I've been struggling with understanding why as a decent poker player one would want to give free advice? It's pretty much you vs the rest of the poker world when it comes to trying to make money. So if you give out advice to other poker players that improves their game doesn't that make things worse off for the decent player?

What are you thoughts?

Depends on the advice you are giving. If someone is likely to believe what you say giving them terrible advice is pretty productive.

In theory giving advice is part of discussing strategy in which you're also receiving advice from your peers. Sometimes however, you'll see forum teacher types that are never asking questions and are never even open to criticism of their own opinions. Advice giving is merely an exercise in intellectual dominance for them. Still, keeping your mind churning about poker and ingraining those concepts into your head is more productive than browsing Facebook or playing video games. There's certainly a negative of having to face people that have listened to and will employ your advice, but it's rare enough to be matched up against that person that the overall effect will be minuscule.

Because figuratively burning money is cheaper than literally burning money.

Also, the sharing of knowledge is written into human DNA. Some of us apparently get more satisfaction from spreading ideas than keeping them to ourselves, even if it might harm us financially.

Some people warn you not to eat the yellow snow. Others will try and sell it to you.

The more somebody shares poker knowledge for free, the more you know he is a losing player. In case you are a long-term winner at stake X, please open the hand review forums on twoplustwo looking at hands played at two stakes below X. 90% of the advice given actually confuses OP even more and is outright terrible, in my opinion when reaching a level beyong basic understanding of most concepts, asking stuff in forums and taking the advice given for granted would hurt your game more than help it, you`d be better actually analyzing your questions by yourself or with a coach(best option).

Very rarely will I discuss strategy at the table, and when I do it's usually disinformation. However, I do love talking real strategy, which is why I like 2+2 so much.

I don't think that posting on 2+2 is counterproductive at all. When I attempt to put my ideas into concise and coherent language, I usually come out of the experience with more in depth knowledge of the topic than when I started. I've been known to ramble quite a bit, and through those ramblings I almost always learn something new. Sometimes I'm corrected by a valid point by another poster, or sometimes I learn it through the writing itself. Either way, I'm learning stuff.

To be nice

There is also the point of having recieved free knowledge back in the day and now giving it back.

This one's clearly not a valid reason.

+1

I'll often start replying and realize I can't really explain something in a cogent way (or even at all), and end up not posting. Then I might learn something via a follow-up investigation.