My unsubstantiated impression is that the SE site has become less active over the last year in terms of # of new questions, posted answers, etc. Is this true? Are there stats available?
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$\begingroup$ Have you looked at space.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3008/… and the link to the data for the prior year? $\endgroup$– fyrepenguinCommented Mar 2, 2023 at 19:23
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4$\begingroup$ There's certainly been a rising tide of BS. $\endgroup$– Organic MarbleCommented Mar 3, 2023 at 0:35
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3$\begingroup$ "My unsubstantiated impression is that the SE site has become less active over the last year in terms of # of new questions, posted answers, etc. " and yet you've accepted the first answer to be posted, which as far as I can tell doesn't say anything about the number of new questions or answers. $\endgroup$– uhohCommented Mar 8, 2023 at 0:46
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2$\begingroup$ I think a small number of high-activity users significantly reduced participation over 2021-2022, and I suspect that SpaceX flights were generating a lot of questions from 2015-2020 as they were frequently doing new and exciting things (like landing boosters or blowing up); they're pretty routine now. $\endgroup$– Russell BorogoveCommented Mar 31, 2023 at 19:26
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5 Answers
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I think uhoh's criticism was correct, so I desperately tried to remember what little SQL I learned a couple years back and eventually refined that into the query What are Space SE's Vital Signs (Count of Questions and Answers by Year)
The raw query results:
| Year | Q (1) or A (2) | Number |
|---|---|---|
| 2013 | 1 | 982 |
| 2013 | 2 | 1436 |
| 2014 | 1 | 1006 |
| 2014 | 2 | 1808 |
| 2015 | 1 | 1357 |
| 2015 | 2 | 2311 |
| 2016 | 1 | 1672 |
| 2016 | 2 | 2706 |
| 2017 | 1 | 1523 |
| 2017 | 2 | 2240 |
| 2018 | 1 | 2758 |
| 2018 | 2 | 4117 |
| 2019 | 1 | 2661 |
| 2019 | 2 | 3877 |
| 2020 | 1 | 2435 |
| 2020 | 2 | 3353 |
| 2021 | 1 | 2201 |
| 2021 | 2 | 3057 |
| 2022 | 1 | 1249 |
| 2022 | 2 | 1896 |
| 2023 | 1 | 194 |
| 2023 | 2 | 290 |
And a quick chart with 2023 omitted since it isn't complete
It looks like the data supports your impression: Space Exploration is becoming less active, and has been since 2018, though the year-to-year dropoff was pretty steep between 2021 and 2022.
Google sheet where I put the data into Markdown and then into a chart
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3$\begingroup$ my SQL knowledge is very rough, so someone else should probably check that I haven't accidentally made all of the numbers very wrong. I did cross-check the eventual output against a much simpler "how many questions only each year" query and got consistent data and was satisfied, though $\endgroup$ Commented Mar 8, 2023 at 2:34
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The 2021 and 2022 "year in moderation" posts posts don't follow exactly the same format. I'm not completely confident I merged them correctly, so here's the spreadsheet where I gave it a shot (or if folks want to add prior years etc). I believe the footnotes were identical between both posts; I haven't attempted to correct them.
| Action (2021) | Moderators | Community¹ | Action (2022) | Moderators | Community¹ |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| All comments on a post moved to chat | 34 | 0 | All comments on a post moved to chat | 15 | 0 |
| Answer flags handled | 463 | 450 | Answer flags handled | 402 | 289 |
| Answers flagged | 0 | 915 | Answers flagged | 0 | 689 |
| Comment flags handled | 273 | 52 | Comment flags handled | 535 | 856 |
| Comments deleted⁷ | 986 | 2,175 | Comments deleted⁷ | 921 | 1,790 |
| Comments flagged | 0 | 329 | Comments flagged | 0 | 1,387 |
| Comments undeleted | 5 | 0 | Comments undeleted | 2 | 0 |
| Escalations to the Community Manager team | 2 | 0 | |||
| Posts bumped | 0 | 91 | Posts bumped | 0 | 83 |
| Posts deleted⁶ | 207 | 674 | Posts deleted⁶ | 224 | 493 |
| Posts locked | 3 | 36 | Posts locked | 2 | 24 |
| Posts undeleted | 20 | 70 | Posts undeleted | 6 | 36 |
| Posts unlocked | 1 | 1 | |||
| Question flags handled⁵ | 95 | 75 | Question flags handled⁵ | 77 | 171 |
| Questions closed | 32 | 289 | Questions closed | 34 | 223 |
| Questions flagged⁵ | 1 | 176 | Questions flagged⁵ | 9 | 249 |
| Questions merged | 3 | 0 | |||
| Questions migrated | 15 | 2 | Questions migrated | 3 | 1 |
| Questions protected | 1 | 20 | Questions protected | 2 | 13 |
| Questions reopened | 11 | 20 | Questions reopened | 2 | 7 |
| Questions unprotected | 0 | 1 | |||
| Revisions redacted | 1 | 0 | Revisions redacted | 2 | 0 |
| Tag synonyms created | 9 | 0 | Tag synonyms created | 1 | 0 |
| Tag synonyms proposed | 9 | 1 | Tag synonyms proposed | 1 | 0 |
| Tags merged | 10 | 0 | Tags merged | 2 | 0 |
| Tasks reviewed⁴: Close Votes queue | 0 | 1,241 | Tasks reviewed⁴: "Close votes" queue | 9 | 947 |
| Tasks reviewed⁴: First answers queue | 0 | 135 | Tasks reviewed⁴: "First answers" queue | 0 | 347 |
| Tasks reviewed⁴: First Post queue | 0 | 723 | |||
