Is MAL a retirement home?

No since we have users under age 60. It's only an older form of forums not fucking letter exchange heh

Tbh I think there's a good mixture of ages on here

To call MAL a "retirement home" is a stretch to put it mildly. I would bet good money that over 50% of MAL users are 30 or younger. I don't think you will find many people calling people 30 or below old nevermind reaching retirement age. Saying that, the longer this forum persists the more likely the average age of forum users will increase. Can't comment on the more general non-forum user ages.

@monsta666 well, I created this account over 12 years ago. Would that make me a long time user of this site?

@DesuMaiden: Sticking with anything for 12 years would be considered a long stretch. So yes I would say 12 years classes you as a long time user. But being a long time user doesn't necessarily mean you are an old person. Granted it is an indicator of being an older but there is no guarantee that is the case; in theory you could have started posting at eight so 12 years down the line you are still only 20. An age I would consider young and nowhere near retirement age.

When people start saying they have been posting on forums for 30 years plus then that's when I begin to think they are either middle age or someone close to their 50's. Don't hear to many of those folks around here. I have seen such users in other forums tho.

This is the simple explanation that people will neglect. But I assume this is explaining most of it. Forums were common when the Internet was more fragmented and you would seek out a particular website for a particular purpose. E.g. someone who wanted to lift weights would look for bodybuilding websites, and on that website they would find the bodybuilding forums. Now major websites accommodate all major interests. And Reddit is basically a large forum of forums that is ready to eat up other attempts to make forums outside of it. So there's little point to seeking out forums. You would expect people seeking out forums to skew older.

With that background in mind, the natural question isn't how MAL has done so terribly at being active, but how MAL has done so well? It also makes any random complaints people have to be unlikely to be the decisive factor.

Tangentially, the bodybuilding.com forums were discontinued in 2024. RIP.

I take the emergence of these trends to be a good indication of the reverse Flynn effect. When IQ levels reverse, is it really so weird that ideologies that existed before the global increase would remerge?

At least the former are apolitical ways of being edgy! Much preferable.

MAL is a dead end. You either turn somewhere else or stay forever. Or maybe a crossroad, but it sounds way too religious to say out loud. I care about my reputation.

I was a teen when I joined, pushing 30 now. Sadly millennials scare off anyone young. Millennials are creepy.

I am 30 years old and love that MAL has older people.

But Forum Games board is full of Zoomers. You wouldn't know that 'cause you don't post on that part of MAL.

Most of these Zoomers don't care about preserving genuine anime culture, which is why I relentlessly promote it in FG.

mal itself is 20 years old, mal is an old website and is a classic for anime tracking/database website, back then (late 2000s and early 2010s) when there were many anime ddl and non english fansubs websites easily found on google, they always link mal as the "more info" of their anime, so mal was the only one i knew and probably a lot of people here were just like me

for a while now anilist was more popular than mal, and i think this is because of anichart, i can say that a lot of us use anichart for looking at seasonal charts, and people who never have any tracking account would just make anilist because of this, there is also anitwt too, there most of them use anilist so people who discovered anime community through twitter probably will just make anilist as well, the newbie anime fans these days enter the anime routine of seasonal checking and tracking through anilist and anichart

however recently i see many new young people on mal here, i feel like this website is getting a comeback, anilist is now less popular than mal, and i think this is because mal have better profile customization and it has official event badge that truly feels official because you have section in your profile dedicated for badges only unlike anilist and AP, mal is also the one that doesnt rely on patreon, mal started as any other websites with a guy making it but now mal is owned by a japanese company and have japanese manga/anime partnerships, and for these reason mal isnt gonna die, it will keep running and new members will keep coming because they migrate here, also this is an unpopular opinion but apparently mal have reputation of having anime elitists and maybe these young people are here for that, if they dont want to mingle with casual anime fan they just come here looking for more

aside from that, there are even older people in anidb, i saw 54 years old guy still active on anidb ~_~ anyway sorry for rambling

@mayoiko this is crazy to realize but mal is 20 years old damn

Age is an odd thing. When you're younger, the 30s and 40s seems terribly older, but upon reaching them you realize how rather young you still are, and what was meant in the saying that "life is short."

It goes too fast.

@Kagami your profile makes me feel nostalgic, your favorites i mean, they were all popular anime in mid 2000s to early 2010s, its like you got into anime between late 2000s to early 2010s and then left