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Comment by rd | Hacker News Reader

I swear this comment is not intended to come off as aggressive whatsoever, purely just curious. I often wonder this when I see comments like this - why didn't you just search it up? If you copy paste "gray filters on iOS" from OP comment, it's self-explanatory.

The reason I ask is because at this point, it's a trained impulse/habit for me to not ask people for things that would be quicker to search up myself. I've noticed a lot of people act the same way, but also people who lean towards asking others for everything, no matter how small a request.

Trying to understand what makes people operate that way, so I want to ask you directly - is it something intentional? I.e. is it that you might know in the back of your mind you could search it up, but it's nice to hear things from a real person, and interaction is never bad?

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Not the person you asked, but sometimes I ask things I can easily Google because we are on a discussion board discussing it, and a human can sometimes come up with an interesting answer that generates further discussion. I'm more confident in that than I am cobbling the info together from scanning 5 "best grayscale app" listicles.

I've been pretty trained that search in the modern era is pretty crap. Nearly all of what I see in the first few results are a cluster (it's all the same stuff), and it seems dumber at interpreting keywords than it used to be. Due to SEO algorithms the content is all anti-concise and rarely contains a succint how-to and almost never is cognizant of version differences. Your search is frequently hijacked by worse-than-optimal solutions or irrelevant stuff whose word jumble vaguely resembles your jumble of words.

It's not the case for everything, but it's often enough that search is just not really my first resort, especially in the case of someone telling me they did a thing I want to do: I want to know their solution, because it works, not trawl through ten pages of "When people use their iOS device, such as an iPad, iPod, iPad touch, iPad mini, blah blah blah." to see if "grayscale" is the same as a "gray filter" and doesn't have to do with image display, etc.

That is the most polite expression of lmgtfy that I've seen in a while. Probably would not happen anywhere but HN.

What’s Imgtfy? Asking because I’ve heard google searches have gotten pretty bad these days and a question like this on HN might stimulate more great conversation.

Maybe a web search can answer your question :)

Google is better for answering "how do I" questions rather than "why do you" questions.

my bet is on either "learned helplessness", or more likely they didn't actually care enough about the answer to look it up themselves, and were simply curious about it. Plus asking here also potentially puts the answer here for future people that were curious

More like "taught helplessness". Google search sucks now.

Not OP but for me, it’s that public answers here are available to all of us. That’s great!

Yep, it is even faster to look it up than type the question here and then wait for the response...

Well, good answers to that question here will be tomorrow’s valuable Google search results.

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