I earned the tumbleweed badge. It's description: "Asked a question with no votes, no answers, no comments, and low views for a week." This sounds quite negative.
(Why) should I be proud / happy about that? That is usually the point of earning badges. Or did I ask a bad question?
I think of it as a pick-me-up thing. It's like SE saying: You didn't get anything useful, so here's badge to cheer you up! So, yes, be a little happy! :)
Poking around on Meta SE:
this is exactly the intent. And it's sort of fun, also useful because it gives us a data point about how many questions are utter failures in the system (not due to the user's fault, necessarily, either) – Jeff Atwood♦
Even more than with material things the acquisition of virtualities like badges on StackExchange is not something you should make your happiness depend upon.
Did you ask a bad question? Maybe, but not necessarily.
If you look at who recently got the tubmleweed badge, you can see that several a day seem to be given out, and the total given out is approaching 2K. That can't all be bad questions, especially not because AFAIK it doesn't get awarded for questions that are closed.
I first thought that Gentoo related questions don't seem that well answered here on U&L, 22 out of the newest 50 questions tagged with Gentoo have no answer but other distros tags give similar results (arch-linux: 24, Debian: 20, CentOS: 18)
I think this is more a case of a question that is difficult to answer without having encountered the problem or at least knowing about the issue. I have no idea what it is exactly about (not your fault, I understand what you ask but are not familiar with why you would do such a thing, as I am not using gentoo myself), and I have little inclination to try and find out and answer your question. If the question was about using bash to parse some field out of a text file, many more people could answer and several would try to gain a few reputation points doing so.
The surrounding posts (currently accessible by using this link) have mostly many more views, so it doesn't seem that nobody was online to look at the question (as might happen on the weekend or between 7-9 AM GMT as is my impression), that IMO supports the notion that the question is not something others have found necessary to solve.
Unfortunately if you post is not answered within a few hours, your chances of getting an answer at all are vastly reduced. Someone has to stumble upon it who solved the issue (why would such a person look at it in the first place?), or remember seeing your question when they solved it later on, and come back to answer it.
Offering a bounty might help to draw attention, I know at least one person on U&L that studied something completely new for the extra bounty points.
