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I'm sorry if this sounds like a rant, but - a software recommendations site is not very useful if it doesn't have a lot of traffic, in the sense of users who follow it in ways which would make them notice other users' requests.

I thought that maybe it was just my questions which were not that popular, but I'm seeing how the most active questions don't have that many visitors or votes. It gets to the point where I ask myself "so why bother post a question there at all? You know you're very unlikely to get an answer"...

So is it just my impression? Or do you (=central site editors/admins/SX employees/etc.) feel this is an issue that needs attending to?

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With a rep of 25k+, you could check the site statistics. As that's not a real answer to you, there's always the Stack Exchange Data Explorer: stats for our site can be found here. Especially for your topic, the following query should be interesting:

Total Questions and Answers per Month for the last 12

graph
Total Questions and Answers per Month, 3/2015-2/2016 (click graph to enlarge)

Indeed this seems to indicate we're running out of visitors posting answers (blue line); what looks very low there is an average of 10 answers per day with about 15 questions per day – so ignoring the fact a question can have multiple answers this would mean every third question is left unanswered. Be welcome helping to improve that!

Speaking of which (and with the following, not only addressing the OP but all members of our community), the above mentioned resources can be used to improve the situation. If you can spare 10min+ each day, check out one of the following stats whenever you want to help out and have no idea where to look:

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  • What I did is subscribe to the C++ tag, so at least I'm following that. I'll try to do a bit more.
    – einpoklum
    Mar 22, 2016 at 13:27
  • I should find the time to try and generate that graph excluding answers-to-self.
    – einpoklum
    Mar 23, 2016 at 12:33
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    Note that the chart's Y axis doesn't start at 0. The total amount of questions vary between 300 and 380, which is not that bad really. The same with the answers: it has a low of about 250, not almost zero, which is the impression one may get if you only take a quick glance...
    – Martin Tournoij
    Apr 5, 2016 at 1:35
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To answer the question in your title, we're not running low on visitors:

enter image description here

That's new visitors per week. What we are running low on is software itself. I've addressed this before in a somewhat related question:

In my view, the reason this number is low compared to other sites is that we want very specific questions - and sometimes (often!) software simply doesn't exist that fulfills all the requirements people put in their question. This is a good thing, as it means our questions are very specific!

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    @Izzy's answer and my personal (possibly unrepresentative) experience suggest that perhaps questions are not overly specific, but rather - the site is running low on people who take the time to answer questions :-(
    – einpoklum
    Mar 22, 2016 at 14:58
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    @einpoklum I used to spend much more time contributing to SE, but similar to Franck Dernoncourt's experience (above), I find some of the higher-level people at SE to be less than helpful or appreciative (and sometimes rude). Our moderators here are 5-Star, but the people above them (in charge of fostering a larger community interested in contributing to SE) are 1-Star at best. Consequently, like others, I no longer spend nearly as much time contributing. BTW, if you take away all my upvotes and all of Franck's upvotes, an even greater percentage of the questions would have no votes at all.
    – RockPaperLz- Mask it or Casket Mod
    Mar 28, 2016 at 6:54
  • That is quite unfortunate. If you have a link to additional writing on this, off site (e.g. blog post etc.) I'd appreciate it.
    – einpoklum
    Mar 28, 2016 at 9:23

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