Interesting, I've experienced the opposite. People would join the discord server and ask questions that are already answered in the documentations, so you're ending up just sending them the link.
Yep. Reading the docs first used to be expected and they were worse and harder to find in the past. There’s a lot less willingness to make a solid effort before asking for help these days (IMO).
I can’t even count the times I’ve solved my own problem by spending an afternoon trying to build a reproducible example.
Part of building a community is dealing with people who know absolutely nothing. At some point, each of us knew nothing about our strongest subject, including how to effectively get help.
Yes, that includes people who don't read the docs, or are confused by the docs, or are totally new to the problem domain as a whole.
Part of what differentiates successful communities is how they remain welcoming to those complete beginners, even when the question was asked for the 5th time today.
Sure, but there's difference between beginners and people who don't know anything and expect you to do everything for them. Tending to the latter is a recipe for burnout.
This is close to an ideal outcome, IMO. For us technical writers it's a sign that we're doing our job correctly when support/software engineers answer customer questions by linking to our docs. It's viewed as a good thing because presumably it wasn't too much work for the engineers to find and send that link. Much less work than recreating ad hoc explanations for the same question every time that it comes up, at least.
If something feels off about the situation, you might argue that it could be a symptom of suboptimal design. I.e. "this is covered in the docs, why aren't customers finding it?" But in my experience there will always be a subset of new, inexperienced who default to asking for help in the forums. Once they see that the engineers keep linking to the docs to answer their questions, they usually get the hint that they should just check the docs first.
