Help Vampire

What is a help vampire?

A forum user who repeatedly asks basic questions

A help vampire is a person who repeatedly uses an Internet community to source answers to basic questions, rather than attempting to find the answers themself. These users "drain" the time and energy of the community's other users, by failing to search for similar posts or JFGI.

Help vampires are common on Reddit, Stack Overflow, Discord servers, and in other helpful communities. They tend to be inexperienced or novice users who don't know that the questions they are asking have been answered before (and that help vampirism is a faux pas). After their initial question has been answered, help vampires often ask a litany of basic follow-up questions - which is another form of "vampirism."

To deter help vampires from continuing to ask time-wasting questions, other users often direct them toward resources they can use to answer their questions themselves. As the saying goes, "Give a help vampire an answer, and you solve their problems for a day. Teach a help vampire how to use Google, and you solve their problems for a lifetime."

Example

Okay u/Buca, you've gotta stop spamming questions. You're turning into a help vampire, and we don't like those
A discussion of help vampires on Stack Overflow
A discussion of help vampires on Stack Overflow

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Updated December 21, 2022

Help vampire definition by Slang.net

This page explains what the slang term "Help vampire" means. The definition, example, and related terms listed above have been written and compiled by the Slang.net team.

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