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>extremely heavily moderated forum. I wish. The best subreddits are the ones like r/askhistorians, which are draconic in their moderation. As a result, the co

>extremely heavily moderated forum. I wish. The best subreddits are the ones like r/askhistorians, which are draconic in their moderation. As a result, the content is consistently extremely high quality. > the top posts tend towards generic mush that is vaguely interesting to most, and extremely interesting to very few. This is how HN tends to work, especially in regard to the comments. It's unfortunate.

sireat 8y ago
I find r/askhistorians extremely infuriating and useless because of the extra strict moderation. I understand that by definition /r/askhistorians should have good moderation but it's insane. My last straw was where I posted a link to a primary source in an relevant question thread 5 subthreads deep. Moderation removed it because I should have provided more context. It should have been obvious what the context was from the thread itself and my answer was not at the first nesting level but 5th. Mod agreed with me but did not restore my answer. So there went my time finding the source. Okay, so if posting on /r/askhistorians is useless, then maybe the answers are well researched? There lies the second problem. Answers are not that well researched. I remember a certain question concerning Soviet economy in the 1980s. The single approved answer appeared wrong to me and cited rather limited number of sources(ie chiefly official 1980s ones). Other alternative answers were deleted. My personal anecdata were screaming at me that the top answer was ridiculously wrong, but I had to spend hours of sifting through more up to date research to prove it. (cue https://xkcd.com/386/ https://xkcd.com/386/) So why should I trust /r/askhistorians answer about something happening 300 years ago if they can't get it right about something happening 30 years ago? Third: The low hanging fruit ie popular answers have been answered. Literally hundreds of quality questions go unanswered on r/askhistorians for each quality answer. So it is pretty much pointless to ask a question there for some specific questions.

sireat 8y ago

I find r/askhistorians extremely infuriating and useless because of the extra strict moderation. I understand that by definition /r/askhistorians should have good moderation but it's insane. My last straw was where I posted a link to a primary source in an relevant question thread 5 subthreads deep. Moderation removed it because I should have provided more context. It should have been obvious what the context was from the thread itself and my answer was not at the first nesting level but 5th. Mod agreed with me but did not restore my answer. So there went my time finding the source. Okay, so if posting on /r/askhistorians is useless, then maybe the answers are well researched? There lies the second problem. Answers are not that well researched. I remember a certain question concerning Soviet economy in the 1980s. The single approved answer appeared wrong to me and cited rather limited number of sources(ie chiefly official 1980s ones). Other alternative answers were deleted. My personal anecdata were screaming at me that the top answer was ridiculously wrong, but I had to spend hours of sifting through more up to date research to prove it. (cue https://xkcd.com/386/ https://xkcd.com/386/) So why should I trust /r/askhistorians answer about something happening 300 years ago if they can't get it right about something happening 30 years ago? Third: The low hanging fruit ie popular answers have been answered. Literally hundreds of quality questions go unanswered on r/askhistorians for each quality answer. So it is pretty much pointless to ask a question there for some specific questions.