> I think many of these earnest but "bad" questions just need answers in the form of heuristic advice or pointers to get them on the right track.
This is true, but not necessarily the role of SO to solve. This seems more like a mentoring service.
SO was conceived as a long-term repository of questions and corresponding answers that are worth archiving for several years, so explainers don't have to rehash the same explanations many times and explainees have quick access to expert knowledge collected over a long time.
Remember the bulk of users are the passive readers of the vast question bank of SO, they come to SO because the questions and answers are relevant and helpful. The primary user is therefore not necessarily the novice user who cannot formulate a question well and cannot search for similar questions or break down their problem into pieces, explain what they did etc. We also need to make sure the site remains high-quality for the readership, people who read answers from months and years ago.
I agree that there needs to be some place for novices to get coarse-level guidance of what terms to search or what fields of CS may be of interest, etc. It's definitely true that formulating the question the right way is already a substantial step towards solving it.
But "I'm confused in a vague way about this specific file I was tasked to work with and I'm getting an error message I was too scared to read, so plz help" is not worth archiving in a question bank.
It sounds more like a support help desk for programmers, but you'd have to pay for it because answering such questions is exhausting and not really rewarding. The people who go to SO do it for free because they like the puzzle solving aspect of thinking and solving interesting questions. Rehashing the same thing gets old and you can not guilt trip people into doing it as some sort of unpaid community service.
