Comment by kelnos
4 hours ago
SO's new-question rate peaked in 2014 and has been declining since 2017 (with a small, short-lived, early-COVID bump). LLMs have certainly hastened its decline, but it would still be in a pretty sorry state today even without them.
the obvious reasoning is that the vast majority of common questions were already asked, and then still many, many uncommon questions, until the only things that hadn't been asked were very, very niche. It's the same reason complaints about mods marking lots of questions as duplicates didn't really pick up momentum until the mid/late 2010's.