Programmers are expected to know to, and to be able to learn the essentials when delving into unfamiliar areas. This is one of the critical skills in the trade.
- But to RTFM, you need to know where exactly to find what you need (because learning anything that you don't need is not an effective time investment), which is not always immediately apparent
- Besides, you need to know that you do need this and absolutely cannot do without it to warrant investing time
So, when rejecting a question, give (links to) useful hints (this includes casting close votes if the resulting boilerplate message would contain a useful hint)
- It's permissible to give external links if the existing help system articles are not good enough
- If a message is presented to new users, it needs to say right away, in an overt manner, that not looking through a few select help pages first would most likely lead to their question being rejected (maybe give a percentage with a link to statistics to show we're not joking).
To avoid delving into pettiness, concentrate on information, not attitude
- In particular: do not comment if a vote would say just as much
- Give the right message, which includes the message given by votes (i.e. account for the fact how votes are interpreted when giving them)
- In particular, if a question is bad, perhaps only drive its score as low as hideous the question is (voters already seem to be applying this subconsciously)
Online communities, especially tech ones, are "direct" cultures because time is more precious here than in live communication
- This can be especially jarring and come across as rudeness to people who hail from "polite" cultures because it's vastly different to what they're accustomed with.
- Users need to be able to learn this somehow other than by trial and error
SO is mature now, and most common problems have already been asked and answered.
- So, it's only natural that more questions are being closed as duplicates and downvoted for lack of search effort
- But duplicates are not deleted specifically because you need to know the right keywords to find an answer
So, when deciding whether to downvote a duplicate, see if the existing answer can be found by the keywords that the OP has used
Likewise, it's becoming ever more important to systemically encourage locating related questions/possible duplicates -- at the very least, to reduce time wasted and anxiety built up on duplicate questions
- E.g. there's already a panel that suggests these when typing a new question (I wonder if there are numbers how many duplicate questions it has prevented from appearing).
- Maybe the same tool for answerers that appears automatically? (The app on the link is dead.) Improving search? (E.g. I often see that Google finds more relevant questions than the internal search)