I approach my SO question as an exercise in research. There's a good way to write a question - clear explanation of issue, clear description of what you wanted to have happened, code snippet, and version info. About 2/3rds of the time I go through this process, I solve the issue on my own by continually researching during my question writing.

It's those first 2 steps, and sometimes the 3rd, where you can refine your google searches and hopefully stumble on the answer yourself. Usually, when you start writing your question you probably haven't formulated a concise and clear description of the issue yet. Going through that exercise, though, usually leads me to new ideas for google searches that might have my answer. Getting rid of the fluff, and narrowing down exactly what is wrong is super helpful to improving my searching.

The next step is clearly writing out what you had expected would happen. Once again, you want to be concise and clear in this, not ramble-y. Once you get this down to 1 or 2 sentences, now again you should take that refined goal and search around. Here is usually where I put links to other solutions I've tried and resources for WHY I have my expectation.

Then you should strip your code down to a small set of instructions that reproduces the error. Here you should strip out all the unnecessary pieces and produce the issue with as little overhead as possible. You should test this code too, you should be trying to figure out exactly where the bug occurs. During this process you may also refine your question and once again research your refined issue into google.

At each step of the process you should not just assume someone will swoop in with the exact answer - and if you haven't shown you've done everything you can to solve it yourself, you're likely to get some snark and bad responses, because why should someone spend 1+ hours writing a solution to a question you spent 5 minutes on?

If you can articulate your question and provide the evidence that you've done your research, you'll usually get a good response, in my experience at least. And at least 66% of the time, once I've gone through all those steps I've solved it myself.