<p>It seems the community has unnecessarily struggled with "homework" questions for a while, mainly due to a worry of having students getting easy answers around here. I see the good intentions of this policy, but it seems it should be clear by now this is something  out of our control and there's no reason to try to address it here. </p>

<p>If you take a careful look at the current questions on the "self-study" tag, many of them are not even homework questions with very good complete answers. The idea of hints would be completely inappropriate, leading to wrong/incomplete answers that would not be useful to anyone. </p>

<p>This idea of giving hints also seems to bias many users to question the OP's intents, leading to unnecessary noise. Instead of asking for clarification or answering the question, the person takes the time to ask "is this homework" or "this smells like homework", which serves no purpose. I have also seen very poor answers which should be comments, induced by this policy of "giving hints".</p>

<p>In sum, I think we should assess a question just by its merits. If you think it deserves your time for a full answer, because it's an interesting question, or because it's a widespread misconception that needs to be addressed, just do it and answer it properly. If you think it's a so simple question that you don't even want to bother answering, post a hint in the comments. If it's a question with no effort at all, downvote it and ask the OP to make it better. </p>

<p><em>PS: I'm aware my views in this topic might considerably differ from current practices, but I thought this question would be a good opportunity to put these ideas into debate.</em></p>
