[hombre_fatal]

I do wonder if it's time for some tiny social cost to not even doing a cursory google search, though. It couldn't be easier, yet all sorts of people's time is wasted on places like r/learnspanish by people asking "what's pero vs perro?"

[grawprog]

> yet all sorts of people's time is wasted on places like r/learnspanish by people asking "what's pero vs perro?"

Yet, if they felt like it was a waste of time they wouldn't bother answering those people at all. It's not like anyone is forced to respond to someone asking a question with an easily searched for answer. But people choose to, so they obviously must feel like it's a good use of their time.

[freedomben]

Agree. Also where do people think Google gets its answers? It comes from stuff like that. There will be many more people that Google than don't.

Reminds me a lot of Googling some programming question, it pointing me at a highly upvoted Stack Overflow question, only to see comments on the question like "voting to close. do some research first" or (also often) some moderator has closed it as "not useful" or something like that.

[omniscient_oce]

Because people in general would prefer to shit on the person asking to feel better about their own mighty intelligence and preserve ego. That said, I have to admit there are some pretty low effort questions around on Quora that sometimes I wonder if they're just generated by a bot actually. The whole 'explain what the difference between dog vs dogs is' type questions do leave me perplexed

[grawprog]

>explain what the difference between dog vs dogs is'

To be fair, I actually made a search like that recently and was directed to quora which actually had a question and answer related to the dogs I was searching for.

[jodrellblank]

Quora started paying money for any question asked which gets views. Incentivising tons of barrel-scraping questions.

[jodrellblank]

People don’t want to read a dusty answer, people want to engage with other living people. You may as well say drop every classroom Spanish course because those people should read books instead and stop wasting everyone’s time.

And the people answering aren’t always the same people; it’s a useful thing to practise explaining something, so it’s useful to have a rolling set of basic questioners to write answers for. It’s not wasted time, it’s beneficial time.

[hombre_fatal]

The self-centeredness of encumbering others with trivial questions just because you want it "fresh" instead of even attempting to google it is what I'm talking about.

Also, let's not compare <pero vs perro> to <learning spanish in a classroom>. If you have a teacher/mentor in front of you, sure, cache-hit them with your easily googleable questions. But when you spend 30 seconds making a Reddit submission to save you 3 seconds of googling, what exactly are you accomplishing?

It also does a disservice to the person always asking these questions who never learns to be resourceful. In my ideal world, LMGTFY is just some tough love. Like, now everyone has google in their pocket and I only see an uptick in trivial questions. And I think it's because we baby everyone with the mentality seen in your comment instead of training people to be self-reliant.

It's like when people ask what `const [a, b] = [1, 2]` in #javascript instead of just... trying it. Just do it. See what happens. That's how we need to be training people to learn, not baby them.

[jodrellblank]

> when you spend 30 seconds making a Reddit submission to save you 3 seconds of googling, what exactly are you accomplishing?

You might have seen someone say "welcome to learning Spanish, if you have any questions just ask!" and simply believed them instead of thinking it was a sperglord den where people were waiting to jump on you for not asking superior enough questions, for one thing. The sidebar of /r/learnspanish even says "If you have a question about anything Spanish-language related, ask and we'll help the best we can!".

For another, when learning something new you're pushing the edge of what you're capable of - what you want is a direct answer to just this sticking point, not a video of "5000 words every beginner MUST know!" or a page of "Twenty False cognates" which might have the answer, or a page of "Introductory Spanish" which is an advert for a training course in another country which isn't even running and hoping you can divert your already-strained attention to digging an answer out of a lot of unrelated stuff; asking a narrow, focused question on just the thing you need might be as much as you can manage. And as you say, you would ask a teacher, you would ask a friend, you would ask an IRC/Discord/etc chat, why would you assume you can't just ask Reddit?

I get it, /r/powershell is full of "how do I get rid of {Name=bob} in my output" because they don't understand the object pipeline, and I answer the ones I want to answer and ignore the ones I don't want to; it simply isn't a sub dedicated to catering "interesting questions for me", and the people who are learning powershell are mostly people with no programming background whatsoever, they're already lost in a pile of syntax, terminology, new tools, grandfathered-in-weird-behaviour, ancient Windows behaviour, filesystem name limitations, web character encoding weirdness, and just can't deal with stopping their five line script to take a course in object orientation before getting any further feedback.

> Like, now everyone has google in their pocket and I only see an uptick in trivial questions. And I think it's because we baby everyone with the mentality seen in your comment instead of training people to be self-reliant.

Agile programmer "Uncle" Bob Martin gave a talk in 2016[1] where he covers the history of programming, from 1 programmer in 1945, through millions in 2016, and estimates a growth rate of number of worldwide programmers doubling every 5 years - that is, every 5 years for the past 70 years, most of the programmers in the world have <6 years experience, continuous state.

You should expect that "everyone has Google in their pocket" leads to an uptick in simple questions simply through growth of people with smartphones, because most people who have a smartphone didn't grow up with the internet, didn't grow up with Google, likely isn't their main hobby or interest, haven't had one (with lots/unlimited mobile data) all that long.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ecIWPzGEbFc