Why is that we feel the need to erase each comment and stifle conversation completely? Often times there could be good discussion happening between normal people in the comments about historical topics, whether they're a historian or just a casual history fan. Isn't that a good thing? We can still have comprehensive responses that answer the question and upvote them to the top. But censoring and deleting every normal history fan's comments just turns people off from this sub. Half the time an answer never arises to a good question because the simple answers are deleted and a historian never gets around to responding to the question. I am sure there are others here that would agree with me. We should encourage discussion not censorship.
Often times there could be good discussion happening between normal people in the comments about historical topics
That's what /r/history or, IIRC /r/askhistory is for. This is a sub where people want a definitive and comprehensive answer to their question. People are free to discuss the answers themselves.
whether they're a historian or just a casual history fan. Isn't that a good thing?
No, when people post a question here, they want an answer, not a dozen people making jokes or saying "Well, I think...". People are more than happy to discuss the answers in sub-comments, but top-level comments should be answers only.
There is a common misconception that the primary purpose of the subreddit is to promote discussion. It's not. The main goal is to curate answers - discussion between informed experts capable of providing different perspectives is welcome, but is a bonus rather than what we're trying to achieve.
The desire to provide a space specifically for answers is the reason why other types of comment are removed. Simply put, writing to our standards takes time (and it takes time for a given question to reach the eyes of the few people even capable of answering most questions). If a thread fills up with hours worth of comments, chatter and low-effort or outright wrong attempts, how many people clicking on the thread would even see the good answer posted hours later to upvote it? Who would bother writing it in the first place, knowing that a bad pun at the top of the thread is all anyone is going to read?
This means that not every question gets an answer, but we'd prefer that half of the questions we receive get good answers than none do. If this is not what you want from a subreddit, that's fine - r/history or r/askhistory both provide less stringent rules about commenting, so you're welcome to post there instead of here. We have no interest in replicating those subreddits here though.
I'm very late to this, but I wanted to mention an angle I'd like to cover more, and leave the rest to my compatriots.
There's often an assumption that the majority of comments that are removed are answers, or discussion. It's not really. You can find some examples here if you'd like to see for yourself, but essentially whats getting removed are guesses, jokes, "I remember my dad told me.." and general low effort stuff like that. You can imagine what kind of clutter the thread would build up with a few hundred comments like that. Combined with how the upvote button doesn't actually work like some others have said, and you end up with a place no better then a random AskReddit thread. Keeping it clear guarantees that when the answer from the expert arrives, it'll have pride of place at the top.
You can check out a good round up of answers each week in the Sunday Digest. Look at the quality difference between some of those and, again, a random AskReddit answer.
Each community is built for fairly specific purposes. AskHistiorians isn't just about history, and its not particularly about discussing history like other forums. It's about asking a question and getting an in depth answer from someone with the sources and knowledge to give it a full write up. Of course that kind of a community might not be for everyone! Different spokes for different folks and all that. I always fully recommend checking out some of the other history subs and finding which one really jives with you.
But we're up to 1.2 million subscribers now, so I'm pretty happy to say we have a community that's keen on this style.
In simplest terms, the best answer doesn't get upvoted to the top. In the best of circumstances, the answer that people think is best does, but that doesn't reflect correctness, or fidelity to the historical method. Not that mods are perfect either, but we work to ensure that the answers which are shown here deserve to be, not simply that they are whatever confirms people's prexisting assumptions on the topic, which can often be quite erroneous. At the end of the day, the rules are supposed to be discouraging to people who just want to post off the cuff, half-informed responses, and if there are users who simply can't participate if they aren't allowed to... then the rules are doing their job in driving them off. This community isn't intended to cater to everyone. It is intended to provide a curated space where experts know that it is worth their time and effort to write in-depth responses to questions, and that those comments won't be drowned out by other content. You suggest that:
Half the time an answer never arises to a good question because the simple answers are deleted and a historian never gets around to responding to the question.
But that makes no sense. If we didn't remove the simple answers, it would be much more than half the time that a good answer never arises. The reason that those answers do arrive is because of the removals we do. Doing less removals won't make good answers appear out of nowhere. It will only drive away the users capable of writing them. If any old answer will do, good, bad, or whatever, then this simply isn't the subreddit for you. If you only want the good stuff, then the trade off is that not every question will get an answer, as our users are, or course, all volunteers doing this in the spare time.
For a much longer explanation, this is the text of our recent Rules Roundtable on this topic:
One of the hallmarks of /r/AskHistorians is the high rate at which comments are removed, and subsequently, the 'seas of [removed]' that some popular threads turn into at times. For most regulars, this is something they don't only expect, but appreciate! But for newer users, and those who might not understand the underlying intentions of large scale removal, it can be confusing and frustrating, despite our best efforts to make clear what is going on with the stickied Automod comment.
