I keep having people complaining about how my accept rate is so low on SO, the reason for this was when I first joined SO I thought well if we want to make a useful site then, however good the answers may be to a question, if it is not the exact solution I used then I would not choose it as an answer. My logic was that I could not prove that the answer really would work, I could only know that the final solution I found to my problem worked though it may not have been found through SO. Thus I would not start a plague of possibly faulty answers for some poor unsuspecting googler.
So that being said, how should I pick an answer, just by which one sounds best or has the most votes? That sounds riddled with flaws to me as nobody did the leg work to verify whether or not that answer really would work in my specific situation. At the same time I don't want people to think I am a jerk for not accepting answers... I understand there is a balance between social time and real technology but it ought to favor reality not stroking of egos.
So what gives? Is it really bad to have a low accept rate if none of the answers were the real solution used and thus I could not prove that they are REAL answers? Or should I appeal to the masses and try to make people happy? To me that defeats the purpose of the site!