Answers which do not meet the sub's quality standards are removed by mods. These same standards mean that answers take longer to appear than elsewhere on Reddit, but they do appear - if you are sick of scrolling through them all, the Sunday Digest contains links to dozens of answered questions each week. The basic philosophy is that if people want a bad or incomplete answer, they have the entire rest of the internet to go to. If someone posts here, it is assumed that they are doing so because they want an in-depth, informed response.

/u/Crrpit already linked the digest (Which is maintained by one of the finest people I happen to be), and I myself linked the twitter and facebook down below. They showcase the many amazingly answered questions we get each week.

But I wanted to make a separate note. In these kinds of threads lots of people assume that all those removed comments are actually attempts at answers. Believe me, that's not often the case. Especially in some of the bigger threads with lots of removed answers. 90% of the time the removed comments are jokes, one liners, two or three sentences that begin with "I guess its...", and then a small mountain of people asking where all the comments are. We are very purposely trying to remove garbage like that. Take a look anywhere else on reddit. The comment most upvoted is rarely the actual correct answers. it's usually the one that was written first, otherwise its a meme or jokes. That is not at all what we want here. Yet that leads us into a vicious cycle. The more we remove to keep things clean and correct, the more people there are asking where all the (garbage) posts went. Then they get removed, and etc etc onwards and onwards for the rest of time.

Your really not missing much at all in the removed comments.

Edit: I'm hijacking my own top level thread because I just remembered two other things that might make your reading even more pleasurable. Firstly there's this fancy browser add on made by a community member. When installed it will actually change the comment count to better reflect how many actual comments are in the thread.

Secondly, there's a special summary bot in the Friday Free For All thread that posts up a list of the top ten threads and comments every week. Very worth checking out for a quick browse.

I saw a similar question a time ago, the response was that the sub doesn't allow half answers, or not referenced ones. So basically only people that have an authority in the field or good sources can respond. The point of all of these is actually to avoid being like r/askhistory, and keep experts and value their answers.

There is also the thing about the bot that always comment in the first comment of every thread. The sub if you read is aimed for questions that doesn't have a good answer with a preliminar search on Google or Wikipedia.

Totally agree. It doesn’t seem productive at all.

It is not productive. Of course studied historians are more qualified to answer than the common folk, but even those should get a shot at giving an answer. To make sure everyone is on the same page about expertise, studied Historians have flairs, and amateurs don't!