

"Peak Metafilter" happened in 2011-2012: since then, posting and commenting activity on the Blue has been slowly declining. For instance, there was a notable drop in 2014 relative to 2013, about -13% and -10% in numbers of comments and posts respectively. There was a remarkable surge in July 2014 due to #JulyByWomen but user participation still decreased afterward (Slides 9, 16).

Part of this may be explained by the Google ranking issues of November 2012 but the trend seems to have started earlier, mid-2011. Slide 17 shows that at that time the monthly number of new active users (first comment) started decreasing whereas the monthly number of users who stopped commenting increased: i.e. since then there are not enough new commenting users to replace those who "leave" (stop commenting). Possible explanations may include: lingering Google shenanigans; lesser attractivity of the Blue; competition of more popular venues for commenting (Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Reddit etc.). How actually worrying the trend is is debatable: it's about the Blue only (not Ask, Fanfare etc.; possibly Fanfare is "cannibalizing" the Blue); quality != quantity so less comments and posts may mean better comments and posts on average (and less work for mods); it may be unrelated to actual traffic, sign-ups and other money-making metrics; the various fixes to the interface introduced since November 2012 may help to recover traffic and user engagement. In any case, the Blue remains Mefi's flagship, so a downward trend in user participation could be a problem in the long term.

Here is a collection of graphics about the evolution of user engagement (posting, commenting) on the Blue (data from the infodump , 15 June 2015).