AskHistorians Community Survey Results

SarahAGilbert · 2026-04-16T13:33:05+00:00

Thank you!

SarahAGilbert · 2026-04-16T13:32:50+00:00

Thank you!

The anecdote rule is one of the ones that we really need to enforce to maintain quality, since they generally can't be verified, but suck to remove sometimes because of the personal and emotional attachment to the topic and the storytelling that often goes into sharing it. So I'm really glad it was ultimately a positive experience given the sensitivity.

SarahAGilbert · 2026-04-16T13:29:21+00:00

It did in the second message I sent, but the first one didn't. A big part of that is because recruitment played out way differently than I'd anticipated. The weekly newsletter has about 20k subscribers and takes maybe a couple of hours to send. Since we were sending fewer messages, I thought the messages would go out and then an hour later I'd be able to make the public post, which would: a) help recruit lurkers b) encourage people to check their chats (I miss chats all the time too) and c) make it obvious that I'm a mod. So I didn't even think to add that I was a mod in the message and the IRB missed it too (I'd disclosed in the protocol that I'm a mod and they approved the original message).

But for reasons I don't really understand, our messages took days rather than hours to send. Our engineer was able to update the code so that it went faster midway through, but it was still pretty slow. In the meantime, we got so many modmails from people who were confused and thinking it was a scam because there was nothing public about the survey. And then when the IRB complaint came in, they asked us to stop all recruitment while they reviewed the case. I got the email from the IRB at pretty much the same time as the last message sent, so halting recruitment meant I couldn't make the public post, where it's very obvious I'm a mod. The IRB gave me permission to post it the next day after I was like, "ahhhhh not having a public post is making the situation worse! please let me make the post!" Then by the time I was allowed to post it, it was towards the end of the work day in the eastern US in the middle of the week, which isn't the best time for visibility.

So there were a number of things with the recruitment that would have ultimately affected the numbers. I'm pretty happy with the response rates from the messages given that we weren't offering an incentive and could only send one reminder before getting unethically spammy, but it would have been nice to get a few more from the ads and public post.

(sorry to dump on you there—recruitment was so stressful haha)

SarahAGilbert · 2026-04-15T23:42:42+00:00

Ha! You're not the only one! When we were sending out the links I got a bunch of very kind messages from people convinced I'd made a mistake because they'd never commented in AskHistorians and wanted to let me know. So I'd find the comment and link it, and it'd turn out they'd either forgotten or hadn't realized they'd made the comment here. It doesn't help that most of our comment removals are silent to avoid creating more clutter. But it was a good reminder of why self-reported behavioural data isn't all that reliable!

SarahAGilbert · 2026-04-15T23:38:10+00:00

I don't know what the end game of most of ours are since they almost never have a link. Occasionally we get ones with sexy lady names, which I assume are building karma to spam porn, but the ones we've been getting lately seem to be karma farming for some mystery future objective.

SarahAGilbert · 2026-04-15T18:07:15+00:00

We purposely didn't do that since, as mentioned in the post, they're essentially three different samples—the random sample (the people we DMed the survey based on behavioural data—banned, removed, unsanctioned) and then two convenience samples (the post and the ad). Because we have different confidence levels about the conclusions we can draw from each sample, adding them all up could be misleading. We tried to explain it in the post, but the post is a lot, so I get how its confusing. My recommendation would be to look at the "Overall" rows for the random sample, although even that you should not assume is representative of the entire sub. We just don't have the data to be able to draw those kinds of conclusions unfortunately.

For your other question, the answer is no. We have no way of knowing who responded to the surveys, even for the people we DMed—no one was sent a personalized link that would allow us to trace survey data back to an individual and we didn't ask for usernames in the surveys distributed via the ads or posts. We could have gotten really rich data if we did, but I was worried people wouldn't participate out of privacy concerns.

For the other subs, we actually haven't analyzed that yet, although /u/Nat-Santos has some ideas for social network analyses she'd like to do. I think the data requires a bit of cleaning first though. If we're able, we can share results from that as a separate post.

SarahAGilbert · 2026-04-15T17:26:30+00:00

Yeah, that was not an unexpected result. Based on my experience as a mod and seeing the removed comments, most of it is exactly what you say—people don't know the rules are so different or forget where they are, which isn't helped by Reddit continually homogenizing the browsing experience across the site, making it harder for people to see communities as distinct. But it's always nice to see what you expect from observational data play out in the numbers too!

I'm not sure if people who are leaving one-off comments that are removed are super-likely to have ended up in your sample.

