@codinghorror @geistesgift As far back as 2015 people were concerned with the drop off in question growth. I wasn't worried except for a corresponding decrease in answer rate. Asking questions has been less rewarding over time (both in terms of getting answers and getting reputation), which is a trend that was accelerated when people were able to avoid interacting with Stack Overflow itself by asking an LLM. The basic approach to dealing with the unmanageable flood of questions was aggressive culling. That's a great strategy as long as the flood continues, but it's pointless now that people aren't even bothering. The missed opportunity was to build pathways to help people ask better questions.

https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/305507/observation-from-site-analytics-fewer-questions-are-being-asked/305870#305870