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There seems to be a new one every day.
This was today's - https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/251243/macbook-pro-13-mid-2014-4k-screen-support

I know we shouldn't close as "Why don't you Google it yourself?" but we can't even link these as dupes, because they're all subtly different.

The only similarity they really share is a total lack of effort.

Today's I voted to close as "Customer Support".

Opinions - do we just keep on posting excerpts & links to Everymac [as I see has been done with this one even as I'm typing this question] or do we ask them to do the minimum of research first?

Straight out of the Help Pages - https://apple.stackexchange.com/help/how-to-ask

Search, and research

Have you thoroughly searched for an answer before asking your question? Sharing your research helps everyone. Tell us what you found and why it didn’t meet your needs. This demonstrates that you’ve taken the time to try to help yourself, it saves us from reiterating obvious answers, and above all, it helps you get a more specific and relevant answer!

I suppose my background for this question is along the lines of :-

  • How do we keep newbies?
  • How do we train them?
  • Are these people ever going to return anyway?
  • Is this type of question ever going to gain us new long-term members, or are they here because it's the first hit on Google & may never find us again?
  • etc etc...

Edits...

Maybe I'm just getting jaded.. Mount Android Phone on Desktop got the comment

Please make an effort to research your question before posting it, and be sure to add as much detail as you can when explaining your problem.

...and the OP on my prime question showing further signs of entitlement in comments...

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2 Answers 2

Reset to default
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I'm not sure if this community is bored with it. But if it is, then here is what we do at Travel SE. A similar approach may be useful for Ask Different:

There are these questions which can be asked with X and/or Y and there are hundreds if not thousands of variations of X and/or Y.

Often, they are extremely easy to solve, not worthy of having to post them on SE.

So instead of saying "I'm voting to close this question as off-topic because google it yourself you lazy/unintelligent slob." we have canonical questions on how to solve the problem very easily, and then we mark them as duplicates of that.

Some examples

Lots of people ask "What is the weather typically like in location X at time Y?" We mark those as duplicates of "How can I find out what the weather is like in a given location on a certain month?" If we didn't there would be hundreds of questions about what the weather would be like, which is extremely easy to look up.

Lots of people ask "I'm going from country X to country Y, how should I bring money?" We close these as duplicates of: "When traveling to a country with a different currency, how should you take your money?"

Finally, one day a guy asked "I want to travel to this place pictured in one of the Windows 10 wallpapers, where is it?" The question hit the Hot Network Questions, and a lot of rep was earned from it. Then a bunch of such questions started appearing, all about one of the (many) wallpapers from Windows 10. Turns out it's not very hard to find out where each of the wallpapers from Windows 10 are from. So we created the question: "Is there a website listing the location of all the Windows 10 lock screens?" So now, we close all such questions as duplicates of that.

There might be a dozen or more types of questions where we have taken a similar approach, but I'm not gonna list them all here. You get the idea. Ask Different may be able to incorporate something similar to this. I'm not saying you should, as I'm not very active here and don't feel I should have a strong opinion in the matter. I'm just offering this approach from Travel SE as a potential suggestion for how to deal with it.

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    I'm a big fan of writing a canonical question that's phrased well and has excellent answers. That way it's easy for people to remember / find them by searching for a dupe. Then we can close as dupe knowing that if the asker has an edit, it will be much clearer for them on how to make their question different than the covered ground.
    – bmike Mod
    Sep 1, 2016 at 22:25
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    @bmike I'm happy to hear that some people here find this approach useful. I'm happy that I shared it.
    – Fiksdal
    Sep 1, 2016 at 22:26
  • For clarification, because these 'resolution'-type questions keep coming up, are we supposed to submit canonical question/answers here for consideration?
    – fsb
    Sep 14, 2016 at 21:41
  • @fbara It should probably be discussed on meta first, yeah. (Probably as a separate post per canonical question.)
    – Fiksdal
    Sep 15, 2016 at 11:18
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    @bmike Should we open a new question for which topics would make good use of canonical answers? I like this idea, I'm just not sure how to proceed.
    – fsb
    Sep 20, 2016 at 20:17
  • @fbara If you have a particular topic in mind, maybe just go ahead and ask a new meta question about it?
    – Fiksdal
    Sep 20, 2016 at 20:19
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    I think this is definitely needed. Two questions in the last few hours have asked: Is my Mac compatible with this screen? Is there an easy way to implement these kinds of canonical question/answer routines?
    – NoahL
    Dec 20, 2016 at 4:12
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Yes, yes we are bored with things that keep asking the same question showing that people don’t like to read the Apple article on what resolutions are supported and how to figure out external displays.

But, we still have to be kind and politely ignore them if they aren’t so bad as to be closed as lacking basic research or basic troubleshooting.

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  • I think that the duplicate approach is the best approach here.
    – ReinstateMonica3167040
    Mar 12, 2020 at 0:29

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