Over many years of using messageboards, forums and reddit, I’ve had the ‘search, don’t ask’ ethos drilled into me, the idea being that creating new threads to ask simple questions is a bad thing because it decreases the signal-to-noise ratio of content.
But now that we’re trying to grow a new platform, it occurs to me that a lot of appeal in established platforms is the searchable index of knowledge that has come out of people’s questions being asked and answered.
In light of that, do you think we should be creating question posts more enthusiastically to build up our library of information, even if it might be stuff that could potentially be answered by doing a reddit search?
The “search, don’t ask” gate keeping is one thing that really annoys me about a lot of forums. Part of the value is not only the answer, but different users opinion and the discussion around it.
Example: when I’m looking for honest opinions on a product. I’ll find multiple discussion threads and usually find value in each thread.
“Search, don’t ask” is fine when it’s a question that doesn’t lend itself to opinions. “When is the next full moon?” would be the kind of thing you should just search. We should never gatekeep curiosity(“what causes a full moon?”), but it’s ok to say to someone “nah, I’m not gonna do all the work for you to spoonfeed you an answer.” That is to say, you can ask whatever, but if your question is a basic fact type question, no one owes you an answer either. No one here is your teacher. You need to enter the discussion in good faith, and if you just expect others to do the work to provide you an answer that you don’t want to figure out yourself, that’s not in good faith.