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Comment by bnegreve | Hacker News Reader

I don't know .. is it that more of these questions get answered, or that when one of these questions gets an answer, we all learn about it?

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As someone old enough to have had a glimpse of the time before the internet I'd say definitely the former. The fact that almost everyone can find the answer to almost anything in almost no time is a historic break that in my opinion is hardly to underestimate. Of course it didn't solve all our problems and brought a couple of new ones with it.

Yet its so weird that with all that information at our disposal that so few people bother to look things up.

Relatively few do, but for those who make use of it, the compounding benefits are immense.

Sometimes I think whether someone makes profitable use of the internet is the real social division these days.

If more questions are answered, is it because of the internet or is there some other factor like people having more time to answer questions?

It's not like the internet wasn't alive and well 20 years ago. Hell, Stack Exchange is little more than Usenet, and that was in use over 40 years ago.

Sorry, 20 years was an arbitrary number. What I meant was before the internet. :D

There wasn't a search engine for Usenet for a long time (other than grep'ing the spool dirs), which was frustrating. I would argue it's more like some combo of "more people connected together who can answer, an ability to quickly find relevant pervious answers, coupled with some amount of social capital accrual that makes taking the time to answer worthwhile". Those things make me think 'internet' is at least a big part of the answer.

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