I am a relatively newb user of this site(I like to think only in account age). Only recently have I begun to take notice and care about the health and how this site works (after I had admittedly commited the rep-whoring everybody is guilty of). I too have already become rather disgruntled at the utter lack of "care" that some users of this site show, both new and old.

It seems that the other newbie, ma-at, is one of the only answers that actually suggest possible solutions to the problem we have at hand. Perhaps we want to better define the actual problem first and then brainstorm solutions?

I don't think the problem is as simple as a because crap, or poor programmers, or homework questions, or even laziness*. These merely skirt around the problem. From my brief stay here, it is clear that these are merely side effects of the problem that this site seems to be experiencing.

It seems to me that the extreme low quality questions that seem to comprise a great majority of the currently asked questions are asked by people that show absolutely no care for the charter of this site or its rules to the point where they do not even display the capability to learn. This, to me, is the initial problem that serves as a catalyst driving certain people to respond to such low quality questions in hopes for easy reps, and the related chain of hate that awesome diagram shows. Even though I might not be the most active on this site, I still see that there are obviously more questions that seem to fail to actually diagnose a problem such that answerers can actually answer them. This conceivably causes experienced users, or heck, even newbie users such as me that actually RTFM to become frustrated with the community.

So this lack of care is spreading, people are becoming lazy. Good questions are sometimes burned because people either a) don't spend the time to read them, assuming that they are just a repeat of "how i debug this" or "give me the codes" or b) actually lack the understanding, but may carry high rep and the possibly associated high ego.

Now, I have actually experienced this first hand in kind. I asked this question once before the currently linked question, but it merely lacked the preface telling our fellow downvoters to not downvote my question because it's actually a good question and not a pasted "how do I debug my homework" question. That question was downvoted to oblivion and recieved TWO close votes. Having been literally the 4th question I asked, I almost lost it there and then and wanted to rant on and on. Even though this is just one example of the negativity that I have been seeing and sometimes am guilty of exhibiting, just this one example happening, to me, is completely unacceptable. We cannot be so lazy as to shoo away newer users that ask good questions. Perhaps lazy is the wrong word here, a more fitting word would be that it seems that the community lacks confidence in newer users' ability to ask coherent questions

How do we solve this? Well, I have one possible solution. Instead of attempting to address the problem that exists with the CURRENT active userbase, how about being slightly more selective as to who is allowed to participate on this site? A short and sweet 10-20 min "Introduction to StackOverflow" course that EVERY new (and existing user that is under some calculated cutoff) must take before they have the privilege of asking questions on the site? This course could have a quiz in the end, with questions that test the understanding of the charter of this site, and how to ask questions. I do not believe this is too much to ask from new users, because frankly, as a new user (unless you have been browsing SO for a long time, in which case you probably don't really even need to read the manual at all) you are NOT capable of asking a coherent question that follows this site's rules UNLESS you read the manual. If certain new users are not even willing to do that, then do they REALLY deserve to even belong in our great community? Conversely, if they DID care, then EVEN if they did ask trivial and stupid questions, they would respond well to feedback(however harsh that feedback is) and learn, slowly. Slowly and steadily, the general sense of a real community of programmers asking questions and giving answers to programming questions will return to the masses. Running with this idea, the moderating/review community could be given greater powers to maybe infract/warn new users that are STILL not exhibiting the bare-minimum qualities of a SO user, with a system that resembles that of many forums.

Regarding *****: and this laziness would not be exhibited in such great frequency if the new users were FORCED to be educated in the ways of SO.

Update:

Just an interesting piece from my absolutely riveting question (not really). I am astounded.

This is just the type of thing that makes you ask : "are you kidding me, SO community member?"