AskHistorians is a heavily moderated community, and the rules sticky is there to remind people of what we expect in an answer. Because upvotes indicate interest in a question, rather than a question that has answers, questions you click through from the front page or your feed may not have answers yet. So we recommend either browsing from the main page: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/

or using the RemindMe bot to remind you to check back later for an answer. Or, if you just want to read answers to questions, check out our Sunday Digest: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/f4r1tr/sunday_digest_interesting_overlooked_posts/

Thanks!

This one really isn't a mystery I'm afraid. While we can provide a forum for people to ask (almost) all the questions they like, we cannot compel people to answer them. While we do our best to encourage users with expertise to write answers, and they often oblige, it would be churlish and unrealistic to expect them to do so at the same pace that Reddit's algorithms hurls posts to the top of the sub. Answers of the type that we're interested in - in-depth, thoughtful and comprehensive - simply take some time to get written.

One big reason the Automod post exists is to remind people that do encounter threads with nothing else in them of the various tools we've created to get around this problem, included curated collections on Twitter and Facebook, and in the Sunday Digest. Our custom Browser Extension also helps a great deal when it comes to differentiating between threads with only removed comments, and those with actual answers.

Answers aren't created by upvotes unfortunately. They indicate interest in the question not the presence of the answer. The average time to an answer is 8-9 hours, and it can easily take longer.