That makes sense. "New visits" are first time users, likely young coders who are looking up answers to things on a search engine, find what they're looking for on Stack Overflow, maybe click on an ad, and leave. They probably don't vote or post much. A sudden die-off there suggests something very bad happened to organic traffic (change in Google? Terrible new SEO scheme? A sudden stop in ad buys?)

The new content rate been dropping at a dismally constant rate for a long time, but the first few months in 2023 were awfully grim. I wonder what might've corresponded to that.