almost all the comments. Let me flip this on its head though. Why do you presume that what we are removing is quality answers which you will learn good history from? Because that definitely isn't the case.
The simple fact is that most things we remove are absolute junk. They are jokes, half-remembered vagueries, or outright incorrect information. While it is true that some of that is obvious, and (hopefully), if left unremoved, it wouldn't gain traction, at the least removing such clutter is an important part of curating the kind of space that actual historians want to participate in, and often, it is about removing information that is wrong, or poorly presented, but not obviously so to a layperson.
This thread is a great example of this. All of the initial comments were about the Midatlantic/Transatlantic Accent. This is the one fact about mid-century accents people know. As such, some people were writing answers about it, and because it sounded right to all those people who knew that fact, they then upvoted it. At a glance, at least 50 comments give that as an answer, and many were getting upvoted before removal by the mods.
But that answer is objectively wrong. And it took the better part of a day for someone to drop in there with an an answer that actually recognized this and took a different angle. If we hadn't removed the objectively wrong answers they likely would have been upvoted into the 1000s by that point. This gets exactly to the heart of the incentivization that we aim for with the rules. In removing the bad and incorrect answers, however truthy they may sound - or more specifically because they often can sound truthy and laypersons don't recognize the difference - we curate a space where people will want to put the time and effort into writing the quality answers that we are known for.
I think what people often forget is that the principle aim of the rules is to create a curated space where people are incentivized to spend time and effort in writing the kinds of responses that this subreddit is known for. Everything else, basically, is about balancing that concern. Because our aim is public outreach, we need to remain open to the public, but that of course means we live in an Eternal September of new folks breaking the rules every day because they don't take the time to learn them, which is frustrating in various ways, but what is key to understand there is that the mods aren't removing amazing responses because that is how we get our rocks off. We're removing responses that 90 percent of the time look like the ones highlighted in these older examples:
Sure, there is that other 10 percent which will often include responses which were long but that doesn't mean they were good. While perhaps at a glance they might have seemed right to a layperson, that gets back to the Truthiness I talked about earlier. Looking right isn't the same as being right, and those Truthy responses were removed because of some critical methodological or factual error present, not because of some silly whim on our part.