Many, many more people read posts than answer them. Leaving those posts up will give some proportion of readers the idea that such questions are reasonable, open holes in our knowledge. Even if there's an answer provided (potentially hours later), the damage would have already been done.

The forum is a place for education. Leaving bad faith questions up hurts that goal and there aren't many practical alternatives, especially given the massive asymmetry in effort by contributors. Did you know that posts often take multiple hours to write? It would only take a couple dozen malicious posters to completely overwhelm the relatively small contributor base without mod intervention.

> The solution to bad ideas is more ideas, not less.

This is true if and only if there is sufficient bandwidth to process all those ideas AND the actors are all people who are trying to learn/seek truth.

Expertise and conversation time is limited, and it's considerably cheaper to ask questions and sow doubt than it is to fully address those questions. Given that asymmetry, it feels more than reasonable to accept certain things as ground truth and eliminate time wasted on dealing with trolls.

> The solution to bad ideas is more ideas, not less.

I can easily imagine situations where that's not true; besides that, you'd have to admit that people being convinced of bad (and potentially deadly ideas, e.g. anti-vaccination) will happen for some period of time. This concept of "more ideas" is time-based, it relies on the hypothesis that things work out to "the truth" in the end. I don't think that's the case much of the time, and I can see why people don't like the idea of holding that hope for some statements.

There is reason to believe that some authorities - such as scientific ones and even judicial ones, do a better job of finding truth than other venues of discussion. I think AskHistorians desires to be a microcosm of that.

There is an excellent paper by Fred Schauer about the "search for truth" defence of free speech, and how it relates to time[0].

[0] "Free Speech, the Search for Truth, and the Problem of Collective Knowledge" (2017): https://scholar.smu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=4682&con...

I mostly agree with you, the problem is that the alternative is worse.

Every time in history that we've institutionalized suppressing speech in support of official truth, it has gone horribly wrong.

The problem with nuanced issues like this is that there isn't really a "right" or "wrong" answer, there's just bad and less bad.

How many more ideas? There's been 80 years of continuous demonstration that holocaust denial is ahistorical garbage. Yet people continue to believe it because it allows them to justify their hatred. When can we stop? Surely at some point people are allowed to say "no, go home" to the person who had nearly unlimited opportunity to educate themselves and refused.

> There's been 80 years of continuous demonstration that holocaust denial is ahistorical garbage. Yet people continue to believe it because it allows them to justify their hatred.

You are suggesting that our liberal approach to free speech has failed so we might as well go full authoritarian and shut down the crazy… all to prevent another tide of nazi authoritarianism?

That is hilariously contradictory.

Full authoritarian? No. It is a subreddit.

At what point would you stop allowing somebody clearly engaging in bad faith from wasting your time? Never?

Or just post a set of links refuting the most common claims. As you’ve said by now the topic has come up frequently enough.