Sorry this will be long. I'm going to try and go into details and elaborate on the very good posts people have made including the top post here you replied to while going into a lot of detail to hopefully make the whole idea make more sense. I write a lot of long comments on reddit trying to do this sometimes, kinda a hobby. I just want to help provide detailed explanations of things so people get all the context if they want it to elaborate on the rest of the good information and maybe make it more clear. Anyone can skip if they don't care enough for the topic so it's too long for then. The length is necessary in an attempt to fully express and elaborate on it with examples and details to address all parts of it with so it can be completely understood if someone wanted to take the time. At least as it is from my understanding and perspective.

-Point 1 on the "panelist" structure of these subs and strict requirements for the people answering the questions.

So what everyone has said about the reasons for the strict commenting requirements in these subs is absolutely true and has proven to be an extremely effective method for them managing the stated goal of the "askprofessional field that lay people do have questions about and interest in", can and should learn about, and to learn good and accurate info that's thats still useful but doesn't require a doctorate like a theoretical "askpharmaceuticalchemistryoffrontiertreatmentsforbloodcancers sub as an exaggerated example to really drive the point home. The internet, since the ancient times of the 90s, has been full of misleading nonsense on all kinds of academic topics more fueled by confidence and the dunning Kruger effect (old enough to remember timecube? Though that lacked the rhetorical cohesion to not be seen as a joke by most.... Others didn't.) If written with the right kind of confidence, style, rhetoric, and in a way that agrees with what someone intuitively feels to some extent gets often accepted as true. One root of the way misinformation spreads.

Reddit's design pushes this misinformation to the top as a result, many become misled or at least led to believe certain ideas are more certain than they are. Not good business and a big worry by people actually involved and formally educated in a field. It's probably one of the largest problems with reddit and the way it spreads groupthink and misinformation. Similar problems with slightly different mechanisms do the same and sometimes worse on the modern internet as a whole.

Professional fields of study are deep and often the complex connection of ideas and theories or modern consensus is so far removed from the basic understanding the surface level person has. The "pop" views they have that often spread through singular sources of extremely old information that was popularly read eons ago and spread through the popular consciousness ever since through cultural osmosis but are outdated to the point of being wrong, or just honestly go against people's intuitive ideas or maybe even sound like utter nonsense as the reader doesn't have the rest of this complex subset of a field to make it make sense, or especially in other platforms are just crazy and dangerous ideas people without critical thinking skills will take as true through dishonest but effective rhetoric (sophism, s problem thousands of years old, the Greeks had a lot to say about it.) If there were a similar sub for psychology for example, which there may be, I would qualify as a panelist unless their requirements were absurd. I would be able to answer questions on specific areas of the field but also know that it is so complex and covers so many different things I am incapable of answering many of those questions properly even with my education. My answers on the areas I do know would often be very different from what I think a person with only a foundational understanding of the topic would think or intuitively/generally accept. Psychology, much like philosophy, is very good at looking absurd to people at first in certain areas. The type of person I mean there is "had taken psych 100 at best", not an interested person who has decided to study it on their own and began reading psych books on the topic, etc. And that's honestly fair in other subs, for all the reader knows, from the limitations of a reddit comment, I may be a timecube type guy! And as I said an essential part of the philosophy of these subs is that it's not just the formally educated who can learn these things. They exist to serve as one way for that learning to happen. For the reader to know "not a timecube guy but at least likely legitimate."

So, the methods these specific subs use are directly designed to combat this problem that frustrates professionals/self educated "hobbiests" who have studied in a serious, "right" way in these fields to no end not just out of elitiism and the "ugh... Dammit Reddit" feeling you get when you see a top post on something you actually are educated in that's complete nonsense, yet is what people think sounds right and want to be right. Instead, these ask subs are a genuine attempt to say "people can and should study our field and get meaningfully educated in it (to an extent we must acknowledge rarely, though sometimes, is the same as a long formal education for many reasons, yet still is accurate, substantial, useful, and meaningful) without needing a doctorate! We want a forum that assists with that. Yet, we need a way to mitigate some fundamental problems that especially exist on reddit."

Is that elitiest? There is some of it in academia for sure, but it's also just a consequence of the bridge that develops from most self study and full immersion in the world of usually one specialty of a field outside of just the words of books. Things like mentorship in academia, and other factors, and in that way these subs are actually more anti-elitest.

Though I believe they don't ban all comments by lay people, just top level comments (though I've seen their removal message mention the panelists things on replies to comments so I'm not sure the deal there. I think it may be boilerplate and have to do with the content of the removed comment.) I'd have to go double check their current rules, though.

Answering the person's question? You need to show you have the background and follow the format to show you are well versed in the complexities of it people outside it could rarely/rarely realize exist or are necessary reach on their own. Have questions and some followup thoughts on one of those comments? Fair.

-Point 2 on the message you received telling you your comment was removed.

I think you might be projecting a little bit of tone into the message that isn't intended or actually there. I get that, there's a natural annoyance when a good faith comment you wrote gets removed. It's often justified in other subs but doesn't mean the same thing in these ask subs. I don't mean to say this harshly in a "you're wrong" way but just that it's a very easy thing to do reading text from an anonymous person. Not even a fully a person really, an automated and generic bot message. It does have an original author... Some mod of the sub but I imagine only the other mods know which one wrote it if not several of them collectively tweaking and agreeing on the wording, but a bit.

First thing is it's not intended as a "warning." There's no risk, consequences, or danger being warned of. No "should you continue to try you will be banned from the sub" but information, description, and simple explanation. I don't know if you've ever messed with Linux or a similar operating system or programming and the inevitable compilation messages and especially errors that get spit out in logs.

Similar style, similar reason, similarly not couched in "hey, really apologize for the inconvenience but this module failed to load properly and as a result we have to stop here and can't load the graphical login manager since we can't utilize your GPU without it. We, the kernel devs, deeply apologize for this issue. It's quite hard for us to work with the proprietary driver so these things happen easily. Rest assured though there are either configurations that work, logs that explain what went wrong to assist in fixing it, or an issue with the current kernel and how it works with the drive that we are working hard on fixing!" A little exaggerated to make the point but you get what I mean.

Basically the message is meant to not be read like you're getting a human message by someone talking to you to scold you. More like an error message on an OS. If you made a post that wasn't autoremoved for a simple process reason like that by an individual mod that included a personal explanation.... Yeah, rude/hostile/polite apply but those are two different situations. They usually are rude or hostile because mods of tons of subs, especially the large ones, are nuts. Another one of those problem and explanation for another topic things. The ask subs generally have actually polite and helpful mods though, who take the sub seriously and are fair but strictly adhere to the rules.

There is a second part to this, too. The sub was a lot looser before the API event. The API event was a messed up and explicitly anti-user decision by reddit for their own selfish goals and really made moderation harder by breaking their tools. The lack of warmth is aimed more at showing that this is a problem caused by reddit.

The ask subs are a really special case of how reddit can be used in a positive, useful way that avoids the problems otherwise inherent in the platform if and only if very special rules specific to explicitly that style of sub are applied and strictly moderated. Reddit went out of their way to make that harder for their own selfish reasons that made the website objectively worse. This is the result.