Saying that Group 3 is a subset of Group 2 misunderstands the fundamental nature of Group 2. Help Vampires are a well understood phenomenon that predates Stack Overflow and even the web. It has to do with the fundamentally difficult nature of programming. There is a large subset of people who want to learn to program, but place a very low value on other peoples time, and see communities like SO as a free resource to the point that they expend next to no effort actually thinking and researching their problem. The worst part is when you give them an answer it does lead to critical thinking, but rather feeds their assumption that programming is about reciting the magic incantation which is easily obtained by asking a guru with a large memory of such incantations. In short, you don't want to encourage these people because they are just at a time sink that benefits no one (not even themselves).
How am I supposed to research a problem if every other search result is a closed SO thread? I'm being hyperbolic but SO closed content hitting the top searches is also waste of everyone's time.
This happens quite a bit, the top result on google is a closed ("duplicate") SO thread. SO should be modifying their robots.txt to try to prevent this.
In short, you don't want to encourage these people because they are just at a time sink that benefits no one
I have learned things by answering questions for people who were unable, or unwilling to do the research themselves. It's the most beneficial when its a topic I am familiar with, but have not had the need to actually try myself.
