This has been thoroughly answered, thank you mods :)
Unlike most subreddits, AskHistorians is curated, with the goal of allowing questions about the past to receive high-quality, in-depth answers. To facilitate such answers, and to ensure that they are visible when posted, we routinely remove everything else: off-topic discussion, jokes, attempts at answers that do not meet our minimum standards and so on. Because of Reddit's algorithms, over which we have no control, popular posts are likely to reach a wider audience before an answer has had time to be written, resulting in many casual users only encountering empty threads, or threads showing comment totals that are greatly inflated from what is actually present. This is actually a bug in Reddit's architecture - if a comment is removed, it continues to show up in the thread total. We do have a Browser Extension that allows you to see the 'true' comment count instead.
If you have a look at this part of the FAQ you'll see a couple of threading explaining why comments don't show. AskHistorians is a tightly moderated community that looks for high quality in depth posts. Anything that doesn't mean that standard is removed. That means those other comments are generally one liners, jokes, links to Wikipedia, or occasionally attempts at answers that fall short of what we're looking for.
Unfortunately we can't change the comment count, no matter how much we bug the administration about that, so it continues to show the removed comments as being there. My suggestion is to try out the browser extension which gives a more accurate idea of the comments.
Should we really have this conversation again?
The best part is that someone left a comment and I cannot currently see it
Hello, it appears you have posted a META thread. While there are always new questions or suggestions which can be made, there are many which have been previously addressed. As a rule, we allow META threads to stand even if they are repeats, but we would nevertheless encourage you to check out the META Section of our FAQ, as it is possible that your query is addressed there. Frequent META questions include:
You may also be interested in the AskHistorians Browser Extension for a more accurate comment count, or subscribing to the weekly roundup. Twitter, Facebook, and the Sunday Digest also highlight content already written.
This isn't intended to be the last and final word, and we encourage you to bring up any further questions you might have which are not addressed there as well, but we hope that this will at least provide you some additional information until a moderator is able to show up and respond further!