>>24598096
4chan traffic as a whole had two major spikes in the last 20 years. The first was the post-Chanology flood of new users in 2008 known as the great newfag invasion of /b/. While they did mostly hit /b/, they spilled over to the rest of the site in short order, with /v/ absorbing the lion's share. 4chan's traffic more than doubled after Chanology.
There were some minor flareups any time 4chan entered the public discourse, like with gamer gate, or the fappening, but these bursts of activity paled beside the 2016 election activity. Several conservative subreddits got banned or quarantined and those users flooded into 4chan, particularly into /pol/. As with the great newfag invasion, these new people flooded into one particular board, but quickly spilled over to the rest of the site, resulting in most boards seeing a significant activity bump.
However it wasn't all genuine human activity. 4chan always had problems with bots but 2016 exacerbated it. Now we had actual political campaign groups canvassing the website and subjecting boards like /pol/ to constant spam. Activity was through the roof, but was also massively inflated by non-human spam. The anti-spam measures put into place in recent years are part of why activity is falling now, it's harder for both robots and human users to flood the site. But 4chan has also undoubtedly lost a lot of cultural relevance too, so there's expected to be some bleed off of genuine users. I still see the current trend downward as a "normalization" of the site rather than "dying".
