alt Hacker NewsLots of the comments here are attributing the decline to a toxic community or overly-strict moderation, but I don't think that that is the main reason. The TeX site [0] is very friendly and has somewhat looser moderation, yet it shows the exact same decline [1].
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bachmeier • yesterday at 1:05 AM
Hate to argue with people on the internet, but your graph doesn't actually show what you claim. The TeX data was stable until late 2021, whereas the SO decline started in 2017. I also would expect some correlation so that SO was a drag on the TeX site.
A similar but not as strong decline. Taking the one but last datapoint for both (stackoverflow/tex respectively): 4436 and 394. If you compare this to how it looked like between 2015-2020 you get (my guess from scanning): 160,000 and 1700. So Stackoverflow as a whole went from 160K -> ~4.4K. That's like a 35x drop, compared to tex, where it's a 1700 -> 394, 4x drop.