Speaking as someone who answers questions fairly frequently on this sub, there's several reasons why I'm glad the mods remove posts aggressively. Firstly, it makes my job easier; I don't have to spend a lot of time correcting mistakes made by earlier posters who've just written a quick answer. Answers already take a long time to write, and adding more work to that would make it a lot less fun. Secondly, it means that people will actually look at my answers, rather than just upvoting the quick jokes or simple answers people write. It's worth noting that 90% or so of removed posts are this sort of thing, rather than anything deep. It's really demoralising to spend a couple of hours researching and writing a long answer, only to have most of the people who look at the comments ignore it in favour of the single-paragraph-long response written in five minutes by someone who's done little research. Finally, by removing racism, sexism and so on, the mods create a space which people with traditionally marginalised identities feel comfortable asking and answering questions in. This means that we get a wider variety of questions, and a wider variety of answers; it also, more importantly, means that women, BAME people, LGBT people, get to participate in this subreddit without having to face constant insults and aggression. That this is such a space is something that's important to me too. If the mods removed fewer posts, I would definitely answer a lot less on here, and as far as I know, the rest of the flair community feels much the same way. I'd also point out that while the mods may know enough to know that a removed answer is incorrect, they may not know enough about the subject to write a full and proper answer - I know that's true for me on a lot of topics.

So I always have a bit of a double take when people say they never see any question gets answers. That is what you said. "EVERY question goes unanswered or deleted." and the thing is, that means you must not be looking very hard.

Here's the Sunday Digest. It includes ~200ish answers and threads, and that's just what I myself read. There's also the twitter which showcases some of the best answers every single day. There is also a facebook page that does the same but I don't have a link handy.

As you say, we have almost a million subscribers. So clearly we're doing something right. This is a very specific community, that's trying to do very specific things. If that's not to your interest that's fine! Different spokes for different folks and all that. But this is what we want here, and clearly is what a lot of people want.

That other thing people are clearly missing when it comes to complaining about deleted comments is that a solid 90% of what gets removed are one line Wikipedia links, crappy jokes, "I don't know", and other garbage that doesn't actually answer anything. Heck I just looked at a thread with 5 deleted question and they looked like this;

• [removed]
• lol
• I dunno, maybe google it.
• a one sentence attempt at answering it and my personal favorite
• a bad pun attempt that doesn't try and answer it at all.

Believe me, you're not missing much in the deleted comments. If you'd rather have to wade through all that garbage, there's plenty of other subs on reddit with a much looser moderation policy.

Edit: However, in my eternal quest to help people enjoy this subreddit even more, let me suggest two other things. Both of them created by enthusiastic members of the community. Firstly, /u/almost_useless has created an extension that you can download that changes the comment count to more accurately reflect whats in the thread. You can find details here. It's still a bit of a work in progress, and we'd love to hear feedback, but it's looking pretty spiffy!

Secondly, every Friday in the free for all thread is a summary bot showing the top posts and the top comments. Once again, a bit of a work in progress, but if your looking for something good to read there's now lots of ways to find fantastic answers!

I've seen some interesting perspectives (racist) but i don't think they should be [...] Removed just because mods disagrees that doesn't mean a person isn't entitled to tell history from another perspective.

It might be worth reiterating this, for anyone confused about it: AskHistorians Does Not Tolerate Holocaust Denial or Revisionism. Full stop. We entertain many questions about the Holocaust and how Holocaust Denial came to be and effects us, but no one that argues that the Holocaust didn't happen or was somehow a tragedy of a lesser scale is arguing in good faith, and has no place here.

That's the big one, but it goes for other forms of revisionism as well. This is not a case of "you cannot challenge the establishment" - we do encourage legitimate debate on the interpretation of historical events. We do not allow racism. Those are not contradictory statements. It is entirely possible to have a disagreement on how to interpret sources, different perspectives from which to look at various events. A flair specializing in economic history is going to have a different view on the Moon landing than a flair specializing in the history of technology.

The "interesting perspectives (racist)" you are talking about, however, have no basis in fact. They are not legitimate different points of view, they are deliberate efforts to downplay, dismiss, and distort the facts to serve an ideological agenda of hate and discrimination. Many of them are based on outdated sources and approaches to history which, deliberately or not, display a bias toward misrepresenting history to glorify one group at the expense of others. That is something to combat, not condone, and many of our flairs do a good job of that wherever they find it.

So to get back to your main point:

just because mods disagrees that doesn't mean a person isn't entitled to tell history from another perspective.

This is exactly backwards. Answers are not removed because mods disagree with them: comments are removed because they violate the rules. This includes the removal of any comment that is verifiably wrong. AskHistorians is not a soapbox for anyone's revisionist view of history. Arguments that proceed from the premise that one group of people, because of race, gender, sexuality, ableness, or religion is somehow less fit or civilized or inferior to others is going to be removed - and the person making that post is probably going to be banned.

We have a zero-tolerance policy toward bigotry. We state that clearly for everyone to be aware of before they post here. If that's the kind of "history" you want to read, ask yourself why. Because history is not about reaffirming what you think you know about the world and how it works. History is about challenging those preconceptions and learning how to evaluate different sources, to look at how narratives are constructed and the motives and biases that lay behind them. The study of history is more than just a collection of facts, it is seeing the people and voices behind the raw data - the very things that racism seeks to distort and eliminate, with stereotypes and prejudice.

Least active compared to...? All the other subreddits which are specifically intended to be a place for historical experts to respond to questions? The whole point of this subreddit is that quality is better than quantity. Unanswered questions are the necessary trade-off to make that happen. As /u/thefourthmaninaboat has already ably spoken to, experts aren't going to contribute here if we don't run the subreddit to a high standard.

I raz on you, but seriously, what metric are you using here? I mean, for the month of June, we had 1,485,325 unique visitors and 7,736,090 page views. /r/history had 1,126,139 unique visitors and 6,003,471 page views in comparison. They also have 14,103,010 subscribers. We have more traffic, they have 14x the subscriber base... Who is the less active history subreddit?

So clearly people are specifically coming here because they see something worthwhile and which they enjoy. If you don't enjoy it, that is find and dandy, but it doesn't mean we need to change things for the literally millions of people who do. To be frank, it just means this subreddit isn't for you.

Oh, it's this thread again.

It's nothing to do with censorship or moderators stifling things they don't agree with, it's everything to do with citation, sources, and ensuring this remains a factual place. Before I really got how much of a great thing that is in this subreddit, I felt the same as you. But now? I see it very much as a positive and think it is the correct way to do things.

Yeah, it sucks to not get an answer to an interesting question. I save stuff all the time and come back to it, but at least when I come back and see answers, they are quality and not just anecdotal crap from some internet rando. Plenty of other places on reddit for that, and I'm glad I don't get that here on /r/AskHistorians.

Edit: I can't stress enough. Save the thread and return. Give the question time to simmer and rope in a qualified person to answer.