It seems that more often then not people are not getting any questions answered. Just flipping through different threads you see that a post has 20-40 replies yet only one answer remains. The rest have been removed. While I understand the need for enforcement of rules and sources cited many interesting questions are left open due to removal of discussion. The sub has become almost useless for getting answers for this reason. Out of 30 replies you may have one that hasn’t been removed or that isn’t a notification of removal by mods. Unless the information is blatantly wrong, miscited or disrespectful it should allowed. We are stewards of history not censorship.
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.
/u/AncientHistory did a great job covering all the main points, so I'll add just one thing. /u/Georgy_K_Zhukov maintains a profile which includes a number of examples of what exactly is being deleted. You can see for yourself what's getting removed. Or you can check out a trending AskReddit thread and see how much garbage you have to wade through to get to an answer. This is a community that doesn't want to wade through that garbage to find the gold.