I've used a few Stack Exchange sites and am thinking of close / downvotes on *[Linguistics](https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/tour)*, *[Philosophy](https://philosophy.stackexchange.com/tour)* and *[English Language & Usage](https://english.stackexchange.com/tour)* especially.

While it is obvious that SE should tolerate or even welcome entry-level questions that aren't catered for elsewhere on the Internet, I am wondering if simple questions no one can find nor knows the answer to inevitably seem at best stupid to other users.

I have asked a lot of these sorts of questions, so it's difficult to illustrate except very loosely, and it may just be an imagined commonality to my poorly received questions. But is it a *known* problem with the site or Q&A format?

It could be that simple, but unusual questions are just harder to ask.
['https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/381207', 'https://meta.stackexchange.com', 'https://meta.stackexchange.com/users/356826/']
What happens to sites is simply that questions accumulate over time and that in and of itself changes things.

On day 1 there are no questions and you can ask anything you like no matter how simple and it will be a new and unique question.

After 10 years though there will be a huge existing body of questions so unless you're asking about some newly discovered idea or concept, the chances are if you ask a simple question that it will already exist as a Q&A on the site.

So it gets harder and harder to ask an unusual question or in fact any question if you don't spend time searching to see if it already exists. It's also the case that not searching for a duplicate may get your question downvoted because you're really just asking someone else to do that search for you.
SE in general shouldn't have any issue with simple questions that **are** googleable, so long as the question itself is well-constructed.

The reception of such is often down to the rapidity & acceptability of the first answer. Get in too late, it's been downvoted to all heck, get in early with a fully comprehensive answer not just a sentence, & you end up with 500+ upvotes & your answer as the first hit on google.  

[I'm not proposing this in any other way than "it does actually happen". I personally have on occasions been gifted one of these 'low-hanging fruit' questions.]

If you like irony, I once googled something I'd forgotten how to do, & the first hit was… my own answer on SE ;)