Some time has passed since D-day (the 'D' stands for DeHNQisation) happened 16 October 2018. Time to take a closer look at the site's stats and what effects the HNQ and its absence have had on the community.
Traffic
Let's start with the obvious one. HNQ produces a lot of traffic. No HNQ means a part of that traffic doesn't come to IPS. We can see that in the amount of page views.
This seems to be stable again. But let's look beyond the views and take a look at the other stats.
The other stats
Posts
Posts suffered initially, but appear to have recovered to a point. It's definitely not as bad as the first few days after D-day.
Especially the Questions per day have bounced back quite nicely. This makes sense. HNQ brings people to already existing questions, causing them to answer, not necessarily ask additional questions.
Votes
A similar effect can be seen with the votes. Users coming from the HNQ tend to lack the rep required to downvote. This can be seen in the amount of daily up and downvotes per pageview:
Looking at the average up and downvote per answer we see a similar story:
Deletions
So we see that the amount of downvotes per answer has dropped slightly. Does this mean that the quality of the answers we get has increased? If we look at the fraction of answers that has been deleted each day, we can see that this has decreased as well.
So while the amount of (nondeleted) answers has gone down, so too has the fraction of answers that has been deleted, part of which presumably due to low quality.
Comments
It's late, and personally I'm not too familiar with the comment side of SEDE. If someone has some insights to the amount of deleted comments per post or something like that, feel free to add that here.
Protections
The amount of protected questions would be interesting too. I might add that tomorrow.
Conclusion
While the traffic on IPS has gone down, the daily questions don't appear to have suffered too badly, and the amount of daily answers per question has gone down from a absurdly high amount, to an arguably more normal amount. The quality appears to have gone up as well. Whether this weighs up against one another, I will leave to you to decide.