This sub is extremely carefully moderated. It’s one of the best things about the place - how careful and thorough the level of discourse is takes real work to maintain.

Answers are expected to be detailed, with sources when required. Comments that don’t meet this threshold - whether too short, too flippant or lacking in supporting evidence - get culled. Unfortunately, Reddit as a site is not very clever, and doesn’t remove those now-invisible comments from the total count.

That's Reddit's native architecture conflicting with how the sub is run. As the AutoMod autopost notes, we like in-depth and comprehensive answers here, backed by historical scholarship. Those 5 answers you're not seeing have been removed by the mods for, essentially, not being up to par. The vast majority of these are one-word or one-line answers, "I vaguely remember an article about this from last year", "I learned this in history class", links to Wikipedia or the top result of a Google search on the topic, and basically just useless dross that does not materially contribute to a thread and that you wouldn't learn from anyway. All this stuff gets removed by the mods, but Reddit-the-site still includes moderator-removed comments in the count, hence why it says 5 comments but you see none of them.

The strong moderation ensures that you only get the good stuff. It can be a slog to get already-written stuff, which is why there are alternatives available - for those, I refer you again to the AutoMod autopost. If you're on desktop, the Browser Extension it mentions is a direct answer to the problem.

Always sort by top posts of the week when browsing for answers. Your hot feed will mostly be questions not yet answered.