Well, a good amount of the Sony guys were either banned or left

Without the NX rumors, this data would look even worse

I agree with the people saying we'd post more if we had threads worthy of it. The quality of discussion has dropped over the years. I also have always been very firm that the segregated base threads aren't good. It decreases the amount of threads being made & surely makes post count go down too. 

as an example, I haven't checked any of those threads since I've returned, not once. I bet some of the stuff posted in those threads are interesting & I'd comment if those discussions were individual threads

This gen isnt kind to VGChartz. This gen has a clear cut winner unlike last gen where it was anyones game

Looks like if I was looking at the Nintendo homeconsoles sales.

Not weird, there's hardly any interesting threads lately

I use to post reviews on here but nobody ever cared so I stopped. Funny thing is, just today, I was thinking about making review threads again but eh, they would only be for me

That's accurate 

It's quite simple. Every post has an ID that you can see if you go to "view post". Your post, for instance, has ID 7803239.

Thus, I got the idea to simply check on which date post #7.000.000, #.6.500.000, and so on, were made. Then, just calculate the amount of days between those, and voila, you have the amount of posts made between two dates, and thus the amount of posts per day.

The same thing works for the overall amount of threads.

For the individual forum sections, it's not quite as simple, and thus the data is also slightly less reliable. I went to the Nintendo forum, and then wrote down in excel the amount of dates between the amount of days between page 25 and page 50, page 50 and page 75, etc. That's equal to 750 threads (30 threadsper page, 25 pages), so the amount of threads per day in that period is 750 divided by the amount of days. .

This method causes some slightly unfortunate inaccuracies, but they're not dreadful. It means that the more popular subforums seem to have a higher volatility, because there will simply be more datapoints. The gaming forum ends up having 44 data points, while the sales forum only has 17.

Another slight problem is that I'm not really measuring when the posts were made, but when they were last posted in. That shouldn't be a large problem, under the assumption that thread lifetime (amount of days between creation and last post) has remained relatively consistent over the years, and assuming the amount of necroposts has been relatively constant.

Those are reasonable assumptions, but testing whether they're true would be a lot of work, so we'll just have to live with some small error margins.

This also means that the time-periods for each data point aren't the same. For instance, the first data point in 2009 is from the 26th of January to the 10th of April for the Nintendo forum, while the Sony forum dates are from the 4th of January to the to the 21st of March, meaning they're not completely comparable. They also can't be added together, meaning that there are some analyses I'd have liked to do that I can't really do.

But again, doing it any other way I can think of would be far more work, so this is the best it's going to be.

I planned on doing the off-topic section, but it's slightly trickier because it's been changed over the years. The politics, movies and sports sections are all (relatively) new, and as I mentioned above, adding together different forums becomes very tricky due to the start and end date of each data point not being the same for the different forums.

The general section is far bigger than the other ones, though, so we can tell a lot just by looking at that. It'll mean underestimating the recent results, though.

In the graph, I'm comparing it to 20% of the whole forum (because back in 2009, and also in 2012, it was nearly that), to illustrate how differently the general section has developed compared to the rest of the site.

If you add in politics and movies, the image becomes ever so slightly more optimistic, but it's far from enough to offset the dramatic decrease. 

Edit:

By the way, if the images are slightly too small to look at, it's because I'm cropping them for this forum. If you view them on imgur, they're far larger.

Forgot to say: Nintendo rules VGChartz!

We're in a great depression, everyone hold on.

Last gen was a lot of fun because all 3 were interesting to watch, this time around... not so much.

wow, great work on gathering the data!

With so much else in life, I think it's a combination of several things, though. I don't think there's just one thing that's dried up the conversation, as it were.

95% of them ninty threads are Splatoon related :)
Splatoon got a new character- create thread
Splatoon got a new feature-create thread
Splatoon sold this amount-create thread
Splatoon fav weapon- create thread
Splatoon fav character-create thread
Splatoon fav level-create thread

Lol sorry, but kinda true, the game needs an official discussion thread.