Rather than instantly downvoting newbie questions, maybe we can reframe the situation…
As a (~40 year old) 20 year Extra, mentor to literally dozens of students and new hams now, and 15 year Redditor (all 15 right here, including as a mod once upon a time), believe me, I get it. Seeing the same questions cluttering your feed constantly gets old.
At the same time, we get posts all the time (often correctly) claiming that the hobby has a lot of barriers to entry, not least of all negativity from the people in the hobby. Downvoting well-intentioned but repetitive or simple (to you) questions just contributes to that perception.
It’s easy as a OM to forget that newbies don’t know what they don’t know. It can be bloody hard to google answers to technical questions when your technical vocabulary is limited, and the US exam material, and format, and most of the available study material, does little to encourage depth of learning during the licensing process. Add to that the rapidly declining quality of online information sources thanks to SEO, AI, ad bias, and rage baiting, along with increasingly weak STEM education in an lot of schools, and one can imagine that learning this stuff can be a daunting prospect these days, just in a different way from the old days when I got licensed.
I’d like to offer this classic XKCD in hopes of encouraging folks who downvote those newbie and repetitive questions by default to, if not upvote, at least just ignore them and let other folks answer, rather than burying them, or worse, belittling OP.
For those that already just keep turning the scroll wheel, or especially those who take the time to answer these questions, I’d like to say thank you.
I can say with some confidence, given 2 decades of experience, that there is very little that fosters your own enthusiasm and enjoyment (and depth of knowledge) of a hobby more than fostering the same in others. Twice I’ve been more or less inactive for years, only to be pulled back into the hobby by a chance encounter with a total newbie who’s so excited about it that they’re like a golden retriever puppy cracked out on Red Bull.
Yeah, it gets old explaining common mode current for the 10th time, but even if you’re like me and took your test back in the code requirement days and had to read the whole ARRL licensing manual because there was no alternative, you were still that clueless noob once upon a time. Even if you came into the hobby with an EE degree, you had to learn new terminology, and new rules.
If you had a great elmer, remember and try to emulate the patience and kindness they showed you. If you had to go it alone, or met with negativity from us crotchety old buggers, remember the frustration you felt, and try to do better for the next guy.
This hobby doesn’t work without people to communicate with, and it is probably changing faster right now than at any point since the development of AM voice communication. At the same time, information availability is fragmenting, search engines are riding an SEO handcart straight to hell, and online communities are increasingly negative. I hear people say “ham radio is the original social network” all the time. I hope you’ll join me in trying to channel those old school roots, rather than the flood of negativity that has engulfed all the other social networks.