There was a time when this community prided itself on
handling FAQ questions with answers like the following:
Google is your friend. If you have a general question
the first thing you should try is a
quick search.
As for it being hard to not call it elitism, I agree. I
also find it stupid. Consider the merits of reaping vs
the above short post. Reaping takes more work. The person
whose post was reaped gets no feedback, their post just
disappears, so you are liable to get a post along the lines
of, "I already asked this but PerlMonks seems to have eaten
my question..." By contrast a short post pointing at how
to use a search engine will encourage the person who asked
to use a search engine next time. Better yet, other random
people who happen to browse PerlMonks will see that people
on PerlMonks would happily start with a search engine for
vague, general questions and are more likely to do that
rather than post themselves. Finally giving the friendly
answer makes the site nicer for everyone.
Why then would people reap? It makes no sense to me. It
seems like a recipe to get frustrated and get even more
opportunities to get frustrated down the road.
