I made a quick-n-dirty data visualization of forum participation trends over time, which you can
explore at this link: https://vigilant-hugle-1fb35f.netlify.com and of which I have made a screen capture below.
The horizontal axis represents the episodes in chronological order, with each point on the axis representing one episode, from Episode #1
Imperial on the far left to Episode #612
The Sixes, the Wisdom and the Wasp on the right. The left y axis represents the number of comments made on the episode in its respective "Episode Comments" thread, and the right y axis represents its number of views.
For example,
Episode #248 "Spar" received 194 replies in its comments thread and 52,057 views of that thread, the most of any episode ever.
We can see, at the very beginning there was relatively little commentary, until Episode 87
Blood of Virgins when there was an explosion of participation that pretty much sustained itself at least through at least Episode 400 and later. Then, at some point thereafter, there has been a steady decline in both comments and views all the way to the present. In former times, it was rare for the number of views to dip below 5,000 and they often reached twice that or more. Recently, however, a view count above 2,000 is quite rare. The number of comments per episode follow a similar pattern of sharp decline.
Seeing this steady decline leads one naturally to wonder what's going on.
