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I have being asking myself from a long time how healthy is Web Applications. IMHO it's obvious that the participation in Web Applications have declined over the years as many of the former assiduos users are not participating anymore, there is a very low participation in Meta and the main chat room among other things. These "symptoms" might not be really bad if the participation on the main site were "healthy". Problably looking at the general stats Web Applications might not look in really bad shape but looking at the top popular tags perhaps the conclusion should not be the same as the participation on some these tags have being declining over the years, like and , the 2nd and 3rd tags respectively I'm wondering if we as community should worry / do something about this.

Please take a look to the below graphs and/or to and and share your thoughts about what you think about the participation on these tags, especially during the last 12 months.

Note: If you are familiar with SEDE and know about better queries, please let me know by posting a comment, the same if you find a problem with the queries used.

After reading 2022: a year in moderation I took a look to the Tags and was surprsided to see as the 3rd popular tag as most of the questions that I have seen in the last months with this tag have no answers, commets, votes and updates from the OP, so I took a look facebook Top Users and found at that time that in the last 7 and 30 days the unanswered stats were 100%. So I have being looking for SEDE queries and ended crafting some. Following there are some graphs showing some stats about selected the top tags over the time

Selected tags: ,,,,,,.
I excluded some top tags that are commonly used together with google-sheets.

Posts by selected tags over the time.

Doesn't include deleted posts. Source: query

Posts by selected tags over the time without including [google‑sheets]

Doesn't include deleted posts.
Same query as above, with the mentioned adjustment.

Answer rate for selected tag by year

Doesn't include deleted posts.

[google-sheets]

Data from Wikipedia
Initial release March 9, 2006; 16 years ago

Graphs created using SEDE query.

[gmail]

Data from Wikipedia
Users 1.5 billion (October 2019)
Launched April 1, 2004; 18 years ago

Graphs created using SEDE. Same query as [google-sheets], just changing the selected tag.

[facebook]

Data from Wikipedia
Users Increase 2.94 billion monthly active users (as of 31 March 2022)
Launched February 4, 2004; 18 years ago

Graphs created using SEDE. Same query as [google-sheets], just changing the selected tag.

2 Answers 2

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Some thoughts

I think that it's fair to assume that the users tendency to move from desktop to mobile have a bigger impact on tags like and than in

The Google Sheets mobile apps for Android and iOS

  • are not yet supporting all the features required by power users
  • the screen size of handheld devices is too small to work with spreadsheets.

Other tendencies affecting to

  • Email technology hasn't changed too much (POP, SMTP, email headers, email original message) and some Gmail features like messages grouped by conversation, filters, labels, etc. and Google account related stuff like username using gmail.com domains are not reusable, either so many questions answered in the early years of still are valid nowadays.
  • The use of email is being replaced by using messaging and videocall apps, like Facetime, WhatsApp, Zoom, among many others as well by the use of chatbots and built-in customer / vendor communications in platforms like Amazon.

Other tendencies that might be heavily affecting to are

  • "old" savyy tech users are moving away both from using desktop apps and from Facebook to use other tools like Slack, Discord among others,
  • "young" tech users are learning earlier to use tech and they are using other tools mainly on mobile devices.

A tendency that is affecting all the tags but apparently having a bigger impact on [gmail] and [facebook] is

  • the rise of content creators / influencers offering content on multiple platforms and in very diverse formats (short / long videos, crash courses, boot camps, etc.).

The Decline of [gmail] and [facebook] is also happening in Android Enthusiasts
Posts by selected tags over the time.
Doesn't include deleted posts. Source: query

2022 Answered Questions By Site

Questions in English, about using Facebook as end-user

Ask Different

Questions in English, about using Gmail as end-user

Super User

Resources

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Yes, we should be worried about it, if we care about this website. This website is turning into a Google Sheets support site. One reason is that questions that don't pertain to Google Sheets are sometimes closed even though they are perfectly fine questions. This scares away new contributors and demotivate existing contributors.

Examples:

There's also a notable rarity of upvotes: All 50 latest questions have score 0 or -1. Why do questions have such low scores on this Stack Exchange website?

Which means that plenty of questions get automatically deleted. Not to mention the low likelihood of getting one's question answered (~50%). Why would people contribute in these conditions? Hence the decline, in my opinion.

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