AskHistorians is an actively moderated subreddit, which means that moderators routinely remove content that falls outside the sub's purpose (providing in-depth and comprehensive answers to historical questions) or breaks its rules. Particularly for popular threads that get seen by users not familiar with our sub, there can be a lot of comments that get removed for these reasons.

The vast bulk of removed comments are not attempts at answers in the first place, or offer simplified or incorrect responses that do not come anywhere near meeting our requirements for answer quality. Simply put, writing the kind of answer we want to see takes time, and we work to ensure that threads remain free of clutter, jokes and digressions so that when answers do get written, they get the visibility they deserve. Unfortunately, Reddit's own site architecture means that the thread comment count doesn't decrease when a comment is removed by moderators, so the comment count is often completely inaccurate. We do have a Browser Extension that corrects the comment count on threads to actually reflect the number of visible comments, which makes browsing for answers more straightforward. If you're having trouble finding content, we also recommend checking out our Twitter, Facebook, and Sunday Digest feeds to see the (many) questions which do get excellent answers.