if someone is asking a good faith question online and you - personally - do not want to offer help, the correct response is not any of these:

• tell them that they’re lazy and should have searched for answers harder
• pick apart the framing of their question as a way to criticize them
• act condescending while refusing to answer
• tell them that they should never need to know the answer to their question
• derail the conversation by making it about how much smarter you are

in fact if you encounter a good faith question online and you do not want to offer help, the correct response is:

• Fuck Off. literally just Fuck Off and do anything else. navigate to any other webpage. watch a video essay. visit your local library. learn quilting. do anything else in the world other than replying to that question

Fedi doesn’t really do this from what I’ve encountered, but holy shit Stack Overflow and reddit are overrun with this attitude and it’s infuriating

some insecure man will be like “how dare you waste my time with this” as if he carries a personal obligation to reply to every question on a website he chose to visit

@kasdeya yeaaah, basically, just get out of the way of people that have the energy and time to teach them