The most important thing to understand is that /r/AskHistorians is a space created with a specific purpose, namely to provide a place where users can, quite literally, Ask Historians their questions, and complementary, provide a place where knowledgeable users want to contribute by writing answers to the questions in their spare time. Because popular doesn't equal correct, and because being first doesn't equal being good, the Moderation Team curates the subreddit to ensure that the only content left standing is the content that deserves to be.
A joke can be written in seconds, and get 1000 upvotes in a few hours; likewise some muddled facts which are kind of right about some things can be posted nearly as fast to the same result. But a good answer can take hours of work, and if it is forced to compete with those low effort comments posted hour before, it will often languish unseen by most. That defeats the very heart of what the subreddit intends to be, and thus we remove comments which quality answers shouldn't have to compete against.
We won't dwell too much on what deserving means, as the previous Roundtables engage with that idea plenty, but the key point is that removal is a important part of ensuring that this subreddit lives up to what it is intended to be. In an ideal world, of course, no comments would be removed, but that is outside of our control, as it requires the users to demonstrate self-control and awareness, which we accept is impossible in an online space of our size, which long ago reached its Eternal September.
Some users, based on replies we get and META threads we see, are apparently convinced that the Mod team removes good answers. For what possible reason, I can't be sure, although we have been accused of political biases, as one might expect, but also more bizarre conspiracies such as gaining sexual satisfaction from removals. The simple fact of the matter is though that our rules are well publicized, and we expect users to read them before posting, and the only comments we are removing are the ones that break them! Nine times out of ten, they aren't even reasonable attempts at answers. People crack jokes, people post links to a barely related Wiki page, people make death threats and call us Nazis, or people post startlingly wrong information. And then of course there is the snowball effect of users who don't read the rules or the Automod comment, and start asking "Where are all the comments!?" We occasionally shares views of this, such as here or here.
A small minority of removed comments are good faith efforts at answering, which while showing some understanding of the rules, fall short for various reasons. These too, are removed of course, as we can't simply bend the rules willy-nilly, but in these cases, even if we don't post a public removal notice, we often reach out to users if we believe it likely that with a little nudge and a bit of coaching, they can get their answer up to what we expect.
We've been doing this for years, and have heard plenty of suggestions on what we should be doing instead, or simple claims that our philosophy is in error. Telling us, though, that "a bad answer is better than no answer" not only misses the point of this subreddit, but certainly says something odd about the writer, who essentially admits to us that they would rather learn incorrect information as long as it means they have something to read! No one should be surprised that "No answer is better than a bad answer" is a fairly core value for us, and one which we seek to attain here, but anyways, to run through a few of the most common things that we hear!
Upvotes have some uses. Nothing warms our hearts more than to see a rules-breaker ruthlessly downvoted in the few short minutes before the Mod Team manages to remove it, but their utility only goes so far. In History, being correct isn't something that is determined by popular consensus. It is something which is determined by good historical practices! While even the Moderation team isn't infallible, we review answers against an involved and carefully developed set of criteria, and we have a damn good track record while doing so! But we have seen plenty of comments getting quickly upvoted, despite being very wrong, in the span between posting and review by a moderator, so we know very well that the consensus of laypersons can be far from correct in many cases.
For those who remember when the Colbert Show debuted, "The Wørd" of the first episode was Truthiness, which is:
The quality of stating concepts or facts one wishes or believes to be true, rather than concepts or facts known to be true.
In a nutshell, that is what Upvotes determine. Not the correctness of the comment, but its Truthiness, its comportment with what the user thinks is true - or at least sounds it - but they often might be quite wrong about. An example I use is this thread, which saw innumerable comments about the Transatlantic Accent, the one fact about mid-century accents everyone seems to know. That isn't the answer, but it doesn't matter, without removal the upvotes certainly would have determined it was hours before anyone wrote something to the contrary.
The Moderation Team isn't claiming infallibility, but we are claiming that we have the tools and experience to do a pretty good job at this. Certainly a much better one than the average user is capable of, and that of course is why so many users come here!
In the first, we wouldn't want to do this. Removal is a metaphorical stick that might not work against users who don't yet know the rules, but at least keeps most of those who do at bay. Take that away, and the floodgates are unleashed, as this simply incentivizes users to post poor quality answers, not to mention increases our workload considerably.
More importantly though, we literally can't. Reddit doesn't have that functionality! Only threads can be Flaired, not Comments! Please, at least suggest things which are technically possible, even if we won't like it...
That is kind of like the worst of both worlds, isn't it? Why would we allow wrong information to stick around even for a little bit? Why would we implement something that still disincentivizes higher quality contributions like that would? Of all the suggestions we get regularly, this one baffles the most. I don't understand the people who explicitly state that they would be happy to read bad information as long as they have something to read... Very odd suggestions.