Compared to the last few years? It seems like it’s mostly Trump most of the time, and there seems to be less activity outside the Trump threads.
Am I imagining things?
I think the Cafe and game threads are almost as active as before.
GD is quieter and P&E busier because of Trump.
The pit is quieter, but that I think is tied to the number of trollish posters banned over the last 5 years.
I’ll also add a strictly IMHO that P&E was extra busy during Trump 1.0, but seems less active in Trump 2.0, due in large part (again, IMHO) to exhaustion and disbelief that anyone believes or supports that crap.
Very true for posting on fellow posters, but some of the threads about Trump that would had been in P&E are now living their active life in the Pit, but again with the same shell-shocked “WTF is wrong with these people?” pain and gloating if they get their faces eaten.
I think we have a periodic tendency though to do a lot of more general threads, and fewer (not none of course) less specific threads, which can lead to some differing perceptions. I’ll log into 40 new entries in the “Leopards Eating Faces thread” but might not see any new threads on events/actions.
I’d be curious how many true regulars we have. I’d guess that something like just 40 posters are contributing 95-99% of all posts and comments.
I’d noticed, a few years ago, that the FQ forum had become extremely slow, sometimes going days without a new post (much less a new topic/thread); my thought was that search engines (and, now, AI) have removed the need to ask fellow posters about, well, factual questions.
But, in recent months, it seems like it’s come back a bit – at this moment, there are 14 different threads in FQ which have had a post in the last 24 huors.
I’ve noticed that too about FQ. The thing that I used to love about FQ was that in addition to the answer, which yes nowadays can probably be found online, we’d have a big discussion ensue and I would learn a lot from that.
In the hamburger menu at upper right you will find an entry [Users]. That will give you lots of statistics on who read or posted what over the last 7 days. You can sort on each column by clicking the header. Note: That page’s layout is useless on a phone. You need a big enough screen to see the tabular layout, not the tile layout.
You’re right that there’s a long tail of very minor posters. And a few non-stop blatherers.
You’ll also find that there’s an entire ecosystem over in Thread Games who’re rarely seen elsewhere. And if you’re not a Thread Gamer yourself, you’d never know that crowd exists, much less posts obsessively there.
I recall writing a post in the last year or so containing a rundown on the shape of the long tail for reading and posting. In response to a thread with a very similar topic to this one, or else one asking about longest tenure or most posts or …
But I’m not succeeding with my search for it. I can’t remember enough unique words I would have used in that post to filter the results set down to something short enough to scan manually. If anyone else wants to take a stab …
Good lord, I’m the fourth-biggest blatherer for the past 7 days, and the past month!
I’m #1 over the last year. I’m not really proud of that; it bespeaks a lot of wasted lifetime.
The person in second place only posts in Thread Games. The person in third place posts for real, plus maybe some in Thread Games. I outnumber outblather them ~2:1. You’re next, just a bit behind #3. And there’s a pretty good pack with similar totals not far behind you.
Under vBulletin it was easy enough to reverse engineer how many total posts there were in any time interval. That’s not readily doable under Discourse. Easy enough to see how many new threads there are per time interval, but not posts.
In the last year we’ve created just over 14,000 topics = threads. The top 17 thread starters created 10% of those. The next 10% of threads needed about 35 posters to whip those up. Which looks to me like a fairly standard exponential distribution.
Dammit, how the heck am I second?! (Week, month, and quarter, fourth for the year.)
I didn’t think I was in the top ten.
It’s simple enough to get an answer from an internet search, but if you want some human introspection, the FQ forum is an excellent place to ask.
The SDMB tended to hover around 45,000 to 48,000 post per month in 2021, about 43,000 to 49,000 in 2022, about 43,000 to 46,000 in 2023, about 41,000 to 49,000 in 2024, and about 38,000 to 44,000 in 2025.
So, a slight downward trend, but nothing dramatic.
July and August 2024 were particularly active for some reason. September 2025 through December 2025 have been on the low side (under 40,000).
FQ certainly has lost ground as wikipedia has grown.
Another factor IMO is that as our collective headcount shrinks, so does the breadth of expertise. There are many careers where we used to have somebody who knew all about [whatever], but not anymore.
As an ever larger percentage of Dopers become retirees, there will also be the issue of knowledge aging. Your former industry moves on even if you’re no longer participating in it and thereby being kept up to date.
Hell, I’m still working and that’s happening.
I took a role running the US office of a foreign firm, and I’m now so far away from the innovation I don’t know what’s going on.
Biggest mistake I ever made.
Interesting to compare number of posts for the year vs. number of topics started. I’m not sure what that says about a person’s general view and use of the Dope, but I will acknowledge that I often feel I have nowhere else to go for a range of views on topics that affect me personally.
Good questions both. For sure some folks start many & post rather little and others are vice versa.
I also think that we now have a big number of large long-running [whatever topic] omnibus threads whether that word is in the title or not. Which absorb a lot of the content that would otherwise be a large number of much shorter threads. I see that as a sign of a maturing community, more than just a maturing average citizen. It’s also something I would expect to see as headcount shrinks and people increasingly talk about the same topics, tired or not.
The point there being the number of new threads, and hence currently active threads, is trending down faster than the slow wobbly descent of post count. That’s the flip side of increasing average thread length.
I also think the Thread Games category really messes with our stats. They, contrasted with the long-form message threads like this one, are really two different group projects.
Stats totalling both hide the very different contributions each makes to the total. I’m not trying to begrudge the TGers their fun. Just commenting that the reality the non-TG crowd sees is a bunch different and has a much different balance, than the reality the TG crowd sees. It’s a bit of adding apples to oranges. Which is OK enough until someone looks at the total and thinks of it as just apples or just oranges.
It works ok if you rotate your phone to landscape.
D’oh. Thank you. I never think to do that. 
That’s exactly what I did. When I saw the instructions to click on a column header, I was confused because there were no columns, then I thought to rotate, and there they were.
Nice find, and a nice feature of Discourse. Note that you can also change the timeframe, such as looking at activity over the past year, or all time. There is, as you say, a very long tail of infrequent posters on the posting frequency curve, but the daily regulars here comprise a remarkably small community.
Oh well, at least we’re still here. As I mentioned somewhere before, a message board I previously haunted before joining the Dope, which was quite active and successful and was self-supporting through ad revenue, was recently abruptly shut down with no explanation.