I’ve always been a “lurker” on all platforms and communities because when I do have a question or would like to contribute my first thought has become:
Actually, let me google it first
In which case I’ll usually have some answer. Usually it isn’t a complete answer but enough for me to not want to share my question anymore.
Now we don’t have to discuss facts because we can look them up but rather discuss whether things are good or bad or certain aspects of them. We don’t have to discuss “is there climate change?” But we can discuss what to do
Just chatgpt it
Yeah, I know what you mean. Its a hard habit to break out of though - I always feel like I should exhaust other resources before asking questions.
When I ask things without looking it up first, it feels like I’m not doing my best to solve my own problem before “bothering” others
I do google a lot of stuff before bringing it up in a conversation, just to be sure I’m not making stuff up, even if it’s something I’ve looked up 100 times
Same but mostly because I’ve had conversations with people who will Google something to tell me I’m wrong when the whole point was the conversation, not being right.
and sometimes it’s not about the answer …
I always thought this was blindlingly obvious. Why the fuck else do you ask a question instead of like… going to the library (before internet anyway)? It’s always been for human contact. That’s why questions exist.
i hate how accurate this is
True, but sometimes it’s about harassing and arguing in bad faith, so I totally understand why sometimes the default answer is “google it”
This is so true, I haven’t asked question on stack overflow for a long time because often I find the answer by myself or by googling it. On rare occasions I asked it gets closed as duplicate of barely related question that doesn’t answer my question or I get no answers.
Also because people are just really fucking rude about it when you ask any question on that site.
Or the only person that answers your question gets heavily downvoted.
Yeah it’s kind if strange behaviour to be on a discussion board and only contribute by killing the discussions by pointing to Google.
I get that people get annoyed by low effort posts and people’s general inabilty to find information independently. But there are better ways…
Especially since that discussion might be found later via Google as well. It’s more helpful to say that you looked it up via a specific search and give a couple of the results. That way it’s not a dead end and the person hopefully learns how to help themselves in the future by example.
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Google has really gone to shit. “2009 Eurovision winner”. 3 pages of the 2033 Eurovision winner.
Same with Google maps. “Pyramids of Giza”, shows pyramids bar in London.
Why are you not placing bets on who the 2033 winner will be with your prescient searching
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Bit harsh.
I suspect Google doesn’t want to to find stuff quickly so you can stay on their site longer, or they show sites that try to sell something as much as possible. I’m using Espanso (text expansion) to filter out a list of words like shop, prices, buy, Amazon, apple, pinterest. But still other search engines often have better results nowadays.
It’s really really gotten bad in the last few months. Results are usually full of those SEO Blog Spam, or completely random things… or sometimes even nothing at all.
I always try to answer even though I know the answer is on Google.
Either because it may be a more up-to-date version or because you simply never know when other websites will stop being available and therefore that source of information will be lost. Also because many times no matter how hard one searches before asking, sometimes we do not know the concepts we want to reach and our search is limited.
Imagine if everyone responded with “Just Google It”, we would never find an answer to anything.
I really hate that mantra and it should be part of “If you don’t have anything to contribute, don’t comment.”
this is how it should be dealt with!
thank you 🧡
My favorite is when I would use a google search for something, and several of the top results would be posts detailing the exact question I have, with the only responses being “just google it” and the post locked/closed to further responses.
Interesting, I’ve never seen that. The opposite happens quite often, though; the question is the same as mine and there’s 5 other people in the comments also not finding an answer.
Maybe I’m just Googling for too many obscure missing .dll files and such.
same for me, google filter sucks sometimes… or those sites who had the answers is down 🫠
i always search before askin’ in a forum… maybe i just didn’t know how to search it? let it be because my native language doesn’t have the answers on google?
so how am i supposed to know what i should search for as a non native english speaker on english? and a few more reasons ofc 😅 (applies if u still learn english)
so it is quite disappointing if i get a answer and realize… oh it is just a… “google has the answer” answer… well how about f u self? it’s even better if u try to explain that u already did and how u did it… and get another reply like, “uninstall your browser, the web isn’t for you” or some type of shi*… yes that’s something that happened 🤐
is it that hard to take those few seconds you had to comment for and help me to answer the question if you seem to know “everything”???
