Our questions are all posted by our users, so the simple answer is just that these are the things people want to know about. As mods, we don't control what gets posted or what gets upvotes.

But that's not the whole story. We do evaluate each question that comes in, and the ones you see are only the ones we have manually approved. There are some things we like to see in a question and some things we've decided, drawing on years of experience, to remove when we see them. Apart from obvious things like not allowing users to air their opinions about modern politics or asking the sub to do their homework for them, we mostly remove questions because they cannot be answered in depth by an expert, and would instead lead to masses of low-effort, speculative answers. As a sub, we cater to longform answers grounded in sources and scholarship. The more casual discussion of history has a home on r/history or r/AskHistory. We offer more explanation of the kinds of questions we like to see in this Rules Roundtable about asking better questions.

One of the key principles of a good question is that it is specific. Questions that define their time, region and subject clearly are going to be much more easily spotted by a relevant expert who can then much more easily search their notes and prepare an answer. Questions that are more vague and broad often miss that crucial connection between topic, expert, and sources/scholarship. This is why you'll often find the best answers in niche threads where you never expected them, while broader questions might have only short and unsatisfactory answers, or even go entirely unanswered.

This is also paralleled in what historians actually do. Generally speaking, a professional historian has a subject in which they've read deeply for years; in and around that subject, they will be able to write articles and books, and they will be able to tell you all about the existing scholarly views on the matter. This is what is required of them to get their degree and to publish research with academic publishers. The standards of the field require them to go deep rather than broad. Historians may have gone through decades of scholarship, visited archives, examined material remains, gathered oral histories, and studied entire languages just to prove that they know what they're doing and their views on a subject are worth other scholars' time and consideration. But how could you ever approach a "big why" question - as you put it - with the same level of attention to detail, with the same depth of reading, with the same grasp of the primary material? At best, a scholar will be able to build up the required expertise slowly over many decades. At worst, they will produce something based on more cursory reading that experts in each narrow subfield will reject as ill-informed and uncritical.

Big historical questions, then, are not nearly as commonly asked by actual historians, and the answers they give are usually tentative and extremely controversial. Many historians never bother. Those that do are regularly treated by their colleagues as if they've sacrificed academic integrity for the sake of popularity and commercial success. You can see the result from the way that sweeping theses like Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs and Steel are received on this sub: many experts do not believe it is possible to write history on that scale and still be responsible with sources and scholarship.

Our experience as moderators reflects the same dynamic, but from the bottom up rather than from the top down. We have seen countless times - and you can go see right now, anywhere else on reddit - what happens when you ask a big crowd with some knowledge a "big why" question. It is rarely possible to distill anything of value from an infinity of partly informed guesses; in fact, many of them are relying on the very same attempts by historians that their colleagues have already dismissed as inaccurate. If you are interested in bigger questions, it is usually better to gather as many answers to more specific questions as possible, and then draw your own conclusions based on the knowledge you have.

The answer is that specific questions tend to be a lot easier to answer, in part because even the most specific question can get broad and complicated rather quickly! Historians tend to have specific expertise, which means that a person who is, say, very well-versed on Persia in the 4th century BCE may not be nearly as comfortable talking about Sparta in the same time period or Persia a few centuries later.

There's also the issue of what exactly we mean by "specific." Asking about "Americans" might seem overly broad to an American; after all, Wisconsin, Alaska, and Florida are very different! We often get questions along the lines of "Did Africans wear fur hats?," which might look specific to some but covers a massive area and time period. Someone is much more likely to be able to answer "What sort of fur hats did people in Ethiopia wear in the 14th century?" than they'd be able to cover an entire continent through millennia. Again, you might get someone whose expertise lies in fur hats, or in medieval Ethiopia, but they may not be able to answer the same question for wool hats or people in Morocco.

For example, I wrote an answer about the origin of sea shanties a while back. I came at it mostly from my background in ethnomusicology, but the answer involves maritime history, African-American/Afro-Caribbean history, the history of the British Empire and of Britain itself, the history of the folk revival, and a bunch of other topics spread out over a couple centuries. To some it may see like a specific question, but to me it feels very broad!

Finally, the idea of "big history" can certainly be interesting, but there are some pretty common and serious holes you can quickly fall into. If you're an avid reader of the sub you may find that certain "big history" books/authors like Jared Diamond are less than well received around here. Often, this has to do with the fact that they make claims so vast that they end up going way out on a limb into areas far beyond their expertise, resulting in errors, misconceptions, and other significant issues that end up calling the central thesis into question. u/CommodoreCoCo does a good job of explaining the main problems with Guns Germs, and Steel, which are often true of many "big history/big why" theories. Formulating something that explains vast swaths of history is really, really hard, and therefore generally otu of the scope of an answer on this sub.

No one is really an expert in "big history", and a lot of historians particularly do not like the idea of big histories I.e. stories of democracy or freedom. Thus is primarily because they're far too prescriptive or deterministic. Even at undergrad level doing a dissertation, you're taught to be almost as specific as you can with your research. For example, I was originally going to do my dissertation debating the idea of a Mid-Tudor crisis (the idea that Edward and Mary were crap, essentially), however even that short 11 year period ended up being way too broad of a topic. I ended up drilling further down and focusing simply on the rebellions in their reigns and answering the question as to whether they constituted crises in and of themselves.

I also spent most of my third year focusing solely on Vikings within North West England. It doesn't sound like there would be a lot to cover in that, however there is a lot of history out there. Seriously, pick any almost any 50 year period in European/Eurasion history and you'll have something you could potentially dedicate your life to. To top it off, people disagree on a lot of things as well, do on top of becoming an expert on a particular period of history, you also need to become an expert on what other people are writing about that period of history as their views will likely differ slightly from your own. People live for the debate around these topics because everyone wants their version of history to be seen as the correct view, if there could ever really be one.

