| Super interesting charts! I was surprised to see big humps over early springtimes. As if springtime causes people to feel more willing to open up and communicate, similarly to how we associate springtime with heightened romantic drive. Another cool thing I've discovered by reading this right after the Usenet thread[0] is that it is typical for large-scale social networks to stop being humanity's darlings after ~15 years of age. Which is also surprisingly similar to how people are supposed to become completely self-sufficient around 16, as if there's no reasonable expectaction of substantial external care for them. Usenet: born in 1979 [u1], stagnated in 1993, 14 years later.
XMPP: born in 1999 [x1], stagnated in 2013 [x2], 14 years later.
Stack Overflow: born in 2008 [s1], stagnation reported today here, 15 years later. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36859510
[u1] "Newsgroup experiments first occurred in 1979." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usenet
[u2] "Segan said that some people pointed to the Eternal September in 1993 as the beginning of Usenet's decline" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usenet [x1] "released the first version of the jabberd server on January 4, 1999." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XMPP#History_and_development
[x2] "In May 2013, Google announced XMPP compatibility would be dropped from Google Talk for server-to-server federation" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XMPP#History_and_development [s1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stack_Overflow |