This is exactly what happens on the official Arch Linux IRC channel. The entire process stinks of condescension and probably drives quite a few people away from

This is exactly what happens on the official Arch Linux IRC channel. The entire process stinks of condescension and probably drives quite a few people away from the channel (including myself). What I found was that very few people on the distro channels have original knowledge - they just run some bot commands or link to some page they Googled for. If I ask a question that hasn't been answered before, nobody replies. That's why I usually end up going to the upstream channel instead, where they actually know what they're doing and are willing to help, even if that means you have to wait 12+ hours for a reply.