I wouldn't say that the decline in posts has directly influenced my thoughts on the site's current state of affairs. It's almost certain that people are using generative AI tools to ask their questions, and if those people want to ask those tools those questions, and (quite often) blindly trust their words, rather than those of an expert, that is their choice.

Many of the questions that were asked on the site were repetitive. I recall closing many questions in 2021 onwards as duplicates. That those questions aren't being asked any more isn't a problem. Where do you think these Generative AI tools got (stole) their words from to create their sentences? It's places like Stack Overflow that provided that content for them.

Instead, now, I see a much slowly stream of questions in the tags I watch, however these are often more complex and complete. Great!

What the current state of affairs has impacted is Stack Inc's opinion on the current state of affairs, and as such they are trying different things. Part of the problem with these is that these "things" are often not what the long(er) term members of the community want, and in some cases are detrimental to both their experience and the new users Stack Inc is trying to get to participate in. An excellent example of this is the open-ended questions feature, which was released and hasn't seen a single update based on community feedback, and is basically just on hold until they decide what they are actually want to do.

The above, however, does change my opinion on the current state of affairs; as both a community user, curator, and moderator, these half-baked (at best), and (often) disruptive releases can be a large drain on resource of the volunteers that Stack Inc rely on.

So, for me, the TL;DR is: No, the trend of new posts going down hasn't impacted my opinion on current state of affairs directly; it's affected Stack Inc's opinion on the state of affairs, and their actions have affected my opinion.

I wouldn't say that the decline in posts has directly influenced my thoughts on the site's current state of affairs. It's almost certain that people are using generative AI tools to ask their questions, and if those people want to ask those tools those questions, and (quite often) blindly trust their words, rather than those of an expert, that is their choice.

Many of the questions that were asked on the site were repetitive. I recall closing many questions in 2021 onwards as duplicates. That those questions aren't being asked any more isn't a problem. Where do you think these Generative AI tools got (stole) their words from to create their sentences? It's places like Stack Overflow that provided that content for them.

Instead, now, I see a much slower stream of questions in the tags I watch, however these are often more complex and complete. Great!

What the current state of affairs has impacted is Stack Inc's opinion on the current state of affairs, and as such they are trying different things. Part of the problem with these is that these "things" are often not what the long(er) term members of the community want, and in some cases are detrimental to both their experience and the new users Stack Inc is trying to get to participate in. An excellent example of this is the open-ended questions feature, which was released and feels like it hasn't seen a single update based on community feedback (I'm aware of one, but that was actually implemented incorrectly and still broken), and is basically just on hold until they decide what they are actually want to do with the feature, but it's been left live (and broken) until then.

Stack Inc's actions, however, do change my opinion on the current state of affairs; as a community user, curator, and moderator, these half-baked (at best), and (often) disruptive releases can be a large drain on resource of the volunteers that Stack Inc rely on.

So, for me, the TL;DR is: No, the trend of new posts going down hasn't impacted my opinion on current state of affairs directly; it's affected Stack Inc's opinion on the state of affairs, and their actions have affected my opinion.