Certainly depends how you look at it, but I think you're missing something personally.

Because the thing is, what you're seeing is not a bug. Its the design. We've got a particular niche here. We want long form, in-depth good and accurate history. There's lots of other subs that allow more discussion, or let everyone chime in with their opinion. This isn't a place like that. We strive to get rid of that clutter so that the real history gems are at the top.

Most of those comments you don't see aren't even answers, or even attempts at answers. They're jokes, one word responses, single sentences (My favorite continues to be "just google it" which is a recurring comment) or something someones cousins uncle second roomate once told them.

If you are interested in what we have, there's a number of ways you can more easily find it. Here's this week's Sunday Digest with a few hundred answers carefully collected by a pretty swell guy. There's a twitter or a newsletter you can sign up for to get a weekly blast of history right to your DM's. There's lots of way to find the good stuff here.

BUT we recognize that's not for everyone. This kind of sub isn't always for everyone, but considering we're nearly at 1.5 million subscribers I'd say there's plenty of people who are fond of it. You might be more interested in r/History or /AskHistory. Both very good places that move at different speeds, or aim for different things.

Edit: I forgot to mention it, but it's open in my tabs so I wanted to add it. OP, or others, might also like the related sub r/HistoriansAnswered. It uses a bot to link to threads that have answers in them, and can make for a nice browsing experience. Easier to find things.

The point of this subreddit is that the answers are only restricted to posts that are high-effort, in-depth, and cite sources—i.e., by people who know their shit. Sure, it drastically reduces the response rate, but would you rather have a sub where all the intelligent and informed answers are crowded out by memes and misconceptions?

Thanks everyone for the replies. I understand better what this sub is and what it is about.

Unfortunately, there's nothing we can do about the comment count, the site's design functions that way.

Honestly, there's a mountain of resources that showcase the many high-quality answers that are written here on a weekly basis. Chief among them are the Sunday Digest and the twitter newsletter my colleague mentioned. There's also the work of our FAQ Finders, whom you'll usually find in many questions a day pointing users to useful links to previous answers to similar, or in some cases identical answers. We also have an excellent podcast where other moderators and myself interview experts on a multitude of fields; you might even find questions nobody even thought to ask being answered in our episodes. Lastly, if you look at our sidebar, you'll be able to see that the Flaired Users Profiles section includes personalized profiles where our panel of experts link to many of their questions for easy access.