I started off on mailing lists (openldap was a big one for me). And my first pleas for help were often met with some pretty brutal scathing replies. I learned to really write up the problem, reduce it to its point. Go back to it so I could find the most concrete path to either reproduce it, or isolate it. This often led to the solution, or it led to getting some confirmation of bugs. Granted I definitely ended up making some verbose emails and then I would get frustrated with people asking me to try things I detailed in my email.

But that was my "rubber duck debugging". Start by writing an email to to an imagined hostile support group. In the process of explaining the problem, it turns into a research project where I have to defend my claims. The sheer act of writing it out forces me to isolate the issue and keep troubleshooting. I can anticipate the bulk of the things they would have me try and I'd try them ahead of time.

People encountered similiar pushback with stack overflow, but I think the stack sites were much more lenient than some of those early mailing lists were.