Actual analysts here that have looked at this graph like... a lot, so let me contextualize certain themes that tend to crop up from these:

- The reduction of questions over time is asymptomatic of SO. When you have a library of every question asked, at some point, you asked most of the easy questions. Have a novel question becomes hard. - This graph is using the Posts table, not PostsWithDeleted. So, it only tells you of the questions that survived at this point in time, this [0] is the actual graph which while describes a curve that shows the same behavior, it's more "accurate" of the actual post creation. - This is actually a Good Thing™. For years most of the questions went unanswered, non-voted, non-commented, just because there was too many questions happening all the time. So the general trend is not something that the SO community needs to do anything about. Almost 20% of every question asked is marked as duplicate. If people searched... better™ they wouldn't ask as many questions, and so everyone else had more bandwidth to deal with the rest. - There has been a shift in help desk style of request, where people starting to prefer discord and such to get answers. This is actually a bad thing because that means that the knowledge isn't public nor indexed by the world. So, information becomes harder to find, and you need to break it free from silos. - The site, or more accurately, the library will never die. All the information is published in complete archives that anyone can replicate and restart if the company goes under or goes evil. So, yeah, such concerns, while appreciated, are easily addressed. At worst, you would be losing a month or two of data.

[0]: https://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/edit/1926...

> When you have a library of every question asked, at some point, you asked most of the easy questions. Have a novel question becomes hard

This would be true if programming were a static field, but given that new programming languages/frameworks/technologies/techniques/etc. are constantly coming out and evolving, that argument doesn't make sense.

OP here: I had the same thought, but noticed a very similar trend in both [0]; I think this graph is more interesting because you'd expect the number of new users to be growing [1], but this seems to have very little effect on deleted questions or even answers

[0]: https://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/1927371#g...

[1]: https://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/1927375#g...

The second graph here ([1]) is especially interesting because the total montly number of new users seems completely unrelated to number of posts, until you filter for a rep > 1 which has a close to identical trend

At my place of work we use an indexing service for discord that creates an index of searchable static pages for all discord interactions.

So while I agree the help desk style system isn’t really better it also doesn’t necessarily mean that it is lost forever in a silo.

Before you ask, we use https://www.linen.dev/ but I’m sure there are other similar solutions by now

> which while describes a curve that shows the same behavior, it's more "accurate" of the actual post creation.

I would say that this graph looks a lot more extreme, actually!

Your post formatting is making this very difficult to read

What exactly do you mean by "asymptomatic"? The proper meaning of the word does not fit into what you wrote.

"Asymptomatic" means you have a cold but you show none of the symptoms, hence a-symptom-atic, no symptoms.