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Recently, I posted a couple of questions here and received no answer. I answered some of my questions by myself. The site seems like is not active. Sometimes, I don't know if I post my question here, on SuperUser or on Stack Overflow. Sometimes I feel that if I ask it on Stack Overflow, I have more chance to get an answer even if it's about Linux. However, I feel recently all the above sites have declined and most of the informed people have migrated from them, so the remained ones can't cover many questions.

I know that I must research more to find my answers by myself, however sometimes even a link or comment can help, but this is also withheld.

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  • Related: What should I do if no one answers my question? If you found some comment helpful, consider asking the commentator to post that as an answer. If you find a link on Ask Ubuntu helpful, you can either mark your question as duplicate (which is appreciated considering your question would be a good signpost) or post an answer what exactly helped you. If you found link elsewhere, consider posting an answer, quoting which points/paragraphs helped you and cite the source.
    – Kulfy
    Commented Jul 23, 2020 at 8:57
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    @Kulfy yeah that's my effort to post answers to my questions when I solved them for future readers...
    – Ahmad
    Commented Jul 23, 2020 at 9:28
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    Someone could pull some hard data on this from here: data.stackexchange.com/askubuntu/queries perhaps something on answer rate or active users? I am not much of a developer and so couldn't get my head round it but others might be able to.
    – Mark Kirby
    Commented Jul 23, 2020 at 10:04

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I feel sad to read your post. I am sorry that you did not get any response to your recent questions, and I am grateful to you for taking the time to post the solutions you found yourself.

Yes, I think you are right that a significant number of people who had been active on the site earlier recently left or reduced their activity. I think this happened in connection with some events that happened last year and affected the entire Stack Exchange network. Perhaps the open letter linked in this post on the network-wide meta site summarises the issues best. The answer to that question has a link to the company's response, which many regard as indicating a positive shift.

I do feel that there are many people in this community who are still very invested in it and continuing to contribute. There are just fewer of us, so it is a little harder to attend to all the questions.

If people like you continue to post good questions and answers, I am hopeful that this site will thrive and future visitors will get a better response than you have.

Thanks again for your participation and also for coming to meta to express your concerns.

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Answering questions are done voluntarily and may require expertise. It may happen that you get an answer eventually if not immediately.

Firing mods and forced relicensing: is Stack Exchange still interested in cooperating with the community? contains important details of the events that happened after a not so welcomed move by the company. This caused many moderators to resign, some users reduced their activities and some veterans even left the network.

If you are interested, how the events affected the questions and answers per day that are posted on the site, there is a query on Stack Exchange Data Explorer. Since the initial event happened on 27 Sept 2019, the query would show the number of questions and answer posted per day since then. You can see the data in tabular as well as graphical form.

Since the data dump happens every Sunday, the current data dump is till Jul 19, 2020. There may be inconsistency for the data about that day until another data dump happens.

Here are number of questions and answers posted per day from Sept 27, 2019 to Jul 19, 2020 plotted on a graph.

enter image description here

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  • Interesting, so both answers and questions actually went up but questions more so. Do you know a query to show exactly how the answer rate changed over that time period?
    – Mark Kirby
    Commented Jul 23, 2020 at 16:47
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    @MarkKirby Actually I forked this query and edited to get the desired result. For answer rate, there exists this query written by muru but I don't know if it's working as expected.
    – Kulfy
    Commented Jul 23, 2020 at 17:47
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    The spike on the graph, it should be noted, is caused by the new LTS release (cc @MarkKirby )
    – Zanna Mod
    Commented Aug 17, 2020 at 2:49

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