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  • Your 'low voting activity' section seems to imply that I made some comparison between Cross Valdiated and Stack Overflow, and that there is a meaningful difference. I actually find the comparison between Stack Overflow and Cross Validated such that the difference is small. They show very much the same trend. I often do these sort of stats on both just as a verification that the trend is more general and works also in the bigger SO population and is not just an artifact for Cross Validated. Commented Nov 19, 2019 at 21:39
  • One would expect that 'the absolute rate of voting' does not drop when people still keep looking at old questions. Sure, it might be that a single question may receive relatively less votes... but all questions together (the absolute rate) are getting less votes. This is not so much because the site is flooding with new questions making old questions less easy to find. The number of votes on new questions are not replacing the number of votes on old questions. It is the type of activity that has completely changed. Commented Nov 19, 2019 at 21:45
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    @SextusEmpiricus The number of tags, users (and therefore views by logged-in users) is certainly vastly different, and I think that the topics of CV are even more concentrated within the fewer tags. I cannot quantify the influence of all that to the observations, but maybe a comparison involving other "non-flagship-sites" (dba, unix), or a "semi-flagship-site" (serverfault) could show whether this is a problem of SO, or conversely, an (unexplained) benefit of CV. (But of course, this would go beyond the core points of the question, which are valid regardless of that) Commented Nov 19, 2019 at 21:47
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    The trends are very universal, except... the query for ask ubuntu is very interesting to compare. You can see clear peaks every two years in april when a new version is released. These votes are a lot on old questions. Commented Nov 19, 2019 at 21:51
  • What do you mean by 'benefit of CV'? I state that CV and SO are much the same in these statistics. Commented Nov 19, 2019 at 21:52
  • @SextusEmpiricus Sorry, then I misunderstood the point of the first graph. The CV one is a bit noisy, but I thought that one of the points was that there are far more SO questions with a score of 0. (Now, when writing this, I'm wondering how strong the dependency between "score" and "votes" is - a score of 0 may be achieved with 10 votes, for that matter). But I'll consider revising the answer at that point (unfortunately, I cannot do this immediately) Commented Nov 19, 2019 at 22:12
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    The questions with 0 or 1 score are most likely questions with 0 or 1 votes. It doesn't happen so often that a question has fifty-fifty up and downvotes (except on meta) and that such questions end up with 0 or 1 score. Commented Nov 19, 2019 at 22:56
  • Indeed the CV curve is noisier. That is mostly because there is a lower volume of questions which is more susceptible to random variance. But... both sites have on the one hand an increase in questions with score 0 or 1 and on the other hand the number of questions with higher scores are stagnating (or even decreasing; in that aspect SO is a bit further than CV, and it shows a the future of other - younger - SE sites among which CV ). Commented Nov 19, 2019 at 23:00
  • Interesting in the SO graph (and what is not present in the SE graph) is the little bump at the year 2015. Bumps occur roughly every year in the 0/1 score questions. The bumps are regular around the beginning of the year and maybe relate with some external yearly patterns. However in the number of questions with 2, 3 and 4 or more score these bumps are not much pronounced, except in 2015 where it is very strong. So possibly whatever happened there (maybe SE being available to China) could be recreated to give a new impulse. Commented Nov 19, 2019 at 23:10