Forums were still going strong a decade after the Internet went mainstream. They only started to fade after smartphones took off and many forums took years to introduce mobile themes. For sports teams however, forums never faded, there tens of millions of users on team-specific soccer forums for example.

That's a good point. I think a lot of forums were less vulnerable for a number of reasons. They typically don't have a large audience (not all, but most), which makes them less of a target. They're also organized around niche interests that don't intersect much with politics and cultural issues, off-topic forums aside. And they're probably more heavily moderated than social media and blog comments.

I think the general point stands when considering large-scale platforms.

Forums also didn't have personalized content recommendation engines... usually, I think

The demographics have nothing to do with that, the economic incentive is what changed when it becomes mainstream.

> The demographics have nothing to do with that, [..] changed when it becomes mainstream.

So it's not unreasonable to say that when demographics of forums was changed, the economic incentive appeared? So it actually depends on demographics?