I'd bet every country has more people asking questions than answering them.

Yes but the ratio is different. Americans produce most of the most popular services even if most Americans consume rather than create them.

Stack overflow generally has more than one answer per question, so probably not. People more likely up vote an existing question.

No way. Even on Stack Overflow the ratio of answers to questions is below 1.

Yup, found it:

select 1000 * (select count() from Posts where PostTypeId = 1 and AnswerCount = 0) / (select count() from Posts where PostTypeId = 1);

https://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/new

=> 132 for me.

so 132 answers for 1000 questions, on average.

You're looking at popular questions, that have a ton of answers. But the long tail is huge and most of those questions have 0/1 answers, most likely 0.

I encounter answers now and then by Indian names, and unfortunately my first thought is "can probably skip this one and look at the next answer". The reason is that the answerers _very_ often didn't read the question properly (or misunderstood it) and consequently are giving a completely irrelevant answer.

Nothing wrong with asking questions and seeking to learn.

Yes but where are the ones who have already learned and are answering other people's questions? And why so many silly questions? That was the question. There's a similar situation on Quora. You can look up just about any question and find multiple low quality answers from Indians. On both stress I there seems to be no attempt to do the hard work of diagnosing/debugging the problem to produce the minimal example scenario required by the site; instead it's just "fix my problem here's the code". It's just a different way of handling development which only works if other Stack Exchange users are prepared to spoon feed lazy developers. It's easy to see why many of the original Stack Exchange users have given up.