<p>Some old links and discussions dealing with the same topic.</p>
<ul>
<li><p>The below image is related to the question <a href="https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/336925/">All localized Stack Overflows seem to suffer from a decline to some degree. Why?</a> and uses the script from <a href="https://data.stackexchange.com/stats/query/1137128/questions-and-answers-per-month#graph" rel="nofollow noreferrer">here</a></p>
<p><a href="https://i.stack.imgur.com/2JOo8.png" rel="nofollow noreferrer"><img src="https://i.stack.imgur.com/2JOo8.png" alt="small decline" /></a></p>
<p>In the question some nicer (some cleaner and edited) graphs are shown, that give the same idea. There is a decline in questions, but this is mostly from 'deleted questions'. The non-deleted questions are only changing slowly (it is still a decline, but not incredibly much).</p>
<p>I don't believe that the decline in questions is a bad situation. As a comparison/analogy, would it be bad for an encyclopedia (e.g. wikipedia) when the number of new articles decreases? Wouldn't it be instead more strange to assume that the number of questions should increase without limit?</p>
</li>
<li><p>Four years ago, when SE was undergoing many changes I was thinking as well that there is a decline and thought of this meta post: <a href="https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5781">Is it time for an independent Statistics Q&amp;A website? How can we be more independent? #STEXIT #WhoOwnsTheInternet</a> (I must regret that I have no backbone and got stuck to SE instead of starting a blog or something, maybe it is the lazy path to procrastinate?)</p>
<p>That post had also a graph about the time evolution of the traffic (in terms of questions and votes)</p>
<p><a href="https://i.stack.imgur.com/NdtLg.png" rel="nofollow noreferrer"><img src="https://i.stack.imgur.com/NdtLg.png" alt="time development" /></a></p>
<p>And the updated image from the <a href="https://data.stackexchange.com/stats/query/1137761#resultSets" rel="nofollow noreferrer">link</a> is</p>
<p><a href="https://i.stack.imgur.com/Bmaoc.png" rel="nofollow noreferrer"><img src="https://i.stack.imgur.com/Bmaoc.png" alt="development for votes" /></a></p>
<p>From 2014 to 2018 there was a change where the highly voted questions stopped increasing and the low voted questions kept increasing, but now from 2018 to 2023 we see that the highly voted questions remain relatively more stable (to be fair, possibly there's a small declining trend) and there is much more a decline in questions with little votes (note that this number of votes is the number after 30 days, and does not depend on effects like acquiring more votes due to the age).</p>
</li>
</ul>