Googling something is probably the most efficient way to find an answer, in the same way that flavorless nutrient shakes are probably the most efficient way to fuel your body. Asking questions and conversing about the answers is fun. It’s madness to abandon an entire genre of human conversation just because some search engine exists.
There’s also the benefit of discussion. You can find perspective on information which is arguably just as valuable as the information itself. Wisdom isn’t just knowing the facts but understanding them in practice and in proximity to other facts.
I’ve been in situations where someone on the table asks a question nobody knows the answer to and the conversation just dies then and there. For example, someone might say: “…and then I saw wallaby from my hotel window, so I started wondering if they would eat those nice flowers I saw the day before”. Well, nobody on the table knows what wallabies eat, so nobody said anything and the conversation just died.
Instead of anyone saying “let me google that”, there’s a long silence and then someone just takes the conversation in a completely different direction by saying something like: “oh, BTW I’ve been thinking of getting a new car and that’s when…”
Is it possible they eat cars and that was part of their answer?
Well, the Australian wildlife is known for being “out there to get you”, so I wouldn’t rule it out. Sticking to the spirit of the conversation, I’m definitely not going to check any facts related to wallabies.
If every time a person has a question, it has to be re-answered, it’s vastly less efficient than having it be answered once and then have people just Google for it. When I answer a question, I want it to benefit not just one random person but all the future people who can find it via searching.
I understand the people who object to people being rude about it, but not with the people saying that they should not be expected to at least search – a small expenditure of their time – before asking other people to spend their time fixing the first person’s problem.
It takes you seconds to hit Google. If you broadcast that question to a forum, maybe thousands or tens of thousands or even millions of people read your question. Then they donate their time to try to solve your issue, and multiple people may spend time on it. It almost certainly takes more time per individual to craft a good answer than it takes the asker to perform a search. That is asking for a big chunk of time from people who are trying to donate their time to help others. Their time is much more limited than Google search cycles.
Common courtesy is to search first. If that doesn’t solve it, then ask.
It depends. I get your point but there are a lot of questions to which answers change over time and a restatement of the question can lead to a discussion about new and better ways to answer them. Plus if I’m new to something I often simply ask the wrong question. Something a knowledgable human recognizes, but google does not. So a better answer to basic questions often is ‘google this not that’ making it way easier for the new person to find the answers.
You’re making the assumption that everyone is capable of using Google to the extent needed to find an answer. Being able to fully utilize and understand exactly what it is you’re searching for is a skill in and of itself and not everyone knows how or what to search for. Of course this is dependent on the question/issue but I still think that too many people take for granted that Google-Fu is an actual skill that some can lack
If plugging the text of the question that you’re asking into the Google Search bar turns up pages with the answer, then that isn’t the situation. And that’s generally what I think people get upset about.
Googling niche topics usually takes me to reddit/quora where someone has already asked the same question and someone has already answered. But sometimes (rarely) it takes to threads where the first comment says “google it” 😑.
Did you mean recursion?
In a similar vein have ever ready portal to all of human knowledge constantly in our pocket it has killed some avenue of debate in face to face social situations, like out at a bar. In the before time you could spend an entire evening debating which came first or who wrote some film, or which song sold most albums and the argument would not be settled by some whipping out a phone, googling and done.
I kinda get where you’re coming from, but at the same time, I think there are just as many people these days coming up with absolute rubbish which too many people have the misfortune of falling for.
And as much as we would like to believe that we can search up facts about any topic in the world, there is just so much rubbish on the internet that even when you do look it up, the search results are far from helpful (depending on what you’re looking for).
Personally I like asking people stuff that I could have looked up, just to hear their take on it.
yeah, I think that almost builds on my post not contradicts it. Someone may whip out a phone, go to the first result in google and say “there proves my point” without assessing the validity of the source.
Something I’ve noticed as I’ve shifted more of my conversations from Reddit to Discord (even before the garbage fire over at the site) is that I’m not looking up stuff as much during instant, short-form communication. Just casual conversation really is okay sometimes. I’ll be trying to keep that in mind as I spend more time on Reddit alternatives.
I also have a theory that message board conversations spend as much time on opinion as they do because all the little shit has been solved now that we have esoteric information at our fingertips. Some people don’t even know what it was like to be sitting around with friends all trying to figure out what 80’s film you saw Robert Loggia in because you couldn’t just look it up on-demand.
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