CrustalTrudger

Not so much political punditry, but Dr. Kaku does has a history of making unsubstantiated claims about natural hazards, e.g. the possibility of a major eruption at Yellowstone. He doesn't hold all the blame for this, some of it lies with the media that for someone reason doesn't say contact a scientist who studies volcanoes and could speak rationally and more correctly about this topic, but a lot of what he says in these interviews are irresponsible and not based in our current understanding of the risks posed by these systems. This is frustrating to geologists like myself, and especially frustrating for people who actually study volcanoes, e.g. this from an actual volcanologist who both studies these systems and works on communicating hazards, discussing unfounded fear of a catastrophic Yellowstone eruption fueled directly by comments from Dr. Kaku.

Why is askscience seemingly so hostile and abusive to its community

I would push back pretty strongly on this statement, but I am admittedly a moderator of that subreddit so I have a bit of bias. One of the challenge here is that in relation to claims like made further up this thread (e.g., "removes absolutely huge numbers of posts in virtually every thread, even many that are factual and expound upon previous answers") is that judging which claims are factual or not is actually pretty hard without a lot of domain expertise. There are mountains of answers that get posted on AskScience that are effectively half-remembered bits from a relevant introductory class or cobbled together from wikipedia, written by folks, who while genuinely trying to answer the question, are doing so without actual expertise. Many of these answers, if you're not an expert, seem fine, but if you are an expert, very often you'll easily recognize that many of these "factual" answers are over-simplified and actually wrong in fundamental and important ways. There are plenty of other subs that are more appropriate for getting simplified answers, but the entire point of the sub is to solicit in-depth answers from people with domain knowledge relevant for the question(s), so, we take a pretty strict view of removing answers that are not fully correct. The other thing of relevance is that generally, these decisions are made by mods with the expertise relevant for the question. Basically, any of us will remove obviously non useful comments / jokes /etc from any thread, but we pretty much stay out of removing borderline content outside of our areas of expertise.

Lots of comments get caught by the auto-mod, for a variety of reasons (including the comment in question). In the future, if you think a removal is in error, you can send us a modmail.

From a practical standpoint, we have >26 million subscribers, hundreds of questions a day, and individual released questions will have 10s to 1000s of comments. Despite what our lengthy mod list suggests, we have a relatively small group of active moderators. Without relying on the auto-mod, the sub would be overrun with random stuff (most of the time, I really wish I couldn't see all of the things the auto-mod removes). We err on the side of overly aggressive auto-removal as it helps to prevent misinformation, but the auto-mod definitely removes things that don't need to be sometimes. We try to correct when we come across, but we rarely have the people-power to continually check and re-vet new comments in all the threads.

Did you ask why it was removed?

Our guidelines, and pretty much anywhere we can plaster it, are quite explicit that we are a heavily moderated subreddit, so no, it should not be a surprise to anyone that they are being moderated if they are posting or commenting on AskScience.