I've noticed that with many UG lists, ... many of them are, for the most part much "quieter" now, than they were in, ... oh, ... roughly 2003 - 2004 time frame.
A typically "pattern" I tend to see in the more recent years, are many of them are quite much/most of the time, ... there are some occasional messages, and once in a while a rather active thread/cascade of messages starts (typically "triggered" from message - and not necessarily first in the "thread") ... activity picks up, ... but after a while that over-all thread mostly quiets back down and typically fades into the background again (sometimes fairly quickly, sometimes going on for quite a while).
Anyway, seems there used to be a fair amount more general activity on various lists I was (and am) still on ... at least for most lists, anyway.
I wonder if anyone has some more substantially statistics on such trends/patterns ... oh, ... say, spanning the from 10 years ago to the present (e.g. some measure of activity of user groups and their lists across that time span). Might make for interesting data (and may also be interesting to see what it does and/or doesn't correlate or strongly correlate to).
Quoting jim stockford jim@well.com:
these days the balug talk list is quiet. what arethe chances it could become voluminously active? thanks for the stats.