I've been lurking on ELU for around six months now, and in my time here, I've seen many, many questions being closed due to being off-topic. More than any other SE site. I've browsed the meta for why this is so much more prevalent here than elsewhere on SE, and the main reason that I've found is that people reason that if an answer can be quickly found elsewhere, it's not worth answering here.
But why? The internet is full of resources from dictionaries to grammar help sites to etymology resources to thesauruses to rhyme finders... I would argue that there are virtually no questions that an average person would want to know about language that aren't already answered somewhere on the internet already. So then why does this site exist?
I want to contribute positively to this site rather than increase the plethora of rejected questions. But every time I think of something I want to ask, I chicken out from fear of downvotes or rejection, and eventually I just spend the extra time to find it somewhere else online. Is this really how we want new users to feel at this site? What kind of questions are we looking for here if we don't like questions that can just be looked up somewhere else?