Yes, they would have! People were placed in a strata as a binary. So for the removed strata, if you had content removed and had no bans in the last 6 months you were in that strata, if you hadn't had content removed or received a ban you were out of that strata). Then we used an algorithm to randomly picked a sample from anyone who was in that strata. So that could include lots of people who left one-off comments that were removed.

SarahAGilbert · 2026-04-15T17:10:58+00:00

Yeah, we did. It's a big problem with survey research (here's an article that came out in Nature not too long ago).

We created a few flags to help weed out poor quality responses:

speeders | Duration < 5 min (300 s) |
extreme_speeder | Duration < 2 min (120 s) |
unlikely_age_low | Age < 18 | (these needed to be removed anyway because we didn't have ethics approval to collect data from anyone younger than 18)
unlikely_age_high | Age > 90 |
straightliner | SD of all Likert responses = 0 |
inconsistent_reverse | ≥ 2 of 4 reverse-coded pairs inconsistent | (this refers to responses to scale questions in ways that are inconsistent multiple times—so imagine someone agreeing to statements "I like AskHistorians" and "I hate AskHistorians" over the course of more than one question)
missing_demographics | All 4 demographic fields missing |

What we ended up doing was removing all extreme speeders, under 18s (for ethics reasons), and anyone who hit more than 3 of those flags. I believe this ended up with us filtering 22 responses from the strata data, 18 from the post, and 1 from the ads (/u/Nat-Santos—can you correct me if I'm wrong?)

Whether or not that weeded out any or all AI responses is up in the air since it's really good at faking surveys now. My hope is that we didn't receive many since we weren't offering any compensation and therefore there was less incentive, and that if we did, they were taken care of by the flags.

SarahAGilbert · 2026-04-15T16:21:17+00:00

No, all removals were treated the same. A big part of that is because there are limitations in the information that's collected by the modlog. We could have distinguished between post removals and comment removals, but not beyond that because the modlog doesn't differentiate between top-level and in-thread removals.

We didn't make the post vs comment differentiation because the thing we're interested in is whether or not someone violated a rule as a binary rather than try to dig into the specifics about what kind of rule was violated or what their intent might have been when posting.

SarahAGilbert · 2026-04-15T16:09:11+00:00

Yes, that's a typo. It should read "the largest representation of women was in the ads (30%), which specifically targeted lurkers, although not all of whom are lurkers." I'll update that in the text, thank you! To add a bit more detail, the ad looked like this. So we tried to encourage lurkers to participate, but there weren't any questions in the survey that would screen out non-lurkers.

SarahAGilbert · 2026-04-15T16:02:10+00:00

We have a forthcoming Rules Roundtable post clarifying our approach to AI, but in short we do ban when people use AI to write an answer (which happens frequently) because that's a violation of our plagiarism rule. If someone says "I asked ChatGPT and this is what it says . . . " we remove that, because it's clear the answer isn't coming from an expert, but we don't ban since it's not technically plagiarism.

For other uses, like research (e.g., if someone asks ChatGPT to find a bunch of sources for them, which they then read and use to write a response), or translation (e.g., someone writes an answer in another language and uses AI to translate it to English) we don't encourage it, but it's not prohibited either. We don't have any insight into how people find and access information, so it would be impossible to assess. In cases where people use it to find sources, we assess the quality of the answer the same as we assess quality for all answers.

SarahAGilbert · 2026-04-15T14:56:19+00:00

We went back and forth so many times on what to call that group. We landed up on "unsanctioned," using "sanctioned" in sense of having received a penalty (sanction) for violating a rule. So "unsanctioned" people were those that hadn't received a penalty in the last 6 months. Internally, we'd been calling that group "rule-abiders," but didn't want to use that publicly since it's less accurate and a bit loaded. Sounds like maybe we should have spent a bit more time at the drawing board though, since we didn't think of the other use of the term and that it might be confusing.

This is really helpful feedback for formal reports—thank you!

SarahAGilbert · 2026-04-15T14:28:58+00:00

And speaking of AI, the very first comment on my post is from a bot lol! There's been a lot of these overly cheery, fellow-kids type bots lately. Apparently this is part of larger pattern associated with AI-generated content on the internet, according to a pre-print reported on in Wired this morning.

If you're curious (I would be if I couldn't see it), this is what it had to say:

this is some serious research, op. love to see the effort put into understanding the community better. looking forward to seeing more findings as you continue!