| Tasks reviewed⁴: First questions queue | 0 | 175 | Tasks reviewed⁴: "First questions" queue | 2 | 436 |
| Tasks reviewed⁴: Late Answer queue | 0 | 266 | Tasks reviewed⁴: "Late answers" queue | 1 | 221 |
| Tasks reviewed⁴: Low Quality Posts queue | 0 | 681 | Tasks reviewed⁴: "Low quality posts" queue | 2 | 589 |
| Tasks reviewed⁴: Reopen Vote queue | 1 | 256 | Tasks reviewed⁴: "Reopen votes" queue | 6 | 189 |
| Tasks reviewed⁴: Suggested Edit queue | 5 | 796 | Tasks reviewed⁴: "Suggested edits" queue | 21 | 1,082 |
| Users contacted | 15 | 0 | Users contacted | 17 | 0 |
| Users deleted | 6 | 0 | Users deleted | 15 | 0 |
| Users destroyed³ | 14 | 0 | Users destroyed³ | 6 | 0 |
| Users suspended² | 11 | 16 | Users suspended² | 13 | 26 |
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2$\begingroup$ The review tasks are the closest of any of those metrics to actual site activity. $\endgroup$– PearsonArtPhoto ModCommented Mar 3, 2023 at 13:55
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$\begingroup$ Is there really no way to find out if this "...site has become less active over the last year in terms of # of new questions, posted answers..."? The recent Q/day for example is 2.8 according to the summary at stackexchange.com/sites (screenshot: i.sstatic.net/xz21e.png) I wonder if there's a plot somewhere that shows the trend over the last few years? $\endgroup$– uhohCommented Mar 8, 2023 at 0:52
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1$\begingroup$ @uhoh presumably data.stackexchange.com/space/queries can be made to do it (I didn't look through all the saved queries to see if one already existed, but I looked through some). I agree this was not a great answer $\endgroup$ Commented Mar 8, 2023 at 1:28
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While mods cannot share specifics, the analytics tooling we have shows that total number of visits has been pretty constant over the last year (since May 2022 - prior to that numbers were higher but the reporting changed with Google analytics) with a wee dip at the turn of the year that bounced back.
New visitors is a bit more variable, but again generally trending level.
All in all, pretty good. Especially as some sites have been seeing significant downturn in numbers. See questions like this one regarding impact of ChatGPT.
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Out of curiosity I re-ran the query. I believe the complete data for 2023 continues to support the idea of a continuing decline in participation.
I've updated the same spreadsheet with the raw data. Note that there is some variation in what the query returned for some years, and I don't know why, so for example 2022 has 18 fewer questions this time. I don't think that makes a qualitative difference in the interpretation, but it's worth nothing.
Adding as a separate answer because I don't think me re-running the query should change the sentiment of the previous query, but maybe me re-running it is annoying so if I get downvotes about it it will be more obvious to me.
I started wondering about per-user contributions so I put together another query which again made me realize how much I don't know about SQL, but at least got some useful per-user per-year posting data. I removed the names corresponding to the users on the version I uploaded; if you really want to know, the query will reveal it. Most of us in Meta can probably guess the top few. WOW, we had some active posters.
Sometimes the top user accounted for more than a tenth of the posts (questions or answers) on Space Exploration SE in a given calendar year.
So what does the site activity look like (not broken down by questions and answers this time, but just by posts--sorry, I'm being a little lazy here) if we remove our Friendly Neighborhood Supercontributor?
Oh, the same. I honestly didn't expect that. Looking further at the data there are probably another couple contributors I could try considering outliers and dropping but I assume the ultimate effect is the same.
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$\begingroup$ I'm definitely less active. My user page says "You have no recent positive reputation changes." :-\ $\endgroup$– LudoCommented Apr 19 at 7:25
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$\begingroup$ In case anyone saw my incorrect initial claim that some users had contributed around 1/3 of total posts per year, I initially did the post scaling wrong (turned out my VLOOKUP was only finding the 2013 value because I messed up the range). It took me a few hours to look at the last graph again and say "wait, that doesn't agree with the earlier one." $\endgroup$ Commented Apr 20 at 4:00
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SE site has become less active over the last year in terms of # of new questions. Is this true?
An active user posted ~400 questions in 2021, and stopped posting questions in 2022-03. That alone accounts for almost half of the 2021->2022 drop in number of questions. And of course, fewer questions results in fewer answers. No idea about the other half.
answered Mar 16, 2023 at 2:25
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4$\begingroup$ perhaps it was space-question-asking burn-out due to a case of Rigelian Space-Question-Asking Fever :-) $\endgroup$– uhohCommented Mar 16, 2023 at 5:44