So, in a side discussion with a friend (that came about after he spent 2 hours looking for a missing class in Java), I'm now raging again about what I can only call "common answers". Consider the following questions that newbies might ask:

 * "How do I make a website?" -> "install apache"
 * "How do I send my code to other people?" -> "use git"
 * "How do I monitor things?" -> "use nagios/cacti/munin/..."

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None of these are necessarily good answers, often for reasons that take a lot more detail to understand or explain.

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There's a case of "worth" as well, I suppose. How do you know when "just use apache" will actually be a good enough answer for what someone wants to achieve?

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Another side of this is people's ...inability(?) to actually know what they really want, and is some cases a variation of the [XY Problem](http://mywiki.wooledge.org/XyProblem)

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There's also the so-called [half-life of facts](http://arbesman.net/the-half-life-of-facts/) to further complicate matters. A correct answer now is not the right one 3 years down the line, requiring the answering party to have time-accurate knowledge, which in turn leads to a requirement to continually keep up with things.

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Seems [@nedbat](https://twitter.com/nedbat) wrote [some related stuff](http://nedbatchelder.com/blog/201207/bad_answers_on_stack_overflow.html) about this. Worth a read.