Yeah, very unpopular opinion. SO shouldn’t exist because it’s users don’t want to answer the same questions over and over again? That is just laziness on the questioner. SO gives you adequate instruction on how to ask questions and they even provide related topics when you are typing in your questions.

SO exists to aid users in self-discovery and self-guided learning. The fact is that most of these questions HAVE been answered and you just don’t know how to find those answers. That is why topics get closed as duplicate. The primary reason for this is to try and funnel answers to one spot. Having the same question asked 50 times causes good answers to be lost because of lack of visibility.

The only toxic thing about SO is that it’s regular users don’t want to waste their time when the newbies aren’t willing to invest theirs in a little research.

SO is not the right community for vague questions. They put all that right in their description of how to ask questions on the site. SO is designed to answer highly-specific, code related questions. Stuff that is answerable without the need for opinions.

The main problem is new users typically don’t do any research on their own and don’t understand the purpose of SO.