Some issues to consider: 1. StackOverflow's original goal was to be an open-sourced archive of technical information, as I understand it, not a free tutoring s

Some issues to consider: 1. StackOverflow's original goal was to be an open-sourced archive of technical information, as I understand it, not a free tutoring service for anyone with a question. This accounts for closing duplicate questions. 2. There's a reason remote IT help is a big online business - they hire people who are paid to be polite and helpful, clarify questions, and solve them efficiently while helping you implement them. It's unreasonable to expect members of any free open forum to behave in this manner, ever. 3. On SO, a major goal of many participants is to up their SO score, by providing popular answers or popular questions. This often conflicts with the archival repository goal (see 1) of the site. For example, I'd say 95% of the time I have a question that seems appropriate for SO, a diligent (time-consuming) SO search usually turns up an already existing answer, thereby depriving me of the opportunity to up my points by asking questions. Throwing out a question without doing any research is considered poor behavior (but see 2, time is money) although the actual motivation may be more about upping that SO score. Finally, there's another reason people try to answer questions that has nothing to do with any of the OP's 1-3 points, and that's that there is really no better way to learn a subject, and to test your own understanding of a subject, than to try to explain it to someone else. However, this is not really 'altruistic motivation' - it's a way of rapidly grasping the fundamentals and issues and common edge cases in say, learning a new programming language. Also, a poor response to a question will bring out the correctors, a useful tactic other comments allude to, i.e.: https://xkcd.com/386/ https://xkcd.com/386/ Thus, don't expect any member of a public forum to ever behave like a paid employee of an IT help company - which means, practically, the ability to ignore the nitpickers, evangelists, dogmatists, preeners, dismissive jerks and so on is a necessary skill.