Focus on boosting comments instead of sheer volume of posts—people post specifically because they want answers, and seeing a long stream of posts with no responses makes them think it’s not worth bothering.
I think people’s familiarity with the r/askhistorians subreddit may be discouraging anyone without graduate-level academic experience from responding, but the subreddit didn’t start out requiring that level of rigor—it became more selective as the volume of replies increased. But for here, even a general-knowledge reply can encourage clarifying comments from more-informed people who may otherwise doubt their qualifications.
Focus on boosting comments instead of sheer volume of posts—people post specifically because they want answers, and seeing a long stream of posts with no responses makes them think it’s not worth bothering.
I think people’s familiarity with the r/askhistorians subreddit may be discouraging anyone without graduate-level academic experience from responding, but the subreddit didn’t start out requiring that level of rigor—it became more selective as the volume of replies increased. But for here, even a general-knowledge reply can encourage clarifying comments from more-informed people who may otherwise doubt their qualifications.