It seems to be just really hard. I see a ton of duplicates in the MySQL and Java tags as well. New programmers who are also new users of S.O. vastly outnumber the experienced, and they're exactly the ones who are going to ask questions that have been repeatedly answered.

Any forum that welcomes new users is going to have this problem. The same kind of thing happened on Forrst, which should probably have been a little more resistant.