As the repeated line goes, "AskHistorians is an actively-moderated subreddit." 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 cry "no" when people come by asking if the people of the Medieval Era drank alcohol all the time because the water was unsafe; I must explain why that's a myth, what the Medievals actually did drink, and why.
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 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 to hitting the post button. 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. (Or in some cases, the emotional labour required to answer the question is currently unavailable. Hell, even I have it easy just by linking posts and I still get bouts of "I cannot deal with Nazi bullshit right now" - what more for someone who needs to devote six hours into writing about Nazi bullshit?)
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's datalinks be forever swift). 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.
Honestly, it's better to come onto the sub to browse it directly instead of popping into the threads that come up on your recommended feed; indeed, those threads tend to have a higher incidence of people coming in who aren't used to the sub's moderation. Give it time, browse the Digest and the FAQ while you wait.
Due to the level of quality required in answers here, it takes time to write them -- and time is the enemy of reddit's sorting algorithms.
Check the weekly roundup posts (linked by the automod bot in each post) for posts with answers.
What a strange comment. Lots of questions never get answered, sometimes really interesting questions. But I have learned so much about obscure matters of history with really in depth answers that people have clearly taken a lot of time to write out. Including references.
When you consider that reddit allows, iirc, comments to contain up to 10 thousand characters, and I have seen a number of replies that require multiple comments to complete the answers, I for one am grateful for the people who do answer questions.
I can't even say, "ask better questions" because I've seen good questions (that is, something I am interested in) never get a reply, and bad questions (subjects I don't care about, how dare they) get in-depth replies. Sometimes I even accidentally learn something about something I didn't know about.
I want to thank everyone who provides answers to the questions on this sub. Even the poor misguided sods who have spent a lifetime studying something that is not of interest to ME.
Yes
I hear the mods have a pretty fancy bot that puts together a big list of all the answers each week. You might enjoy checking that out!
I also like /r/historiansanswered because it links questions that have been answered, even if it's just a link to an older question with the answer. I find that the sticky on each question with the option to get a message when it's answered is buggy for me on mobile and I like the instant gratification of getting an answer.
Don't view this sub by "new", use "top" for the day or week.
It takes a couple of hours or a day to get the answer, so if you are looking at threads less than 2-5 hours old, you're not seeing them.