What's your age group?

[schneeland]

I do sometimes wonder why there are so few younger players joining the discussions on these boards given the influx of new people coming into the hobby over the past decade.

Web forums are IMO a medium for "old" people, meaning older Gen Y and Gen X. If you weren't around when they were "the thing" for discussion on the Internet, you are, in my experience, less likely to join a forum and more likely to resort to social media, Discord or Youtube (or sometimes groups in messengers like WhatsApp).

 

[Meech17]

Have to admit, its trending older than I thought it would.

I'm a new member here, and I was picking up the vibes that I was a youngster here at 31. It's nice to see a poll confirm I was correct.

Web forums are IMO a medium for "old" people, meaning older Gen Y and Gen X. If you weren't around when they were "the thing" for discussion on the Internet, you are, in my experience, less likely to join a forum and more likely to resort to social media, Discord or Youtube (or sometimes groups in messengers like WhatsApp).

I think this is probably right. I'm on the younger side of the Gen Y and got to witness the growth of MySpace and then Facebook. I was hooked on web forums when I was in middle and high school. I loved being a part of these smaller, tight knit communities. Getting to know people, recognizing avatars/signatures.. I don't recall any of my friends being into them however. Forums were just the weird old places where Google took you while troubleshooting computer/game problems. But even that role has been usurped by Reddit.

It's also slow. I personally enjoy it because you can take in a thread piece by piece, over the course of a day or two. It's nice to help pass the time when I should be working. (Though ENWorld moves pretty briskly in that regard.. There's been a number of threads where I logged off for a day or two only to come back to 40 pages of two people arguing about something only barely relevant to the topic at hand.) Other social media moves much faster. A hot Twitter thread is born, blows up, and dies in the same time it takes a the typical forum post to fill out the first page.

I think people like that these days. They're less interested in slow moving topics with people they recognize. Logging on 24 hours later and seeing half of the front page made up of the same content as yesterday feels dull compared to Reddit where the whole front page will be new 24 minutes later.

 

[Warpiglet-7]

I fall into both the 40-45 and the 45-50 groups, so I'm not sure how to vote.

Yes