"That guarantees the stagnation of their community"
Not from my perspective. I'm a Rails developer, and between our continuously evolving platform, the proliferation of gems, and my changing projects, I've always got new questions.
Meanwhile, new technologies keep appearing to become the New Hotness.
Here's why it guarantees overall stagnation (not necessarily on a specific topic):
Let's say you have 10 super segments, eg: PHP, Python, Ruby, Java, Javascript, etc.
Once you build those out to a high degree, reasonably the amount of new content possible in relation to existing content, will plunge. Then if you add a new language that becomes popular and mass adopted, the best you can hope for is perhaps an addition of 5% to 10% to your content base. It all becomes modestly incremental, and the excitement overall is guaranteed to fall in that environment.
Ruby can be hopping as a subset, but the likelihood the whole thing will be is vastly reduced once the overall build-out slows. What's left to be excited about in the PHP section, once you've answered 97% of what is important about the language? How many ways can someone ask about error reporting?
I don't see anything in this that bodes badly for Stackoverflow, financially or as a community.
If all the PHP questions are answered, every PHP programmer is now able to Google and find what they want to SO. That means they 1) learn that SO is the place for answers and 2) see ads.
2 years from now, when they're working in another language with less established Q&A, they'll know where to go.
"Excitement overall" really doesn't mean anything here. I don't care how much or little activity there currently is in the Objective C section because I don't use Objective C. I'm able to find the info I want and get questions answered if they're not already there. That's all that matters.
I don't see anything in it that bodes badly for Stack in terms of traffic or financially either. I never said otherwise. They're dominant and given their answer base and the value of the content, they're likely to remain so.
I believe overall stagnation in the community is guaranteed however, which is what the topic rather focuses on.
Maybe we just aren't talking about the same thing. What does "stagnation in the community" mean to you?
If it means "overall, people lose interest and stop visiting to ask and answer questions," I don't see that. I'm not visiting to fill in all the gaps in SO's content, and feeling disappointed when there aren't many gaps to fill. I'm running into questions, Googling, and hoping to find my question already answered.
If I find it and it's not answered, I'll do research and try to answer it myself. If it doesn't exist, I'll ask. If I find the answer before anyone else does, I may answer it myself.
I'm not going to stop doing that, and I don't see why anyone else will, either. What the overall trends are in the site really has no bearing on my individual participation, so it never feels "stagnant" to me.
Maybe you're imagining users who show up and surf for questions to answer, and those people are getting bored? That's just not the way I use the site, though.
Not from my perspective. I'm a Rails developer, and between our continuously evolving platform, the proliferation of gems, and my changing projects, I've always got new questions.
Meanwhile, new technologies keep appearing to become the New Hotness.