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Timeline for Is MathOverflow saturated?

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Mar 17, 2017 at 10:13 history edited CommunityBot
replaced http://meta.mathoverflow.net/ with https://meta.mathoverflow.net/
Mar 20, 2015 at 22:49 answer added paul garrett timeline score: 10
Mar 16, 2015 at 15:40 comment added Emil Jeřábek The reduction in points for question upvotes was applied retroactively, hence the statistics available in SEDE are computed as if it were 5 from MO’s inception. So it shouldn’t skew the results.
Mar 16, 2015 at 11:37 comment added Federico Poloni @StefanKohl You are correct, I forgot about that. The fact that the average number of upvotes per question is decreasing is still true, but the picture of "how difficult is it to became a 200+ reputation user" is more complicated in view of this.
Mar 16, 2015 at 9:54 comment added Stefan Kohl Mod @FedericoPoloni: Since 2010 there were at least two changes -- firstly, the number of points per question upvote changed from 10 to 5, and secondly the association bonus was introduced with the move to MO 2.0. -- So what do you want to say with the numbers you give in the last sentence?
Mar 16, 2015 at 7:33 comment added Federico Poloni The average question score per month is also decreasing: data.stackexchange.com/mathoverflow/query/287159#graph. This isn't surprising: as the site grows, there are less eyeballs on each single question and less upvotes. Maybe the number of users that who only 1-2 reasonable questions in their lifetime is the same, but their overall reputation decreased. In other words, getting from the initial 101 to 200 in 2010 was as hard as getting to 150 now (in my opinion).
Mar 15, 2015 at 22:25 comment added Kim Morrison Mod I'm not meant to share the google analytics data in detail, but I can say that page views, while showing seasonal and weekly variation, are otherwise pretty close to constant since Day 1.
Mar 15, 2015 at 21:11 comment added Gerhard Paseman I would say that "the Math Educators site also reduced the audience of this site" is a belief and not a fact. It is plausible that some who lurked on MathOverflow stopped after MESE went beta, but that is a good thing as they found a forum on which they could do more than lurk. I suspect MathOverflow participation was affected but not decreased by MESE's arrival. I think a more telling statistic is participation in meta. If the core of committed users is declining, then MathOverflow has a serious problem. Gerhard "Easy: Make More Committed Members" Paseman, 2015.03.15
Mar 15, 2015 at 19:34 history edited Piotr Migdal CC BY-SA 3.0
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Mar 15, 2015 at 17:56 comment added cardinal @vzn: I'm pretty sure the OP was aware of your link, though it's nice of you to add it for others. :-)
Mar 15, 2015 at 16:50 comment added vzn all se sites have a temporal evolving dynamic aspect (apparently not well studied/ understood) where it appears, observationally/ anecdotally, (a) a lot of high rep users earn their rep earlier in site history & it becomes difficult for anyone to match them (b) site activity patterns shift over their lifetime eg gradual decrease in answers per question etc, votes, etc... what is desirable to "steer" for is a whole other question... fyi see also this excellent new se tag cloud graph/ analysis tool
Mar 15, 2015 at 16:19 comment added Federico Poloni Mathoverflow is also getting more and more picky with its topics. Many soft-question and big-list threads that were considered ok back in 2010 (and gathered massive amounts of upvotes) would probably be shot down today. The Math Educators site also reduced the audience of this site by creating a separated community. Neighboring disciplines such as statistics, computational science, physics, theoretical CS now have their own sites, too. I'm not saying all of these are bad things, but they are contributing factors.
Mar 15, 2015 at 14:24 history edited Emil Jeřábek CC BY-SA 3.0
fix URLs
Mar 15, 2015 at 14:22 comment added Emil Jeřábek I see, that makes sense.
Mar 15, 2015 at 13:47 comment added user9072 @EmilJeřábek this is a relevant point, but there are less than 600 closed questions without answer, so about 1% of all questions (and less than 2500 closed questions in total so about 5%, some of them with very many answers) so that while this can have some effect I'd speculate it must be at least an order of magnitude smaller than what is reported. On the other hand, I find the 3.5 that is reported in itself misleading, as cutting of the first few month one is down to 2 or something like it. (Would deleted be included the situation were different, but I doubt that is the case.)
Mar 15, 2015 at 11:42 comment added Emil Jeřábek There's been an increase in the number of off-topic questions after the migration, and these are typically unanswered. Do your answer-to-question ratios include closed questions?
Mar 15, 2015 at 11:36 comment added Emil Jeřábek MO could be universal, but it's clearly not homogeneous, hence it can't be saturated.
Mar 15, 2015 at 1:35 comment added Piotr Migdal @JoonasIlmavirta Yes, it is constant. Actually, it was my starting point - I wanted to see changes in tag usage, but discovered that it is almost flat (see this query: data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/284210/…).
Mar 15, 2015 at 1:29 comment added Joonas Ilmavirta Is that constant activity phenomenon visible for major tags? It would be interesting to see if there is a difference in trends between, say, PDEs and algebraic geometry.
Mar 15, 2015 at 0:00 history edited Piotr Migdal CC BY-SA 3.0
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Mar 14, 2015 at 23:38 history edited Piotr Migdal CC BY-SA 3.0
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Mar 14, 2015 at 23:26 history edited Piotr Migdal CC BY-SA 3.0
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Mar 14, 2015 at 23:21 history asked Piotr Migdal CC BY-SA 3.0