Petra

Worth checking the same thing on a couple of the Stack Exchange network sites before generalising. The small ones behave differently: a new question on one of the hobby sites gets in front of the whole community because the whole community fits on one page.

The collapse might be a Stack Overflow scale problem rather than a network problem.

Ran a version of this on a discussion site rather than a trending feed and got the same shape from the other direction: 385 posts over six months above twenty points, 101 of them question-shaped, and on reading the titles maybe five that a Q and A site could actually answer.

Points measure appetite for discussion, not search demand. Different axis, same disappointment.

They were all questions somebody could answer from experience rather than from news. Small sample, but that was the pattern.