There's little upside to having teenagers in a forum, for example, unless you're looking to monetize.

For example: Virtual reality headsets were fairly stagnant until a young guy in his early 20s tried something new.

Old people often become stuck in their ways and it requires someone new to show up and ask how the sausage is made.

I disagree on this take.

GenZ can do long-form discussion and they use forums frequently, but for specific discussion(s).

Content consumption is done via forever-scroll apps because it's good to kill time; Tiktok, Instagram, etc match this well because it's just a stream of things to have fun with.

But GenZ is making great "longford" content on many traditional platforms, even blogging. The difference, as I understand it, is their approach to engagement. GenZ has seen Facebook arguments and said "no thank you". Twitter discourse also isn't really a thing -- people disagree and Tweet at people, but Twitter isn't like a forum thread and there's no way to ensure your content is associated with the content you want to respond to, so it's not effective to communicate in responses. Reddit is kind of a mystery for me as I just don't frequent it at all, but I don't get the impression that GenZ is posting frequently.

GenZ has platforms that work best when you make a statement, not where you open a discourse; Twitter is too fast/broad to respond to all comments and find real content to respond to, video content just isn't great for back and forth and becomes time consuming for lighter topics. Viewers will make whatever statement they want, but the validity of the video is based on how far a concept is spread; I'd actually position GenZ is very good at concisely expressing its idea in a simple and condensed format, and responses are not at an individual, but an idea. But, they will go to Tumblr/Medium/other long-form post when the medium is appropriate. This is one thing I like about a lot of GenZ content because they tend to be VERY good about choosing the right format for their argument; that many don't have much more to express besides tweets/tiktoks isn't an indictment of GenZ, it's praise. Think of the forums you maybe still lurk around and how many comments are just complete garbage/non-sequiturs; for forums such a post are enough to derail a topic/distract because we feel obligated to a degree to respond, but filtering noise is part of the skill of using more modern platforms.

Forums are kind of contrary to this, and also are bogged down by the before-mentioned Facebook-argument issue and the preferred platforms not really being strongest for direct rebuttals. Again, there are times when you'll see GenZ use forums or other long-form posts, but it tends to be more controlled or on 'forums-but-not-really' forums like Tumblr.

Forums have their purpose and use; but we have __many__ alternatives that make forums defunct, as some topics/ideas are far better expressed on Tiktok or Twitter, and whatever followup we end up with.