A few stats:
- Questions that aren't closed, and have accepted an answer: 779
- Questions that aren't closed, have at least one answer, but no accepted one: 694
In other words, even when I answer a question where I think I might be the absolutely right one to give the optimal answer, I have a ~0.45 chance of not getting accepted afterwards; if i consider I might not be the only one to answer: that number gets even worse.
I've spent a couple of minutes pasting
friendly reminder: please accept an answer or clarify what is not satisfactory about the answers you've gotten. This site stops working if askers don't give feedback!!
as comment to questions that have gotten positive-upvote-count answers.
I'd really like to encourage especially new users to give answers, but with as few users as we have, the reward of answering something is really small, and the +15 from an accepted answer makes a hell of a difference.
So, is there a better way to encourage people to accept or discuss answers?