Says you? It's hard/to early to tell ofcourse, but currently it looks like it's stagnating. https://insights.stackoverflow.com/trends?tags=elixir

A lot of Elixir Q&A actually happens on https://elixirforum.com/ and the slack channel https://elixir-lang.slack.com/ . So stackoverflow trends may not be the best thing to judge this.

As an avid Elixir user, your comment got me thinking about how and where I look for help. I realized that it wouldn't even really occur to me to use Stack Overflow for answers regarding Elixir, as the other platforms you mentioned tend to be so active and well suited for that purpose.

This isn't to say that I wouldn't use SO for other purposes, as I actively visit the site for JS/PHP content. Anecdotal evidence to support your insight by all means, of course.

Absolutely. The elixir community on the forum are amazing.

Agree with this. I've had a couple of questions on Elixir & while I use SO for looking up answers to other languages, for some reason it never even occurred to me to ask Elixir questions there. Possibly because the folks on Elixir Forum & the Slack channel are incredibly welcoming. They also have areas specifically for those questions you know/feel are very beginner noobish levels.

I haven't used it, but the prospect of having to use a forum rather than Stack Overflow for Elixir help would worry me

Discourse (the platform used by ElixirForum) is built by Jeff Atwood one of the founders of StackOverflow. It is a really nice app to use.

Discourse is garbage but that's an ancillary point I think. Developers are on StackOverflow. If you have a C#, C++, JavaScript, Java, Python, Ruby, or Haskell question and you search for it online chances are it's already been answered on StackOverflow. If it hasn't there is still probably enough information to guide your future search.

"Go to the Slack channel" is not really an acceptable substitute for that level of independence in research.

SO shouldn't be used as a gauge of popularity of a language or framework. Well established languages/frameworks will not see a lot of new questions being posted there since they have an established set of answers. Newer frameworks/languages will see a lot more activity there building up a base set of questions/answers.

The other angle that SO can misrepresent is that inexperienced developers are using the site more than experienced devs. If you know your language/framework/libraries pretty well, then you are mostly going other places for help like API docs or maybe directly to the Github repo for a library and asking committers since you are much deeper into the language.

Another reason could be that SO itself is trending downward. I know that there are people, like myself, who don't often use it or who just use it as part of a set of google results for the topic they are researching.

Exactly what I See in elixir. It Keeps growing each and every day