Allow me to ponder on the future of Academia(.SE):
I don't claim to be an integral or representative user of this site, but I've noticed I personally haven't been using Academia as much lately. This is probably a natural phenomenon for many users across the SE sites, and isn't necessarily a problem for the sites if they are getting enough new active users (and may be a boon, if you're getting less of me :).
The above was sort of a disclaimer to this observation, which is my main worry: it seems to me that when I have been browsing new questions here, most of them are either duplicates (if not in the technical sense, at least morally so) or about some specialized issue I am not so interested in. I think this partially accounts for my decrease in activity here. It seems to me that this may be more of an issue on Academia than some of the other sites (because there are a lot more possible questions of "broad interest" and/or questions are more focused on changing developments).
If this observation is true, then it seems likely that either usage (measured in some sense) of Academia will eventually peter off or questions will tend to become more and more specialized.
First:
Do other people see a similar issue with the questions being asked here? (mostly duplicates/very specialized) Or is there any data for or against this? (Surely we can get data about numbers of questions that are or aren't duplicates; being "too specialized" may be hard to measure directly, but we could try to measure "broad interest" by counting question votes inversely scaled by the growth of the site.)
Second:
If this issue is in fact real, is there anything we can or should try to do about it?