I often ask niche or difficult questions, and I often get tumbleweed badges.
Part of the formula is low views, so I see them mostly as a useful notification that very few people are looking at my question and that I might therefore need to do more to get it seen.
Ways in which I've responded to Tumbleweed before:
- Migrating questions to a different site. For example, I asked a "Microsoft on Mac" question on this site, which went tumbleweed, so I asked for it to be migrated to Apple.SE, where it got a better response (and actually got a gold badge for over 10,000 views eventually!)
- Re-wording the title to make it more interesting or more obvious what the question is about. Sometimes my question titles were accurate but unclear or unappealing
- Putting up a bounty. If a problem is both difficult and only a small number of people would relate to it, people will understandably need some extra encouragement to help. I'm expecting to need to do this with this questionthis question, for example.
- Looking on other sites such as specialist forums - particularly if it's a very niche piece of software. Maybe there just aren't any regulars here who know that software. Linking to the question on a specialist forum can sometimes work (if the forum doesn't mind such things)
- Sometimes, if you feel like you've done everything you can, you can put up a Support question on Meta linking to it along the lines of "What can I do to get this tumbleweed question seen?", and that itself might be enough to get an expert to notice the question (or, suggest a way to improve it)
- Sometimes you just need to be patient. For example, this very niche questionthis very niche question got almost no response from the regulars (I think it was on something like 5 views for a month after asking), but got a great answer months later from someone else who was researching the topic, and is now up to 3,000 views because it's a rare source of quality info on a niche topic