Hurray for meta thread time.

The thing is, this sub is a very specific community with a very specific goal. High quality, in-depth answers on history. It's askhistorians, not askrandompeoplewhattheythink. Check out the Sunday digest. There's hundreds of answers, and they give you an idea what kind of posts we look for. The important thing, especially for this meta discussion, is that high quality answers like that take time. Often several hours. So as part of that we remove all the low quality crap that tends to accumulate. Jokes, one liners, wikipedia links, etc. We don't want that.

A common misunderstanding is that all the removed comments are actually attempts at answers. For example, in this thread easily two thirds of ALL the removed questions are "Where are all the comments gone?" Even though there's a mod post sticked to the top of the thread that explains the rules! So it's a vicious cycle. The more we remove low quality, the more people people ask about it.

his is basically an empty, useless sub now and I feel like I'm wasting my time clicking on questions.

I feel it's time for an overhaul on the posting rules or this sub will die off.

I'm sorry to hear that! But it's certainly not empty, nor is it dying. We passed a million subs and we're steadily growing. If anything we're thriving! Perhaps even faster then is healthy.

As I mentioned above, we get hundreds of answers but its important to have patience. Those fantastic answers take time to write, time to be researched, and we don't want it drowned out by a highly upvoted little paragraph or joke response.

That's the kind of community we're after here. honestly, it's not the kind of community that appeals to everyone. And you know what, that's fine! Different spokes for different folks and all that! You might appreciate other history subs like r/history or r/askhistory.

But otherwise my suggestion is to fall back on that patience. Take advantage of the prefilled remind me bot link in EVERY automod post in EVERY thread. Come back on Sunday and check the digest, or perhaps browse our twitter or facebook.

Edit: If you want some great examples of what exactly is getting removed, then check out /u/Georgy_K_Zhukov 's profile where they maintain some examples of removed comments.

/u/Gankom covered most of what needs to be said, but I would add one more thing, namely that is makes sense that the number of comments would get removed over time. 'Eternal September' is a problem that almost every online community faces, as new users show up and need to learn the community norms. The bigger the sub grows, the more new users are going to be showing up compared to the number previously. They are going to make shitty comments.

Users such as yourself, OP, seem to be making the wildly bizarre assumption that we are removing good answers, yet... what possible reason would be be doing that? For shits and giggles? Because we derive sexual satisfaction from removing content? Because we like being called "fucking f*****\s" and receiving literal death threats and dismemberment/cannibalism fantasies in our PMs?

Of course not. Very little has changed in the past few years as to what we remove. The only thing that has changed is the size of the subreddit, which means that the volume of bad comments, which we always have removed, grows in number. In the current top thread, which I presume is what is frustrating you, this is a snapshot of what you are missing, which as you can see is a mixture of people complaining about removed comments, and masturbation "jokes" (all usernames are of course edited out).

You are complaining that:

However, within an hour of a question posting, almost all answers get removed.

Which... yes? Of course? How quickly do you think answers get written? The average is ~8 hours usually from post of the thread to posting the answer, and that of course includes the time it takes for the respondent to see it in the first place. The entire purpose of the curation in this subreddit is to remove the stuff that is posted early, and which is almost uniformly junk, so that users want to put in the time and effort to write better answers that take longer to write. This means that one junk comment though being removed can then lead to the snowball effect of "Why is a comment removed?" and then more "Where are the comments?". Because we post an Automod comment in every thread which states very clearly "Welcome to /r/AskHistorians. Please Read Our Rules before you comment in this community. Understand that rule breaking comments get removed." we temporarily ban most users who posts those comments, but to return to the beginning, it will always be Eternal September.

I think it’s funny you used the word factoid, one of its meanings is “an item of unreliable information that is reported and repeated so often that it becomes accepted as fact“, I’d wager that the majority of history related stuff on reddit is of that variety. I’m glad that this sub has the standards it does, it’s really depressing to see how highly upvoted completely bogus comments on r/history can get.

AskHistorians has over one million subscribers - and growing.

In part, we feel that the success of this subreddit has been because of its active moderation policy and its knowledgable base of flaired users - all of whom are volunteers. We have attracted some notable experts to participate in AMAs, and work to extend the reach of great answers from this community through social networking (twitter, Facebook, etc.) and our Podcast series.

It can be very frustrating to click on a question only to find that many or all of the comments have been removed - which can sometimes be the case when a popular thread rises quickly, attracting a good amount of attention (and subsequent low-quality comments, most of which don't even attempt to answer the question), which has to be aggressively pruned. The AskHistorians Browser Extension can help with that, and we also have the Sunday Digest threds to help curate answered questions for easier consumption.

Of course, if you're still upset over our level of moderation, there is always r/history and r/askhistory - both fine subreddits with decent moderators who enforce their own rules in their own way. But this is AskHistorians, and the thing that differentiates us from those subs is being more stringent assessing and, if necessary, removing answers and comments that don't meet out standards. High standards are what AskHistorians is all about; without them, why have the sub at all?

So while we feel your frustration, and welcome suggestions for how to improve our moderation policy, please try to understand why the subreddit is how it is.

Is there a way to keep questions off the front page until it's answered? I feel like that is part of the frustration, when someone runs across a question that intrigues them and see nothing but removed comments. Sure, you can save it and come back later, or go to the sub and see answered questions, but this is Reddit, most people are just browsing their front page.

Unlike most subs, we don't need wide viewership to get an answer. If someone wants to know about midget concubines in tenth century Constantinople, we want Byzantine experts, not random redditors who see and upvote.

If you want historical factoids go to r/history

I love history, too, and I love the serious moderation on the serious subs like this one, askanthropology, etc. It means that when a question gets an answer that stays, it's a quality answer with real information.

Keep doing what you do, mods, your work is well-appreciated.

I like at least one sub with quality control. Is that so wrong?