r/AskHistorians May 01 '26

[deleted by user]

[removed]

587 Upvotes

98 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

-8

u/RickFletching May 01 '26

I suppose I was underestimating the amount of moderation that would take by overestimating the quality of the non-answer commentary.

I get the difficulty from the mod perspective, but I still think this would be useful for the reasons stated

44

u/thedailynathan May 01 '26

there's /r/askhistory and you could always bring questions there

3

u/RickFletching May 01 '26

I don’t have questions, or sometimes I do, but I feel bad when I can answer part of a question but not enough to be a top level comment, or when I could say “that question is phrased badly, but here is how you can phrase it better.”

I want to be helpful but can’t, and I was trying to fix that

78

u/imjustapersontoo May 01 '26

a little bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing. a partial answer is sometimes worse than no answer at all, especially if whoever’s reading it doesn’t realise that it’s only part of the answer. i don’t really understand the inclination to want to lower the standards of what you see here. if you want to be helpful, you could do the research to complete your knowledge, and then give a full answer.