Late last year, /r/AskHistorians got its millionth subscriber, so we did a census (survey) which got about two thousand responses. One of the questions we asked was about whether we were ‘overly zealous’, as you put it. Only 7% agreed with you. most were happy with the moderation, and indeed almost as many as those who wanted us to be more lenient actually wanted us to be stricter. Since then our subscriber numbers have gone up by 90,000 or so. I’m sure you can do the math!

Additionally, if you go and look at the most popular questions of the last week or month as judged by upvoted, almost all of them have answers, and plenty of less prominent questions got answers too. Basically our Sunday Digest series herehere has all the historical reading you could ever want. Enjoy!

Hello, and thank you for reaching out to us via this thread to register your complaint. That said, it is not one that we will be acting on as it evidences a fundamental misunderstanding of the mission and purpose of this subreddit. This subreddit does not exist to be a place for freewheeling discussion, for users to make their 'best guess' at an answer, or repeat half-remembered information from a book they read years ago. There are other subreddits on this site, such as /r/History or /r/AskHistory, which fill that niche, so we simply see no reason why we would desire to change our subreddit to be closer to meet a need that is already filled elsewhere.

Put plainly, /r/AskHistorians offers a specific, curated experience that is intended to value quality of responses to the quantity of answered questions. The rules we have are crafted, through many years of experience, to further that goal, and are quite effective at doing so. That said, while we are quite proud of the community we have built here and happy with the state of the subreddit, we realize it isn’t for everyone. But just as how some people may not enjoy it, tens of thousands of readers come here every day specifically for what we offer, and who understand that not every question can get answered, and ones that do can require time and patience to deliver.

So while we do understand where your dislike and frustration may be coming from, far from indicating that we need to change, it simply indicates that you may want to consider a different subreddit. There is nothing wrong with not liking something other people enjoy, but there is something unusual in expecting that those people should be deprived of their enjoyment by changing that experience to your own preferences.

If you are interested in a deeper exploration of the philosophy behind the subreddit, we would encourage you to check out the META section of the subreddit’s FAQ, and if you feel like in this light, you may want to give the subreddit another try, we would also encourage you to check out the feature on ‘Subscriptions and Reminders’, which can greatly improve the browsing experience.

Thank you!

The mods have jumped on the question already, but I should point out that they aren't the only ones deleting posts. I have sometimes typed out a basic answer to a question and deleted it when someone posted something better. I've also looked at a posted answer later and decided that, no, that's not really good enough to stand- and deleted it.

Note that answers are also mostly posted by people who happen to be wandering by and seeing the questions, and as there are sometimes questions that need very special knowledge, a question might have to be posted more than once.

Someone just asked how far a train could travel on a tender-load of coal in Europe in 1910, pulling eight cars. Amazingly, it got a pretty good answer by u'/Brickie78, who earned ( last I looked) all of 6 points for a good bit of time , trouble, and evident expertise. If you dislike questions not being answered, perhaps you could applaud some of the answers?

I've made it halfway through fascinating responses (with references) only to get booted due to moderator deletion

More general points about the moderation philosophy have been made already, but I thought this was worth engaging with more specifically. While I obviously have no idea which answers you're referring to, I can address the broader phenomenon. That is - why would longer, sourced answers that are at least somewhat interesting/well-written be removed?

Most stuff that gets removed is... not this. It's bad jokes, speculative guesses, people agreeing that they also would like the question answered, link drops to Wikipedia and so on. However, we do remove a small but significant number of attempted answers as well, that in some cases look outwardly very similar to answers that don't get removed.

This is fundamentally because we moderate on a qualitative as well as quantitative basis. That is, while we're always going to remove a two-line answer no matter what, we will also remove a 200 line answer if the content is dubious. In a similar way, more sources doesn't count for much if those sources are blog posts or National Enquirer articles. Even more reputable sources sometimes simply aren't appropriate - we are explicitly trying to curate answers that have a scholarly basis. So yes, we do get rid of answers that rely on non-scholarly sources or otherwise do not demonstrate an advanced grasp of the subject matter.

A common response here is that for genuine but flawed attempts at answers, we should just let the upvotes decide - users can read the answers provided, and reward the better answers. However, this simply doesn't work in a subreddit like ours. The whole point is exploring historical questions that aren't common knowledge - there is no way that we could expect that every user has the skills and knowledge to evaluate even a fraction of the answers we receive. As a lot of content on non-fiction orientated subreddits often attests, something that's written well in an authoritative voice will generally be accepted as correct. Moreover, Reddit's own structures do not lend themselves to this kind of meritocratic outcome. Generally speaking, the answer posted first will receive more upvotes and therefore be more visible (and accrue more votes) - and it takes longer to write a good answer than a bad answer. Everyone on the modteam is familiar with this phenomenon - blatantly wrong answers in a popular thread quickly accruing 100+ upvotes in the time it takes us to review them.

So, we remove them in order to maintain the sub as a curated space in which users can feel confident that they are receiving in-depth, comprehensive and correct information. It's certainly not the only way to discuss and learn about history online - r/history and r/askhistory both offer a much more relaxed moderation approach, which is fine. They don't want to be us, and we don't want to be them. You, and all users, are very welcome to seek out the forum that suits your tastes best.

The problem,if there is one, really isn't bad moderation, it's insufficient engagement by people educated enough to know the answer or interested enough to make the effort to comment. It's a issue everywhere there isn't a clear and compelling incentive for people to do something, like money.