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    The point about fragments versus articles is interesting. There has been a downward trend in adult literacy starting around 2017. I’ve always found that the Stack Exchange community tends to value verbose textual explanations. I definitely think one of the avenues that needs to be explored is how to accommodate people who don’t like to read long-form text (even though I am old and frustrated by the trend of information getting stuffed into difficult-to-search/skim video forms). Commented Jan 11 at 13:55
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    I don't think AI is as strong a reason for drop in questions as we think it is. If you even just reference the graph alone the decline started from 2016 - well before any AI became prominent. COVID brought a spike in 2019/20 (presumably due to staying at home), but barring this the decline has been steady. Also I don't think young people are adverse to research either as this is a drastic drop - the drop in question activity I would think is simply most questions have been asked. A better graph would be question visits over time - then we can assess relevance properly. Commented Jan 12 at 16:45
  • Rethinking the core ideas of Stack Exchange should be done outside of Meta SE / SO because the current system limitations play against this. Commented Jan 12 at 17:04
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    I recognise a lot of your hypotheticals are just spitballing, but I thought I'd mention that some of them (answers as videos instead of text, AI answers, etc) would absolutely turn me away from all parts of the network except for chat. Commented Jan 14 at 0:05
  • Yes, the decline started before AI. However, the decline from almost 300k to 150k was survivable. Immediately after ChatGPT released, that went from 150k to 100k in about six months. Since then, it has kept dropping and is now something like 5% of peak. I agree that there are other problems and the other problems mostly showed first, but AI has grown to the largest single problem. I'm not convinced that "all questions have been asked". Reddit and Discord seem to be fine. Switching gears, I would also find many of the proposed changes here offputting. Commented Jan 15 at 16:58