This doesn't seem right to me -- for example, Stack Overflow seems to have far less instances of such gatekeeping than it used to, and seems less relevant now than it used to. The gatekeeping occurred before the pedants understood how broadly and differently the community was being utilized; and it didn't impact its growth.
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Every small dead or dying forum I've ever been in pushes new contributors away with some version of "did you even try to use the search function???".
https://xkcd.com/1053/
This doesn't seem right to me -- for example, Stack Overflow seems to have far less instances of such gatekeeping than it used to, and seems less relevant now than it used to. The gatekeeping occurred before the pedants understood how broadly and differently the community was being utilized; and it didn't impact its growth.
Asking same question is not a contribution.
Every dying community I've ever seen was full of low quality and repetitive questions.
Every dying online community I've ever seen was full of posts asking for a ban on another type of post.
That's fair- low quality rebuttal on my part, sorry about that.