As others have noted: AskHistorians is one of the most aggressively- and well-moderated forums on Reddit.

Answers must be accurate, researched, supported, and factual. Generally, "scholarly". It's not uncommon to find posts with a thousand or more votes, and 100s of comments, all removed. The mods are looking for good answers. As are most of the readers.

The result may be frustrating for commenters, but that's really not the point.

I actually had an opportunity to answer on a subject which I've some familiarity last week, and got mention in the weekly wrap-up for it, which was kind of nice. A bit more than I deserved, really.

(I was talking trash ... but at least that was the topic.)

This is typical of /r/AskHistorians , not Reddit as a whole.

They have an explicit policy of removing any amateurish or unsourced answers, in order to keep quality high.

And they still get things drastically wrong sometimes:

https://web.archive.org/web/20190825021639/https://old.reddi...

Doesn't that imply that the rest of reddit which is less heavily moderated has more low quality comments?

Yes, and IMO it really does.

Yes.

It's a "serious" subreddit. Unlike HN (or many other subreddits), where you can say something completely incorrect and be upvoted by the army of uninformed people, /r/askhistorians specifically allows only well-sourced posts.

It's not uncommon to see incorrect answers highly upvoted on AskHistorians - even ones from flaired users. That's one of the problems with the sub - though it's better than most Reddit subs, it's still far below the quality that most of its users and moderators believe it to be. Like with Wikipedia, you need to be skeptical of claims and actually look at the sources.

But mostly, it's a graveyard of unanswered questions.

And so fairly representative of the real world.