Based on the SEDE query that was linked in Thomas Weller's comment](How does the continued decline in posts since May '25 influence our interpretation of the state of SO?), the last data point shows 1447 questions per month. That's 46 questions per day in 31 days. That's a bit too low for a site that wants to continue to grow or even remain a healthy, sustainable global community in perpetuity, but it's a much more appropriate number for a healthy, sustainable community than most of the other months the site has been up.

The peak rate was ~200,000 questions in a single month... that's ~6,500 questions every day, for a month! Even if the site were only up for those three months where it was >200k per month, that would still leave us with over 600,000 questions, which I would argue is quite a healthy amount to have over the entire lifetime of a Q&A site... assuming they are all good questions.

Now, I think we'd be lucky to select 600,000 good questions on the site that are worth keeping around. There are maybe twice that many on the side that are helpful to more than one or two people. That's just my gut feeling after over a decade of using and curating the site.

To really answer your question, I think we can't just look at the decline or even the entire graph since late 2008 when the site launched... we need to first ask "what is a healthy number of questions asked per month, given the amount of people we have who can curate and answer the incoming questions?" Given the smaller user base today, it's probably not much more than a few thousand questions per month... maybe 10,000 questions per month would be a good target/maximum? Are there enough active, knowledgeable users here to answer ~322 questions per day across all the various programming languages or tools being used/asked about in 2026? Maybe... I'm not sure. But I am sure that the site would have nearly as big a problem in the other direction if we were still getting 100k-200k new questions per month.

In the context of that question, I'd say that the current posting traffic is low and cause of concern, but not horribly so. As I've mentioned elsewhere, there's still about a century's worth of backlogged questions to curate even if we completely stopped receiving any new questions today, just based on the small curator footprint around today. It's certainly not a great trend, and I think the SE staff/company ownership are not doing us or themselves any favors with how they are running the network or the company. But the current state of SO in terms of questions asked per month is, refreshingly, tolerable the last few months for the first time since the first 12 months it was around.

And, to that point, I echo what others have said: yes, there are way fewer questions here today, but the ones that do get posted seem to be higher quality/have more effort put in, on average (yes, there are still many questions asked per day that are bad or low quality/effort, but I think the average quality has risen a bit). This is helped a small amount by the Staging Ground (if only SE staff would remember that was a thing), and helped a lot more by people who don't want to put a lot of effort in going to generative AI tools to ask their stupid or low effort questions there, instead.

Based on the SEDE query that was linked in Thomas Weller's comment, the last data point shows 1447 questions per month. That's 46 questions per day in 31 days. That's a bit too low for a site that wants to continue to grow or even remain a healthy, sustainable global community in perpetuity, but it's a much more appropriate number for a healthy, sustainable community than most of the other months the site has been up.

The peak rate was ~200,000 questions in a single month... that's ~6,500 questions every day, for a month! Even if the site were only up for those three months where it was >200k per month, that would still leave us with over 600,000 questions, which I would argue is quite a healthy amount to have over the entire lifetime of a Q&A site... assuming they are all good questions.

Now, I think we'd be lucky to select 600,000 good questions on the site that are worth keeping around. There are maybe twice that many on the side that are helpful to more than one or two people. That's just my gut feeling after over a decade of using and curating the site.

To really answer your question, I think we can't just look at the decline or even the entire graph since late 2008 when the site launched... we need to first ask "what is a healthy number of questions asked per month, given the amount of people we have who can curate and answer the incoming questions?" Given the smaller user base today, it's probably not much more than a few thousand questions per month... maybe 10,000 questions per month would be a good target/maximum? Are there enough active, knowledgeable users here to answer ~322 questions per day across all the various programming languages or tools being used/asked about in 2026? Maybe... I'm not sure. But I am sure that the site would have nearly as big a problem in the other direction if we were still getting 100k-200k new questions per month.

In the context of that question, I'd say that the current posting traffic is low and cause of concern, but not horribly so. As I've mentioned elsewhere, there's still about a century's worth of backlogged questions to curate even if we completely stopped receiving any new questions today, just based on the small curator footprint around today. It's certainly not a great trend, and I think the SE staff/company ownership are not doing us or themselves any favors with how they are running the network or the company. But the current state of SO in terms of questions asked per month is, refreshingly, tolerable the last few months for the first time since the first 12 months it was around.

And, to that point, I echo what others have said: yes, there are way fewer questions here today, but the ones that do get posted seem to be higher quality/have more effort put in, on average (yes, there are still many questions asked per day that are bad or low quality/effort, but I think the average quality has risen a bit). This is helped a small amount by the Staging Ground (if only SE staff would remember that was a thing), and helped a lot more by people who don't want to put a lot of effort in going to generative AI tools to ask their stupid or low effort questions there, instead.