"Useful contributions" is subjective. Not everyone is born a senior developer. Juniors, and even children who aren't even juniors yet ask questions on these channels.

Source: I bothered a lot of people on the Internet about C++ when I was child.

I contributed well-researched answers already when I was ostensibly a very junior dev, and even before that during my CS studies. Stuff you can lookup or simply try out is doable, of course questions where you need experience aren't a good fit.

When I was in high school I read the docs, and learned C++ from books and MSDN. Granted my access to the internet was rather limited back then, but it also never crossed my mind to bother people for things I could easily lookup myself.

Growing up in a RTFM, "search the forum first before asking" environment is seen as toxic today, but it really helps keeping certain behavior in check thats a drag on society as a whole.

One of the best mentors/bosses I ever had never answered coding questions directly, but always in the form of a question so I could look it up and learn for myself.

I try to do the same with my junior devs today, unless there's time constraints or they're under stress, I try to let them figure out the final answer themselves.

I find there's a time and a place for RTFM, and it's usually not at the start of the project when you know the least. When you're just starting, you just want to get something working. Being spoon-fed some answers to get past a few hurdles is rather nice. But then there comes a point where you have to stop and be like "Okay, what the heck is this actually doing? How does it work?".

I just hit that point with some TensorFlow stuff because I started hitting the limits of what ChatGPT could answer successfully, and I think that's fine. But maybe good that I couldn't get everything out of it or it may have delayed my learning further yet. Which I guess reinforces your point.

Are you saying these child questions are useful contributions?

To the child that asked it? Absolutely. :-)

Information is only useful if it's accessible. If they are asking questions it's because the information they want is in practice not accessible to them.

I'm not disagreeing, just clarifying. I myself have asked lots of dumb/easy questions but prior to ChatGPT it was hard to get simple straight-forward answers.

There's a rule of tens online: for every comment, there are ten interactions (like an upvote/down ote), and for every interaction, there are 10 views.

So, every comment on a post roughly equals 100 views.

I learned this as a real estate salesperson, some 20-years ago: Take 10 calls to get a meeting. Take 10 meetings to get a contract. Sign 10 contracts to complete a sale. So a thousand calls and a hundred contracts for 10 sales. I didn’t last long, the only other people there who were successfully selling land were also heavy cocaine users, that’s a mark of how grind-y the job was.

Sure, but at least the knowledge the publicly viewable, even if the contributions werent equal. Upvoting, browsing, asking is also a contribution.