[jasonv]

101ism also ruined the internet. People won’t look anything up.. every forum is ruined by people asking the same intro question over and over again (example: “What’s there to do in Yosemite?”)

Same for restaurants, fitness, investing, cooking, Linux, etc.

Yelp, AllTrails, etc exist for a reason. A whole swath of internet users seem allergic to looking things up, instead of asking about their own use case. (What’s there to do for a 16 year old? What’s there to do for a 17 year old? Etc etc)

[yummypaint]

I think this change is paralelled by gradual changes to search itself. Google seems to be aiming to deliver short answers to such queries without users leaving google at all. It's like a library card catalog that doesn't want you to actually pick up and read a book. I think this is also part of why tech companies push voice search so hard, because it better confines the user to the search provider's ecosystem where they can be spoon fed curated information. Companies then pay to influence how users are steered by the "search" results. End user freedom is less profitable.

[Isamu]

All the way back in Usenet days it was mitigated somewhat by frequently posting the “Frequently Asked Questions” digest, but people still managed to ignore it.

Laziness is human nature. And it may even be a feature, not a bug.

[Apocryphon]

That's an annoyance of how the internet experience is shaped, but hardly a reason for why it's fundamentally ruined now.

That said, the problem also attributable to how much more content there is- it the amount of data is overwhelming, the rise in clickbait and content farmers dampens the signal-to-noise ratio, and so sometimes the mere act of asking people, even anonymous people on an online community, feels more authentic and reliable.