Help vampires do not ask valid questions very often. It's very unlikely a community will have RTFM as a standard response to valid questions (i.e. those that provide context and show effort on the part of the asker), with one exception: when the question has been asked countless times already, and the asker could have seen it if they had made the minimum effort of reading the community's FAQ. In which case, RTFM -- or rather, a link to the FAQ -- is the best response.

> 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.