Reading this list, I'm honestly blown away that the IRC culture has evolved from "RTFM" Pretty cool that there are people willing to "waste" their time explain

Reading this list, I'm honestly blown away that the IRC culture has evolved from "RTFM" Pretty cool that there are people willing to "waste" their time explaining stuff now. Is this just a product of there being large masses of programmers out there before, where it was pretty specialized a decade ago?