Have you answered a lot of questions on SO? You can quickly tell the "I want someone to do this for me" questions from the "I'm lost and I don't know how to pro

Have you answered a lot of questions on SO? You can quickly tell the "I want someone to do this for me" questions from the "I'm lost and I don't know how to proceed" questions. SO's fixation on letting the low effort "I don't want to google my problem and read results to see if anything fits my problem" question live on really drove me from the platform. When that was the majority of the questions, I just stopped contributing because the majority of people asking questions feel so entitled as if they paid you to solve a problem. It's a tragedy of the commons. > there are other possible solutions, like changing the culture of the site by actually employing people to do any number of things, like slap cruel comments on the wrist and/or delete them, and/or apologize to new users for any cruelty they experience, and/or get rid of that ridiculous constitution for posting, and/or... It's funny that "helping newbies learn how to help themselves, or at least ask a better question" isn't even on your list. It's only about "slap the people doing all the work" or "apologize to the newbie that the people doing all the work aren't super happy that he shit on the floor and asked them to clean it up". > that the people who ask questions there are just there to take The overwhelming majority of people who post "I have this code. I want it to do X. Please make" don't contribute to the site and respond to questions. The pool of people contributing is tiny compared to the total population. > maybe this is the way the at least occasionally cruel SO lifers think? I don't think I'm cruel. I'm always happy to help people who need help. But I stop helping people when they're not trying to learn and solve a problem and are just trying to offload their work on me. And that's what a lot of the "newbie" (more like "don't care to learn, just solve this for me") questions on SO are.