This post in /r/AskHistorians apparently caused a mod conflict and confused sub users.
A couple of highlights:
Hello everyone wondering where the answer is […] We are not asking anyone to completely re-write something to suit our tastes, but to contextualize what is written within the reality of the times. As this question hit /r/all, it’s very clear that there is a large audience reading it, with various degrees of knowledge about the period and the novel/film.
They did, though, and people called them out, to be met by some confusion, followed by another mod response:
In sum, you had the poor timing of posting right at the point when the mod team ‘turns over’ several times - US slips off to Bed and then Europe wakes up. It meant that you were dealing with, essentially, a string of mods in different time zones and different “shifts” which created something of a Moderator game of telephone about what we had been expecting out of an answer in the thread.
General confusion ensued.
There were several conflicting mod DMs that weren’t captured publicly, too, but were responded to in the OP. Asked to include all races, then asked to narrow it down, asked to include a disclaimer (I did, at the bottom), then asked to move it to the top, asked to remove things, then to include those same things. It was maddening.
E: re-reading, I don’t think I’ve ever used race words so often in my life, jesus.
e: I only included this photo because I couldn’t seem to submit this post without a photo for some reason. It’s only tangentially related to the Reddit post, but this is an example of my education on the subject.
Compare my first link to this: https://www.reveddit.com/v/AskHistorians/comments/69670k/did_southern_girls_around_the_civil_war_really/
Thank you for that link, @NotAnotherLemmyUser!
the back and forth of approved vs. removed happens when a group mod doesn’t read the full context of the post or comment
I don’t even know what any of this is or what you’re trying to say to me right now
I’m with you
One example:
User:
I’m confused.
First of all, we value the work /u/LillyPip put into their answer and we approved it after they expanded on the original comment.
Was it approved and then disapproved again?’
Mod:
It was. Later debate among the moderators led to it being removed again, because we feel that while it’s a solid answer, it needed more work to be a good explanation of the depth and complexity of the situation: a scene in a 19th-century-set American-Civil-War-era novel (which uses characteristics of surreal overemphasis and wealth as literary technique), written by an early twentieth-century writer, which gives two different time periods’ contexts of gender behaviour and racism to work with.
Like, how do you even conform to that?
The Reddit mods have always been delusional.
I just reread the original Reddit post, and they’ve hidden all of the mod responses from me. It’s weird. Give me a minute, I’m trying to find a way to show the original thread ….
What I was trying to show was the censorship that happened even before the latest censorship, plus the mod drama, but it’s apparently harder than I thought.
None of the ways I used to know work anymore.
Oh my god, thank you!
My point was the drama, which was removed from the official thread. And in this link, you can see how much was removed.
Thanks so much!
That sub was always prone to lengthy back and forths with mods because their standards are set essentially barely below what a masters or PhD student could be expected to produce.
It’s worth it, because it was/is the single best sub for finding both bredth and depth of information. Them insisting on high standards is what made it worth going to.
But holy Hannah, it does make it difficult to contribute with niche interests if you don’t already have some degree of knowledge about how historiography is done. My background was nothing near that, and I had no interest in spending a week or more doing edits until I got everything up to snuff the one time I ran across a question I could answer.
I did try a couple of times, but the kind of research and reporting I’d done was always more casual, with next to zero need to cite much of anything beyond a quick note.
My steam ran out after maybe the third attempt to get things up to standard. Never actually made the comment, because I respected their standards and didn’t want to give them extra work removing unacceptable comments when it was easier to just message a draft.
Which, I kinda think they might be better off implementing that as their default, if there’s a way to make it manageable. It would be way less hassle for users too.
Since there are other subs with less stringent requirements for history questions, I’m glad there’s a place online that average folks can interact with experts at a high standard.
But dayum, I can imagine the chaos and annoyance on your end lol.
That’s fair, but this was my area of expertise, where I had more than 20 years of academic and practical experience. Please see my other comment in this post for how ridiculous this particular thread became.
I get you, and I totally agree. It did get rather insane, though.
e: given their crazy-high standards, perhaps I should take it as a feather in my cap that it was ultimately approved. I was definitely not going to try again, though. It would be easier to publish a scientific paper for peer review, because at least there’s consistency there.
What does the corset have to do with it?
That was the subject of the entire discussion: the original question was about whether ladies in the late 1800s took naps in the middle of parties, and if so, if that was because they wore corsets.
(e: they didn’t and it wasn’t.)
