User group downturn?

[Jima]

On 2012-12-01 16:54, Dave Smith wrote:
> I've been thinking a lot lately about the downturn in user group meeting attendance and mailing list participation over the last few years. Today I graphed Plug's mailing list activity from 2005 to present (messages per month), and noticed a startling coincidence.
>
> Is this causal or merely correlated? Did other groups see a similar downturn in mailing list usage?
>
>      http://thesmithfam.org/images/plug-stats.png
>
> FYI: The arrow in this graphic is pointing at September 2008, the month StackOverflow started its public beta.

  To be fair, over the last 5+ years I've observed a number of LUGs 
experience a similar downturn in interest, regarding meeting/installfest 
interest, mailing list traffic, and simply the group maintaining its 
online presence at all.  (Take SLLUG as an example of the last.)

  What'd you use to generate the graph?  I think I might ham one up for 
the TCLUG ML (I don't run it, but I have about half the archives, and am 
grabbing the other half right now).  I wouldn't be the least bit 
surprised to be a similar trend.

      Jima