But the issues remain - people are sometimes lazy, sometimes asses, sometimes jerks, and often suffer from learned helplessness.[0] In each case, answering their question is not always the right thing to do.
I admire anyone who has the patience to answer questions on places like Stack Overflow or mailing lists. I don't have that particular helping gene. I'll help you move, though.
I had when I was a teenager; I'd spend endless hours explaining C++ to people on Internet forums. It was a kind of pastime for me.
Somehow, I've lost most of that "helping gene" over the years. I'll still happily explain things to people, but I don't look for occasions to explain stuff on purpose anymore.
For me it has a few factors: I learn, memorize, and internalize through argument and learning to explain things to others. Eventually my skill ceiling rises in a topic where this no longer applies much. But, if I can spend 5 seconds to save someone 5 hours, I'm likely to help unless I thoroughly dislike the person - it's just too high of a positive impact. With my peers, I'll accept much worse ratios (e.g. spend 1 hour to save you 2) under the vague unstated assumption that you'd do the same for me, or it'll help accomplish our common goal faster. And in the special case of helping people with research and problem solving skills, it'll sometimes make people less annoying :)
Here's a resource to deal with it:
https://www.mikeash.com/getting_answers.html
Here's another, somewhat harsher version that preceded that:
http://www.catb.org/esr/faqs/smart-questions.html
These were discussed on the C2 wiki a long time ago:
http://wiki.c2.com/?HowToAskQuestionsTheSmartWay
But the issues remain - people are sometimes lazy, sometimes asses, sometimes jerks, and often suffer from learned helplessness.[0] In each case, answering their question is not always the right thing to do.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learned_helplessness