The downward trend seems to start ~2017, and was interrupted by a spike during the early months of COVID-19. I'd be interested to know what drove that jump, perhaps people were less hesitant to post when they were working from home?

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manquer 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

More people spent lot more time learning new tech skills (at every experience level).

The excess time available (less commute or career pause etc) and more interest (much more new opportunities) were probably leading reasons why they spent more time I would imagine.

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umanwizard 4 days ago | parent [-]

I’d guess it’s also because it’s not as easy to ask your random question to a coworker when they’re not sitting next to you in the office.

	▲	manquer 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		I felt it became easier with slack. The culture to use slack as documentation tooling can become quite annoying. People just @here/@channel without hesitation and producers just also don't do actual documentation. They only respond to slack queries, which works in the moment, but terrible for future team members to even know what questions to search/ask for.

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zahlman 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

A huge amount of people were just starting to learn programming, because they were stuck at home and had the time to pick something up.

If you look at the trends tag by tag, you can see that the languages, libraries, technologies etc. that appeal to beginners and recreational coders grew disproportionately.