Hi, I've seen multiple subs where I can now vote on old posts and comments. I realized today that this is a deliberate decision by the mods of those subs. https://www.reddit.com/r/modnews/comments/py2xy2/voting_commenting_on_archived_posts/
I was wondering if there was a conversation regarding enabling this for r/AskHistorians; I searched for META posts on the sub for the last couple of months and didn't see anything, so I thought about bringing forward the question: could we please upvote old posts and answers? There's a ton of excellent content from back before the sub was popular, and I think that many in this community would like to thank the people for their valuable answers even after 6 months have passed.
I understand that this could place an additional strain on the mods of the sub, but I thought that I should ask.
Yes, the mod team has discussed it internally, when the change first rolled out, and our determination at that time was not to turn off archiving for now at least. We want to see how other subs deal with it, and how much content actually ends up happening in older threads, and how easy it can be moderated.
While there definitely are some positives that suggest itself with such a change, we also have serious concerns about how effectively we would be able to moderate comments in older threads.
A reevaluation and discussion of the state of things will likely happen at some point, but it also isn't a high priority at this time. What would certainly be nice is if we could adjust the archive period... But that of course isn't a thing right now.
So the counterargument: as a long-time reader and very very occasional poster—it is obvious that the sub’s standards have increased over time. Many posts from five years ago would be deleted today.
And I’ll we’re talking about is imaginary Internet points. I’d like to think as gratified as the posters would be by the upvotes the best way to acknowledge them is by referencing those old posts in new answers.