Comment by Libertat on 23/02/2020 at 17:09 UTC*

22 upvotes, 0 direct replies (showing 0)

View submission: Introducing the Rules Roundtables 2.0: The AskHistorians Mission

I don't think this is a good idea, frankly.

There are ways used by moderators or even flaired user to point to questions that could be answered by specific flaired users, if they have the time, motivation or desire to do so. I wouldn't be surprised that these reminders or propositions of cooperations would provide for a significant part of answered posts by flairs, altough it's more of a gut feeling. Questions aren't ignored by flaired users, either because we look at the subreddit directly, or because we're reminded that "hey, this question looks like something you could answer".

But, on private ~~and public~~ grounds, suggesting to actively and directly go for DMing flairs would be problematic.

*Privacy** : depending of the contact policy they clarified on their profile pages, some flairs might not appreciate to be DMed at all, some other can only irregularily answer, some other might do but (I'm told some of us have a social life) only with more or less important delay.

Eventually, it would be more decent and polite to give a flaired user their own autonomy and agency when it comes to answer the question they want, how they want (as long it is along AH rules) without being directly "called" : and that's not even mentioning the risk of abuse. Unfortunately, several mods and flairs were insulted or threatened due to their answers or even general principles : I'm afraid I can see how much of a shitstorm it could be if a flaired user declined or didn't want to answer questions made by entitled, rude, sexist, racist, xenophobic, nationalist, etc. people (this *is* Reddit, after all). Granted it could happen, and *did* happen, all the same : but we don't need to be enabled by an "ask directly" suggestion.

*~~Publicity~~** ~~: one of the stated missions of AskHistorians is to provide with sourced and accessible answers on the past. Granted, these are answers to a specific question made by one redditor in particular : but these can easily interest peoples that either had a similar question, or didn't even tought about it before they saw it.~~

~~Answering privately to a sole redditor not only touches...well, only one redditor (assuming they're still interested on the question which, giving the number of detailed and worked answers that are left without even an acknowledgement from OP, is far from systematical). And this redditor wouldn't even been guaranteed the same level of quality than a public answer would do : a flaired user is definitely able to botch their answer, to not represent all the aspects of the topic, and to simply miss something that another flaired user might complete or correct. Being "flaired" alone doesn't give a seal of quality : publicitty of his answers, regular demonstration of their academic familiarity and moderation of their posts does.~~

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