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.
All search engines are terrible now. I don’t blame people for not using them. AI chatbots are still capable of bringing up useful answers, but they have a tendency to deceive.
Search on the Fediverse sucks in general. I can do without the “what distro do I pick” questions because these answers always get the same responses, but on the other hand, googling “what distro do I pick” will get you complete bullshit pushed to the front page of every search engine by SEO spammers.