Finding questions to answer

Question

I joined PPCG a while ago, and made a few posts, but didn't do much. I find that I have an interesting question that doesn't already have several answers. If I go to the "active" section, most of the questions that show up already have many answers, but if I go to the "unanswered" section, most questions aren't very good questions. It's almost a bit discouraging, because I want to do some code golf, but you can't code golf if there's nothing to golf. I could just answer a question that's already been answered in the language I intend to use, but that feels like less fun knowing that someone else has already done it, and probably better.

Answer 1

I have two answers for you, a simple technical one and a more complex philosophical one:

Go to Questions, sort by newest

When you sort questions by "active", you get all the questions that most recently had some activity, where activity could mean different things, but in practice you will see mostly questions that received an answer (or had modifications to an answer) in the last hours, no matter when they were asked.

If you are really interested in recent questions that didn't get many answers yet one thing you could do is clicking on the "Questions" link at the top of the page, which will lead you to this page, where you can actually sort questions by "newest", showing first the questions that have been most recently asked. Here you have a bit more chance of finding questions that don't have lots of answes yet, but might get more in the future.

That said...

Don't worry so much about that

My real suggestion is: try to answer any question you find interesting, no matter how many answer it has. Try first to come up with your own way of solving it, without looking at how other people did. Then you can compare your solution with others and see what other people did differently: maybe they used different algorithms, or applied some golfing tricks you didn't know or didn't think about. As long as you are using a different language, or a different approach, you can even get ideas from other answers and use them to improve your own! (In this case it's always nice crediting people for the ideas you "borrowed", both in your answer and with upvotes)

Once you have an answer you don't think you can improve anymore, don't be afraid of posting it even if it's longer than some other answer in the same language: if you took a different approach to any part of the answer, or to all of it, people may appreciate your creativity. Even more, you may get some golfing tips that could shorten your answer and make it competitive!

The best part of all of this is that even in the worst case, when at the end you find out that some other answer is simply a better golfed version of yours and you end up not posting your solution, you will have learned some new tricks from that which will help you do better next time, and you will probably have had fun while doing that!

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A final note: from my experience "unanswered" questions are often unanswered not because they are not interesting, but because they are hard. Try not to dismiss them so quickly, and if you think you can build an answer for one of them, by all means do it and post it! Your efforts won't be unappreciated.

Answer 2

There are some quite sophisticated search predicates which you can use. E.g. you can search for questions with 3 to 8 answers and a score of at least 5 which were posted in the last year: https://codegolf.stackexchange.com/search?q=is%3Aq+answers%3A3..8+score%3A5+created%3A1y..