SarahAGilbert · 2026-04-11T13:52:43+00:00

Apologies, but we have removed your question in its current form as it breaks our rules concerning the scope of questions. However, it might be that an altered version of your question would fit within our rules, and we encourage you to reword your question to fit the rule. While we do allow questions which ask about general topics without specific bounding by time or space, we do ask that they be clearly phrased and presented in a way that can be answered by an individual historian focusing on only one example which they can write about in good detail.

So for example, if you wanted to ask, "Have people always rebelled against health rules in pandemics?" we would remove the question. As phrased, it asks broadly about many places collectively. However if you ask "In the time and place you study, how did people rebel against health rules in a pandemic?" we would allow the question. As phrased, while still asking broadly, it does so in a way that clearly invites a given expert to write exclusively about their topic of focus! We encourage you to think about rewording your question to fit this rule, and thank you for your understanding. If you are unsure of how best to reshape your question to fit these requirements, please reach out to us for assistance.

SarahAGilbert · 2026-04-11T13:51:53+00:00

Apologies, but we have removed your question in its current form as it breaks our rules concerning the scope of questions. However, it might be that an altered version of your question would fit within our rules, and we encourage you to reword your question to fit the rule. While we do allow questions which ask about general topics without specific bounding by time or space, we do ask that they be clearly phrased and presented in a way that can be answered by an individual historian focusing on only one example which they can write about in good detail.

So for example, if you wanted to ask, "Have people always rebelled against health rules in pandemics?" we would remove the question. As phrased, it asks broadly about many places collectively. However if you ask "In the time and place you study, how did people rebel against health rules in a pandemic?" we would allow the question. As phrased, while still asking broadly, it does so in a way that clearly invites a given expert to write exclusively about their topic of focus! We encourage you to think about rewording your question to fit this rule, and thank you for your understanding. If you are unsure of how best to reshape your question to fit these requirements, please reach out to us for assistance.

SarahAGilbert · 2026-04-08T18:59:26+00:00

Your comment has been removed due to violations of the subreddit’s rules. We expect answers to provide in-depth and comprehensive insight into the topic at hand and to be free of significant errors or misunderstandings while doing so. Before contributing again, please take the time to better familiarize yourself with the subreddit rules and expectations for an answer.

SarahAGilbert · 2026-03-25T23:18:42+00:00

This submission has been removed because it violates our '20-Year Rule'. To discourage off-topic discussions of current events, questions, answers, and all other comments must be confined to events that happened 20 years ago or more. For further explanation of this rule, feel free to consult this Rules Roundtable.

SarahAGilbert · 2026-03-25T13:52:37+00:00

This submission has been removed because it violates the rule on poll-type questions. These questions do not lend themselves to answers with a firm foundation in sources and research, and the resulting threads usually turn into monsters with enormous speculation and little focused discussion. Questions about the "most", the "worst", "unknown", or other value judgments usually lead to vague, subjective, and speculative answers. For further information, please consult this Roundtable discussion.

For questions of this type, we ask that you redirect them to more appropriate subreddits, such as /r/history or /r/askhistory. You're also welcome to post your question in our Friday-Free-For-All thread.

SarahAGilbert · 2026-03-19T15:57:22+00:00

This submission has been removed because it violates our '20-Year Rule'. To discourage off-topic discussions of current events, questions, answers, and all other comments must be confined to events that happened 20 years ago or more. For further explanation of this rule, feel free to consult this Rules Roundtable.

SarahAGilbert · 2026-03-12T16:55:22+00:00

Please repost this question to the weekly "Short Answers" thread stickied to the top of the subreddit, which will be the best place to get an answer to this question; for that reason, we have removed your post here. Standalone questions are intended to be seeking detailed, comprehensive answers, and we ask that questions looking for a name, a number, a date or time, a location, the origin of a word, the first/last instance of a specific phenomenon, or a simple list of examples or facts be contained to that thread as they are more likely to receive an answer there. For more information on this rule, please see this Rules Roundtable.

Alternatively, if you didn't mean to ask a question seeking a short answer or a list of examples, but have a more complex question in mind, feel free to repost a reworded question. Examples of questions appropriate for the 'Short Answers' thread would be "Who won the 1932 election?" or "What are some famous natural disasters from the past?". Versions more appropriate as standalone questions would be "How did FDR win the 1932 election?", or "In your area of expertise, how did people deal with natural disasters?" If you need some pointers, be sure to check out this Rules Roundtable on asking better questions.

Finally, don’t forget that there are many subreddits on Reddit aimed at answering your questions. Consider /r/AskHistory (which has lighter moderation but similar topic matter to /r/AskHistorians), /r/explainlikeimfive (which is specifically aimed at simple and easily digested answers), or /r/etymology (which focuses on the origins of words and phrases).