I feel like a lot of people who ask specific questions about daily life or similar topics are fantasy/historical fiction/alt history writers (like me) trying to worldbuild/research their settings with small details harder to find online

Because non-specific questions are already answered by textbooks or an easy google search.

Do you want to know who fought in the Battle of Lepanto? That's easy, you can google it. Do you want information on FDR economic policies? Hundreds of books and articles have been written on the matter.

But it will be harder to find how attitudes towards beaches have changed over time; or how a certain activity was done in the middle ages, unless you ask a historian.

To expand on this, for the love of god PLEASE ban the "I am a 'blah blah' in 'whatever time'" type questions. Just ask the question like a normal person, it can be done, always. The "I am a.." adds nothing to the post except an instant downvote.

As somebody who asks very specific questions:

It's usually because I'm reading something, like a Wikipedia article, an old answer on this sub, etc that deals with the "big perspective", and I run into a statement that is tangental to the article/post, but makes me think "wait what? Why?"

I totally agree with you, whenever I see a question trending is always like "I'm a shoe maker in 346 bc Rome, how likely is it that a duck crosses my path on way to work"

This is kind of funny, because my impression is that people are always asking "big" questions! One of the top questions right now is "How did people in the old days have fresh meat in open air markets? Wouldn't flies alone ruin the meat within a few hours by laying eggs? Did people just eat spoiled meat regularly?", and "Before Darwin's Theory of Natural Selection in the 1800s what did non-religious people think life/the world came from?" is also on the front page. We also get questions about how people dealt with the heat in the past, whether people before modern hygiene practices were grossed out by each other's bodies during sex, how women in the past could be oppressed when there were female goddesses or queens. These are some really big questions!

Even the ones that are more specific in that they're about a defined historical period are still pretty broad. Right now, some other questions at the top of the sub are "how far back does gendered drinking go in Anglophone culture?", "Were fathers [in the 1970s] actually angrier and more strict back then than they are today?", "Was there any international reaction to [the 1955 Buenos Aires] massacre or was just considered an internal affair and ignored?"

But we do get a lot of specific questions. I think this comes down to a few things:

1. Sometimes people just have very specific things they wonder about. Maybe they were reading a book/website/tweet on a topic and it gave them a question.

2. People know that we have experts here in a lot of topics, so they come to us for enlightenment rather than depending on the rest of the internet.

3. Other people may see the questions and be interested themselves, upvoting them.

4. Our experts are more likely to answer specific questions, because the answer is usually more rewarding to write than one to a broad question. (I know I would personally rather write about the view of women in the reign of Queen Anne vs. afterwards than about "did people treat women better when there were queens?")

I feel like many questions here start with an untrue or disingenuine statement. I think they may get more attention, but honestly instead of attention, I'd rather the moderators fix or delete the question.

Take the current Top thread "Modern meat is full of preservatives and still spoils fairly quickly when left unrefrigerated. How did people in the old days have fresh meat in open air markets? Wouldn't flies alone ruin the meat within a few hours by laying eggs? Did people just eat spoiled meat regularly?"

So "modern" fresh meat is full of preservatives? Yeah... preserved meat obviously can be. You can find it at every gas station in the US in bags, and it lasts years. That doesn't sound like "spoiling fairly quickly". True, You can find it in every deli, but that is not "fresh" meat.

Why was the thread question worded this way? I may not be a poster here but I do like to read, but more often than not the threads here that I end up noticing are because they state incorrect facts in the title.

Not only that, but I feel like this is an easily answered question if you just think about it for two seconds: Obviously before refrigeration, there would not be fresh meat markets. You would buy an animal and butcher it when you wanted meat and preserve the rest if you can. Also, you could just buy preserved meat, the same as you "can" today. Just look at r/Charcuterie for five minutes. If you are hunting, you're going to eat or preserve right away obviously. Same as today.

Even the last part: in times of markets, why would anyone eat rotten meat other than out of pure desperation, which kind of defeats the purpose of the question. The best place to store the extra meat is by eating it, hopefully adding to your body mass. Obviously, the question isn't referencing fermentation either.

I wish you could comment on the quality of the question without being a historian, having to answer said question. You might even get better thought out questions inside the thread, which would allow the actual historians to give more thoughtful and interesting answers.

I personally keep this sub in my back pocket because I'm an amateur writer and when I have specific questions about various aspects of life in the settings of my stories, I know where to ask. The kinds of small things that usually aren't covered by experts or in widely available resources.

I assume there are others here for the same purpose.

I wondered this before, but I like those kind of questions, they are fun to read and think about. But personally is really annoying when I want to read the comments and there are none because they all got deleted, and it happens on very popular questions all the time. I know there are rules but honestly i would love to read the answers and comments anyways even if they dont answer the question thoroughly. Maybe this is an unppopular opinion but I don't care for a perfect answer, I just want some insight, some opinions or a debate and that really discourages me from asking thinks. I'm a history student and i'm not a native English speaker so sometimes I would like to answer based on what I studied on it (specially if the question is about my country. It happened to me a few times) and knowing that my comment will prob be removed also discourages me from answering a question that i know I could contribute something to. I'm new to this sub and i love it, just wanted to get that out!

Well of course i'm not asking you to change your rules because i can't just do that, lol. I still think my suggestion is valid, although i don't know how moderation works so i can't say anything about that. There are too many posts with nothing but deleted comments and its a bummer- as a curious reader and also as someone who tried their best to answer before. I agree there's nothing more to be said, just hope somebody consideres it!