Why is it that every time I see an interesting question here, there are removed or no comments?

Per Rule 4, answers must be in-depth and comprehensive, based on good historical practice. Just being 'correct' is insufficient by the sub's standards. An answer is not good just because it's correct; it's good because it explains. It is not enough that I say that the Japanese plan for the Battle of Midway was flawed - I should also explain why it was flawed, how the US used their advantages, and what that meant for the course of the battle as a whole.

Everything that's removed is not up to this standard, and the vast majority of the time, you'd get nothing from seeing them anyway. They're one-liner answers that contribute nothing, or are outright wrong anyway. Or they're based more on an insufficient popular understanding of the topic. Or they're variations on "just google it" or are clearly the top result of a Google search of a relevant keyword. Or, as usually happens when a thread hits the front page and therefore gets a lot of views, they're variations on "why are all the comments removed". Or they're various kinds of disgusting useless bullshit - racism, genocide denial, that sort of thing. Nothing of value is gained from any of this, and thus they are rooted out.

It takes time for a good answer to be written. I'm a homebody with no life and I still take around four hours from when I spot a question in my bailiwick. Now consider that some of the people here have actual jobs, or don't hang around sniping the New queue, or have classes to teach, and it's easy to see why it can be a bit of time, not to mention the time necessary to write that answer in the first place.

Reddit's voting system privileges early content instead of good; far too frequently, whoever's first, regardless of quality, gets all the upvotes. If the latest rehashed variation on this guy's wife or him having broken arms gets to the top while a proper answer that that person spent hours on to get it right languishes at the bottom, how fair is that to the second person? And how much would you have learned, on a subreddit whose stated mission is to bring academic-quality answers to historical questions?

This does impact the subreddit's browsing experience, which is why the AutoMod autopost on top of every thread contains ways to get to already-written content (may AutoMod remain forever performant). If you're on desktop, the Browser Extension corrects the comment count to exclude the stuff that's been [removed]. The Sunday Digest is a compilation of all the answers of the past week. If you really, really want the answer to that specific question, the link to the reminder bot is already filled in for you when you click through; all you have to do is press send.