That doesn't mean everybody needs to be teacher/mentor/educator. But the people who don't want to be can also just keep out of the conversation, instead of rudely pointing to some 300 page manual and telling someone with passion and interest to screw off.
RTFM is aimed at help vampires (recommended reading: http://www.skidmore.edu/~pdwyer/e/eoc/help_vampire.htm). Help vampires do not grow a community; they destroy it. These are people you do not want in your community anyway. Unlike actual beginners, who learn and then proceed to become valuable contributors (unless of course they are treated harshly by veterans, in which case they simply leave), help vampires are never helpful. They ask the same question again and again, don't pay attention to any cues, don't read anything, and seldom provide context or follow-ups to their problem. And when you've wasted time with one (more often than not fruitlessly), the next one comes in. And they are legion. The end result, like the first article I mentioned claims, is that your community of well-intentioned volunteers is destroyed. So a polite RTFM is often the best response: if the person was an actual beginner, they'll read TFM -- and follow-up questions are often welcome, since they show the asker has actually made an effort. If not, they'll leave and you haven't wasted any valuable time.
In fact, help vampires are often indistinguishable from trolls, in that they have the same community-disrupting effect.
RTFM has always been part of the hacker culture (also see: How To Ask Questions The Smart Way, http://www.catb.org/esr/faqs/smart-questions.html). It has nothing to do with trolls.
Even just politely linking a similar question and response is better than responding with RTFM.
> RTFM has always been part of the hacker culture
That doesn't necessarily make it a good thing, or anything worth keeping.
> That doesn't necessarily make it a good thing, or anything worth keeping.
But it does make it not trollish behavior, which we were discussing. Hacker culture was not trollish, this was always part of hacker culture, therefore it's neither new nor trollish behavior.
I think a variation of RTFM, let's call it GentleRTFM, is both worth keeping and necessary.
I'm in agreement on that. Although I also think Socratic method should also be employed in those cases.
This is actually the RTFM-ish situations I hate the most; specifically as someone searching a forum and finding a thread or threads close to my own question, only to find the only responses are rudely unhelpful.
I get not answering an insipid post, or a mod locking/deleting one but replying to a question you find dumb or repetitive is a waste of time to everyone involved.
Just like "Don't feed the Trolls," I feel one shouldn't raise the post count of a time sink.
Answering with a link to the canonical question doesn't seem rude to me, however.