This mainly relates to tech communities, but certainly applies elsewhere. I’m just so sick of seeing a constant flood of basic questions being posted that would’ve been better off as a search query.
Instead of communities being a wealth of discussion and a place to learn/exchange knowledge and ideas, it feels like most have about 10-20% solid content at best, and 80-90% useless noise: “How do I X?”, “What Linux Distro should I use?”, “What does Y mean?”
Like, I’m all for asking questions, but I prefer to help those who help themselves. Is this all the result of iPad kid syndrome or something?
If you’re willing to take the time to post a simple question that 50 other people have already asked within the last week instead of taking 5 seconds to search for an answer (that’ll probably be the first result on any search engine), your thought process makes no sense to me and I can’t see you as anything other than a complete nuisance to the community/fediverse.
Thanks for coming to my TED Talk.
What defines too many questions? How many questions should we allocate each user? Even if everyone has access to a single question, I’m sorry to tell you that’s still hundreds of thousands of questions you would see.
People asking for answers instead of doing their own personal research is older than civilization iself. Asking someone that already knows the answer before doing your own research is a fundamental and basic effort to reward evaluation that humans learn at an extremely young age.