Hopefully this question counts as a valid meta enquiry
I noticed a recent post had a comment count of 59 but when I checked the post there were only 3 comments showing, one from the automod, one deleted one from someone and a one mod post explaining about the deleted post
I can only assume the other "missing" comments are due to shadowbans but that seems like a surprisingly high number expecially seeing as other posts in /r/AskHistorians don't appear to have the same high number of "missing" comments
I'm not complaining or anything, I'm just genuinely curious as to why there would be such a high number of "missing" comments (for one particular post)
Nah, that's not a high degree of shadowbans; they're a lot less common than people think. The conquest thread is instead something that has the mod team on alert - a thread that's gone popular, has hit r/all, and is seeing a bunch of newcomers go in with half-baked answers of various types, but none of which reach the threshold of acceptability for an answer on the sub. Thus, they are served with the ritual of [removed].
Enjoy your first sight of a comment graveyard, as happens every time a thread gets on r/all.
I’m wondering this too. I feel like I haven’t actually been able to learn from the sub for a while - I can never see any comments.