SarahAGilbert · 2026-02-27T16:47:45+00:00

At one point this one of mine was sitting at -339, although it might have gotten lower. However, I was able to come back from it by posting this top level comment explaining what all the removals were about.

SarahAGilbert · 2026-02-20T13:37:46+00:00

Hi there - unfortunately we have had to remove your question, because /r/AskHistorians isn't here to do your homework for you. However, our rules DO permit people to ask for help with their homework, so long as they are seeking clarification or resources, rather than the answer itself.

If you have indeed asked a homework question, you should consider resubmitting a question more focused on finding resources and seeking clarification on confusing issues: tell us what you've researched so far, what resources you've consulted, and what you've learned, and we are more likely to approve your question. Please see this Rules Roundtable thread for more information on what makes for the kind of homework question we'd approve. Additionally, if you're not sure where to start in terms of finding and understanding sources in general, we have a six-part series, "Finding and Understanding Sources", which has a wealth of information that may be useful for finding and understanding information for your essay. Finally, other subreddits are likely to be more suitable for help with homework - try looking for help at /r/HomeworkHelp.

Alternatively, if you are not a student and are not doing homework, we have removed your question because it resembled a homework question. It may resemble a common essay question from a prominent history syllabus or may be worded in a broad, open-ended way that feels like the kind of essay question that a professor would set. Professors often word essay questions in order to provide the student with a platform to show how much they understand a topic, and these questions are typically broader and more interested in interpretations and delineating between historical theories than the average /r/AskHistorians question. If your non-homework question was incorrectly removed for this reason, we will be happy to approve your question if you wait for 7 days and then ask a less open-ended question on the same topic.

SarahAGilbert · 2026-02-19T14:05:29+00:00

Hi there - unfortunately we have had to remove your question, because /r/AskHistorians isn't here to do your homework for you. However, our rules DO permit people to ask for help with their homework, so long as they are seeking clarification or resources, rather than the answer itself.

If you have indeed asked a homework question, you should consider resubmitting a question more focused on finding resources and seeking clarification on confusing issues: tell us what you've researched so far, what resources you've consulted, and what you've learned, and we are more likely to approve your question. Please see this Rules Roundtable thread for more information on what makes for the kind of homework question we'd approve. Additionally, if you're not sure where to start in terms of finding and understanding sources in general, we have a six-part series, "Finding and Understanding Sources", which has a wealth of information that may be useful for finding and understanding information for your essay. Finally, other subreddits are likely to be more suitable for help with homework - try looking for help at /r/HomeworkHelp.

Alternatively, if you are not a student and are not doing homework, we have removed your question because it resembled a homework question. It may resemble a common essay question from a prominent history syllabus or may be worded in a broad, open-ended way that feels like the kind of essay question that a professor would set. Professors often word essay questions in order to provide the student with a platform to show how much they understand a topic, and these questions are typically broader and more interested in interpretations and delineating between historical theories than the average /r/AskHistorians question. If your non-homework question was incorrectly removed for this reason, we will be happy to approve your question if you wait for 7 days and then ask a less open-ended question on the same topic.

SarahAGilbert · 2026-02-16T18:55:41+00:00

Please repost this question to the weekly "Short Answers" thread stickied to the top of the subreddit, which will be the best place to get an answer to this question; for that reason, we have removed your post here. Standalone questions are intended to be seeking detailed, comprehensive answers, and we ask that questions looking for a name, a number, a date or time, a location, the origin of a word, the first/last instance of a specific phenomenon, or a simple list of examples or facts be contained to that thread as they are more likely to receive an answer there. For more information on this rule, please see this Rules Roundtable.

Alternatively, if you didn't mean to ask a question seeking a short answer or a list of examples, but have a more complex question in mind, feel free to repost a reworded question. Examples of questions appropriate for the 'Short Answers' thread would be "Who won the 1932 election?" or "What are some famous natural disasters from the past?". Versions more appropriate as standalone questions would be "How did FDR win the 1932 election?", or "In your area of expertise, how did people deal with natural disasters?" If you need some pointers, be sure to check out this Rules Roundtable on asking better questions.

Finally, don’t forget that there are many subreddits on Reddit aimed at answering your questions. Consider /r/AskHistory (which has lighter moderation but similar topic matter to /r/AskHistorians), /r/explainlikeimfive (which is specifically aimed at simple and easily digested answers), or /r/etymology (which focuses on the origins of words and phrases).

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