How the pandemic changed traffic trends from 400M visitors across 172 Stack Exchange sites
It’s been a little over 100 days since the first cases of a novel coronavirus emerged. As the world copes and we’ve settled in to be at home for the long haul, we have seen the shifts of this “new norm” reflected across the Stack Exchange network, one of the largest groups of websites in the world.
Along with Stack Overflow and the developers of the world, the Stack Exchange platform is a network of 172 communities focused on everything from cooking to writing to electrical engineering. We have seen an incredible spike in activity across a number of these sites as users and members of the general public turn to the internet for answers to questions and try to spread knowledge about age old practices and cutting edge research.
Some sites are growing for obvious reasons. Biology has seen a wave of engagement as people seek to understand the nature of viruses and what we can do to stop them. For example, people have been discussing what it means that humans caught this disease from animals, and now big cats like tigers are apparently catching it from us. You can also find informative answers on what it will take to develop an effective vaccine for COVID-19, how to visualize the virus at a genetic level, and what immunity for those who have recovered could look like. There has been a tremendous 45% uptick in traffic on one of our beta exchanges, Medical Science.
The growth in traffic and activity hasn’t all been focused on the hard sciences. People around the world are sheltering in place to help flatten the curve, and a lot of normal activities, like group sports, movie theaters, and in some cases even playgrounds, are closed or suspended. So how do you have fun and boost your mental health at home? Games of course! There has been a roughly 300% surge in visitors to our puzzling site, and a 106% and 85% surge to our video game and board game sites respectively, and a 75% raise in poker, as people stuck at home try to find fun ways to pass the time. If you’re in the mood for something fun, see if you can solve this emoji puzzle.
With people spending more time at home, folks are eager to learn new skills and become more self-sufficient. We have also seen 100% spikes in traffic for sites like gardening and cooking, an 82% jump for homebrewing, which teaches folks how to make beer, mead, and cider in the comfort of their apartment. Meanwhile, with car traffic at historic lows in most major cities, many people have turned to cycling for exercise and transportation, and we have seen a 72% bump for bicycles.
Some great examples
- With some ingredients in short supply and people trying to avoid trips when possible, improvisation in the kitchen is common. Here’s a good discussion of what to do when you don’t have quite the right fruit for your pumpkin or banana bread. In a rush to finish your meal before that Zoom cocktail hour? Here’s a guide to cooking without waiting for the oven to preheat.
- The homebrew community is discussing whether or not you can use sanitizers typically used for brewing as a substitute for hand sanitizer which is in short supply. You can also learn about making your own yeast and how to tell if your kombucha is alcoholic.
- On gardening, you can learn about how to remove a row of bushes, hardening your plants under grow lights before moving them outside for spring, and rescuing a houseplant that has been overwatered.
- And over at our bicycle exchange, beginners are getting sage advice from seasoned riders on how to take care and tune gears on a road bike. The community is also constantly updating and improving its index of terms for biking equipment and usage.
While all this growth is significant, the biggest surge in activity, alongside puzzling, has been a 245% boost in traffic on Meta Academia. This community was created over eight years ago, and stems from a profound interest among our early users in the pursuit of knowledge and lifelong learning. The recent explosion of usage on this site is a reflection of the fact that students and teachers around the world have seen their in-person classes suspended. Remote learning and collaboration are the new normal, and Academia has been doing this for the better part of a decade.
People are asking questions about how to conduct virtual lessons and how to safely manage video chat. The growing traffic is also a testament to the Academia community, which responded to this pandemic by putting together an amazing list of resources for people who’s academic workflow has been disrupted by COVID-19.
We are seeing similar efforts across numerous Stack Exchanges, as digital communities that have existed for years or, in some cases over a decade, come together in this moment of crisis. As these groups discussed how to tackle the new challenges facing employees, families, individuals and organizations, they created a new chat room where users from across the Stack Network can come to to discuss issues or emotions related to the ongoing crisis.
We want to offer a deep thanks to the moderators, power users, contributors, and visitors who have helped create so many rich and vibrant online communities and who have kept these sites busy over the last three months. The challenge we are facing now, as a global society, is one that will take many more months to understand and defeat. Know that we’ll be here, working to support you as best we can.
Update 5/12: A mention of Academia was changed to Meta Academia, where the surge in traffic occurred.
Tags: announcements, community, stackexchange, stackoverflow
12 Comments
Uh, what’s your source for a surge in activity at Academia, or that they’re getting questions about video chat for children? That’s not on-topic!
Seems likely that the source is the data analytics services in use on the site:
Google Analytics, Quantcast and comScore.
Yes, we are relying on tools like Google Analytics to measure web traffic. And yes, in these times, when folks are all discussing how best to structure remote teaching and learning, questions about video chat can be on-topic.
Are you serious right now? Who do you think you are? You do not get to decide what is on-topic for any site. Teaching children is not and never has been on-topic at the Academia site. https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2059/why-is-academia-only-for-higher-education
That might get messy. On a lot of sites – we’re still dealing with a lot of things that were *once* on topic and arn’t, and while some find find it useful, changing the scope of a site, without consultation with the regular folks already using it rarely goes well.
Have y’all talked to the local mods and community and helped bring it up on their meta as part of the process? How has the dialogue on this done, and how are y’all working with the community *on* the site?
Yes, Ben, video chat questions can be on-topic at Academia when they are about Academia, but education questions pre-college level (that is, involving children of *any* age) have always been off-topic on Academia.SE and still are, pandemic or not. Why is your blog post talking about “children of all ages” involving a site for which children of any age are not on-topic?
Btw, for Stack Exchange sites the place to start to learn about what is on- and off-topic is the “on-topic” help page, for Academia it is found here: https://academia.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic …we tend to expect people asking questions to read that page before they ask (though of course not all do) – might be good practice for the SO blog, too.
This comment makes it sound very much like you’re making a proclamation that these questions *are* on-topic now, when it’s the community that get to decide that not you personally. If that’s not the intention then I apologise, but with the catastrophe of the last few months behind us, I’d have hoped SE staff would be a little more circumspect about appearances.
I am elected moderator on Academia SE.
While video chat is on-topic on our site when relevant to academic teaching and communication (and has always been, not only in these times), “safely managing video chat for children of all ages” certainly is not. I am also not aware of any question on our site that addresses this issue. There is a good reason for this: We have no particular expertise on this. In fact, since the vast majority of academic communication is exclusively aimed at adults, Academia SE is probably among the last places where you want to ask such questions.
As for the traffic surge, I fail to see it in the tools provided to 10 k users and moderators.
whose*
We really need a stack for teaching itself, abstracted from computer science or math or the culture of academia. So many good questions, and now more relevant than ever. It would also address curiousdannii’s point about this stuff being off-topic for Academia. Spoken as a high school teacher in my fifth week of delivering classes online.
Well that is what happens when people are at home more than they are they workplace. Even if they are working from home they will actually checking in on sites more often than before
Ben, please don’t make unilateral, unsubstantiated claims about what is and is not on topic on a given site. We have enough trouble keeping the sites on topic as it is without SE employees further muddying the waters. Academia.se is about academia, not schools. Teaching children is never on topic there, since it is a site dedicated to those enrolled or working in adult education from the undergraduate level onwards (see https://academia.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic).
Questions about video chats with children might be on topic at Parenting.se, perhaps, you would have to check their help center, but they’re certainly not on topic in Academia.se, and this hasn’t changed during the current crisis. Please remove the misleading claim from this post, it is really unhelpful to the Academia.se community and does the entire network a disservice since it suggests that SO Inc. don’t really understand how their own sites work.