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Comment by afavour | Hacker News Reader

One immediate reaction: this data isn’t adjusted for overall numbers. Yes, the number of GraphQL mentions on Hacker News varied, but how did it vary compared to the overall number of comments on the site? Same with SO questions and GitHub repos.

Without controlling for that you might just be looking at the normal ebb and flow of site traffic throughout a year. In fact you see it in the SO data, where both GraphQL and Kubernetes take a dive at the end of 2020. I’ll bet overall site traffic was down as people left for holidays, focused on end of year reviews, etc etc.

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I’ve looked up a lot of tech on Google trends. Something strange happened late 2020 across many tech topics. Searches are down across the board.

I can only speculate that people working from home just stopped working as much and therefore searched for work topics as much. Or maybe all the universities going virtual meant less students working as hard and searching for help less. It would need someone to give it some real research to uncover what caused the trend. But it’s super pronounced if you run some searches on google trends

Or people were less inclined to learn new technologies during the pandemic

Or compared with similar technologies. Here's a very naive comparison between GraphQL, REST and RPC: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=NL&q=R...

They all seem pretty stable, although REST and RPC switched places in the mid-2000's

But "rest" is also an unrelated English word, is that taken into account somehow?

Using the more specific scopes, it looks like REST is only gaining in popularity.

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=2005-06-13%202...

Perhaps a simpler way to control would be comparing the trend to the trend of nginx/apache or some other similarly widely used mature tech.

The post mentions all the data come from BigQuery so it should be relatively simple to get an overall row count. I'm not clued in enough on BigQuery pricing to know whether it would suddenly make the query uber-expensive, though.

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