I've been reading Stack Overflow questions and answers for a long time now, probably 5 years now, always my first try on Google, and I have always loved the quality of both the questions and the answers.
Although I have never asked many questions on Stack Overflow because either I find a good solution somewhere or I try hard to solve the issue myself because of being ashamed to ask someone else.
But yesterday I have started my journey on answering questions on Stack Overflow and for my first tries I started with the tag of the language I really know deeply. While watching the new questions coming up, I was surprised by the terrible amount of poor questions, either lacking any effort to solve the issue or being something you'd know if you've read a introduction, tutorial or book about the language, or at least know the very basics of programming and have common logic. Sometimes the OP of those questions do not even correctly pick the best answer!
Currently I cannot downvote, but if I could, I'd very angrily happy (!) downvote those very specific questions. My current approach is to comment on the question (if it can be, amazingly, answered in a single line), because I don't feel very ethical or happy about getting reputation on answering those questions that completely lacks effort. Although I've seen people answering those and getting 6 upvotes in one hour (though the OP is downvoted or 0ed) and I confess it bothered me a bit.
So my question is, should I effectively encourage those questions by answering them? What could I do about them to help the community have less of those?