>I was wondering if there is some place that has voting statistics / general usage statistics on Serverfault.

It's not publicly accessible. Shane's screenshots were from the page that Moderators can see. Moderators are only allowed to disclose the general trends and such, not much of the specific data. Shane is a Stack Exchange employee (they get diamonds like the Moderators, confusing I know, but the issue has been brought up and apparently [SE wants users to be confused](https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/82682/146105)) which is why he can post screen shots and actual data.

>Downvotes are up, up votes are down. And honestly, isn't that kind of normal?

Yep, pretty normal. We have sharply less people providing answers however, sharply less answers, and a relatively steady rate of incoming questions. This means questions either go unanswered, or Experts providing answers burn-out quicker than they should (assuming you're in the "it's normal for people to burn-out" camp).

>The attitude that you leave simple questions to newer members might not be the right one.

Great idea, now find the small army of veterans to answer every question and we'll be set. Sorry, I know that's snarky. People new to this problem all have the same simple answer. If the problem was that easy to fix, we would. Getting people to commit vast swaths of their personal time in exchange for fake Internet points and a sense of *helping a community* is insanely difficult (SE has done a fantastic job of this overall, but it's not working *well* here on SF).

>Maybe the right response is to have more open discussions on newer questions

Perhaps, but SE has a **strong** anti-discussion slant. The SE Sites really only work well for the Q&A Model, not for discussions. To that end some of the original founds have now moved on to creating a great "discussion" website: http://discourse.org

<sub>Sorry I'm skipping the rest of your questions as their either redundant or more along the lines of observations and rhetoric that requires no direct response within the context of asking for data</sub>