I think this is the most important takeaway. It's especially true for smaller libraries and commercial libraries. And even for huge ones like Rails, questions a

I think this is the most important takeaway. It's especially true for smaller libraries and commercial libraries. And even for huge ones like Rails, questions answered 6 years ago might be little more than a catalog of improper practices by now! For a hard numbers example of "trends" being poor, I develop a JavaScript diagramming library, GoJS: https://gojs.net https://gojs.net It has competition, such as JointJS, jsPlumb, etc. If I look at StackOverflow tags, I would think we're in big trouble: * 180 questions tagged gojs * 449 questions tagged jointjs * 518 questions tagged jsplumb These aren't even enough to show up on StackOverflow's trend tool, and they make the case look pretty dire for GoJS! But behold, Google trends: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=gojs,jointjs,jsplumb https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=gojs,joi... (ignore the last, partial-data month) In search interest GoJS is clearly ahead of these other two libraries. What's more, if you compare the forums for each product, you'd see that GoJS gets 10x-100x the traffic of the others. StackOverflow is simply not the a good place to gauge library interest and activity over the long term, and its not a good place as you say to ask or find answers to questions for products that have ecosystems which continuously improve their APIs and evolve.