I'm relatively new to this whole Stack Overflow thing, but I joined primarily to ask questions related to google-charts and google-visualization. Unfortunately, I quickly learned that it was quicker to answer my questions myself, and that even at my relatively low level I am one of the more frequent users (ranked #8 for top users of google-charts and #21 for google-visualization). Over the past 2 months, I've provided 44 answers to questions that aren't my own.
Of those 44 answers:
- 14/44 (31.8%) are accepted
- 18/44 (40.9%) have upvotes
- 10/44 (22.7%) are accepted and have at least 1 upvote
- 20/44 (45.4%) are not accepted and have no upvotes
I am not going to pretend all my answers are perfect, but I think the issue is less the quality of the answers, but the unpopularity of the tags and the lack of experts to recognize the appropriate answer, and the amount of people who came in (like me) expecting to find a slightly more bustling community and slightly quicker responses.
Perhaps I just don't understand the system and/or need more patience, but it seems as if almost 50% of the answers I provide are just ignored.
So the question becomes, for unpopular tags like this, what should I be doing better? Is this just a matter of continuing to try to answer questions as best as possible to build more users for these tags? Is it just a time thing?
the fact that it hasn't been accepted or upvoted will devalue the answer
At least I don't think this is true. I frequently come across old, good answers that have no upvotes, and am always pleased to get to upvote them.