RTFM might be reasonable advice, but its not "welcoming" advice.

I remember being very enthusiastic about helping people on, say, Stack Overflow. It didn’t take much extra effort to be nice and made me happy.

But I also burned out relatively quickly. I’d happily answer new questions nicely, but the third or fourth time I saw the same question I spent much less effort to give a welcoming answer than I had the first time I saw it.

Of course, getting the same question repeatedly may suggest something should be redesigned.

I don’t know any good way to keep helpful volunteers helpful for a long time. The best idea I have is constantly recruiting new experts to continually replace the ones that burn out and chase off newbies.

Yep, especially when so many instances of TFM were awful. Perl's docs were fantastic, or so at least I thought at the time, but they were the first large open source project docs I devoured. I can imagine someone coming from another language not even considering just looking at the man page because they were used to awful documentation.

I agree in general (and already commented on this). But some people believe it's like giving fish instead of fishing rod. And I think it was prevalent idea in tech circles during 90s-00s that people who don't read that fm waste other participants time, and needlessly multiply forum topics or extend conversation history. Which was seen as uncivil behavior in those times.

If they specified ‘perldoc -v $|’ instead of just ‘man perldoc’ I’d have been thankful for that as the entire response. It’s literally a pointer to where the answer is and to how to use the canonical tool to find it.