[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.