Unpopular Opinion

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People post too many questions (lemmy.today)

submitted 7 months ago by arcayne@lemmy.today to c/unpopularopinion@lemmy.world

21 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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.

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[–] Rentlar@lemmy.ca 4 points 7 months ago

Upvoted for unpopularity. I don't want to raise the bar on questions just yet. First, can you point to me where newb questions are flooding a tech community, here on the Fediverse? !linux@lemmy.ml might be a little but it's not egregious.

Second, "high quality researched questions only" gives people at every level of experience impostor syndrome. You get someone doing a deep dive in their dconf, syslogs and server configurations being like "not sure if this belongs here". Being more restrictive until we can better define what makes a good question, like having an FAQ or wiki, will have a negative impact on how well knowledge gets shared here.

Third, well researched questions get less traction most of the time. Yes easy questions are a bit of a soapbox stumping platform but in my eyes it gives those communities more visibility for other people to ask better questions and share better information.

Fourth, easy/beginner questions and anecdotes (I'm thinking of the posts like, "I just installed Linux, hooray! What do I do now?") encourage other people that don't post or comment have their questions answered that wouldn't have otherwise occurred to them and helps everyone go from beginner to more knowledgeable.