<p>The proportion of unanswered questions is indeed slowly growing because (among other things):</p>

<ul>
<li><p>the number of people answering questions is growing more slowly than the number of people <em>asking</em> questions. </p></li>
<li><p>the proportion of <em>very poor</em> questions is increasing rapidly, sapping the time-resources of the very people who tend to answer questions into dealing with clarifying or closing questions. </p></li>
</ul>

<p>I doubt this relatively slow process is the cause of a sudden drop in answers for you, however.</p>

<p>Part of it may be a matter of luck but you can certainly improve your chances of an answer by working on your questions. Several questions already on site here deal with such issues.</p>

<p>Looking at your recent questions, at least some of your questions seem unlikely to be of broad interest (for all they are sure to be useful to you personally); that will reduce interest in answering them; it's fine to ask but they won't necessarily be priorities. You can consider ways to make some of those questions more generally useful, which may help make them interesting to answerers.</p>

<p>You can also make it easier for people to answer some of your questions.</p>

<p>For example, the most recent one asking about references on probability links to three references <em>but mentions neither the authors nor the year of publication</em>. Since many books on probability have similar or even identical titles, the titles alone don't really identify them. So when I see a question like that, I have to ponder whether I have time to start loading page after page on Amazon just to find out what books you're even talking about. </p>

<p>I'm kind of busy (and then when I am here there's a lot of tasks to take care of besides answering questions) and even without that, there's more questions a day than I can even read, let alone give a worthwhile answer to, so if my connection is slow enough to make it take a few seconds each page, it's likely to be "<em>Sorry, next question</em>". I imagine at least some other answerers may be in a similar position.</p>

<p>Clicking through now, I only know one of those books. So even if I did decide I have time to click through to find the books, I would disqualify myself from offering a choice; again it would be a case of "Sorry, next question". [A rephrase of the question may make it more likely to draw at least partial answers.]</p>

<p>Lastly, a number of of your questions are outside my area of knowledge, or are just about within it but so specific I doubt I have enough specialized knowledge to give a useful answer. This, too, may be the case for several other potential answerers.</p>
