[sytelus]

The author of this article certainly don't understand social dynamics and various competing forces. On producer consumer systems, the ratio of consumers to producers is often 10X or less. This has been case everywhere from Wikipedia to Etsy to TV to movies to various blogs. The act of producing something is many magnitudes more expensive than act of consuming something. As all biological systems, humans tends to conserve their energy and that's the root cause of these symptoms.

Second, it is very important for these systems to ensure high quality content or otherwise consumers would stop consuming and then producers would stop producing leading to vicious cycle. On large scale systems like Internet, consumers are saved from quality issues by search engines and you can keep producing garbage without triggering vicious cycle. However on websites like SO this is often not the case because they rely on gamification. If you allow users to quickly accumulate scores in game effortlessly than other users who have to try much harder for same scores than overall quality would decline.

And no, SO is not in decline by any measure. In fact, SO has firmly established itself as go to website for vast majority of developers. Some even say programming is mostly reduced to searching SO these days.