I am Gen X but not far from the borderline with Millennials. I guess we were at the right age to be attracted by blogging and Web 2 social media when they came to be.
I was attracted by neither for a while. I am still not interested in Web 2, and except for my X account, I don't have any of them still active. Not using X much either.
Regarding blogging, I had my website which included a blog part before having this account on Hive, and I had a few minor attempts at blogging before that. But certainly way after it was cool (and more profitable) to be a blogger before Web 3.
With time and the appearance of Youtube and then live streaming platforms, some of my generation who started by blogging moved on to vlogging or live streaming, or to a combination of them. They also moved on to short-form content, but from my observation, more like X-style than Youtube shorts or TikTok. Especially TikTok seems more for the younger generations.
Younger generations definitely prefer short-form content.
Why Are These Changes the Result of Massive Attention Shifts in Society?
You can never discuss or present in detail a topic using short-form content delivery. You can at most link to an article or video or live stream where the topic is discussed at large. But you can comment on it (threadcasts are very powerful).
There are other places where short form is useful, like for entertainment and fun, or casual talk. Or for sharing important live news, that doesn't require much explanation, or with a link to a long-form content piece.
We can see a shift in society toward short-form content, even if we look at its effects on long-form. There are very few who read articles in full, or even in diagonal. Long before the ChatGPT momentum that revolutionized LLMs, most people started reading only titles and eventually section titles, if the article had a structure in which the reader could easily see what the article was about. Now with LLMs, they can create summaries for us, or extract various types of information, without any effort from the reader. They can even write entire articles, themselves, as we know.
That orientation toward short types of content has probably been influenced by social media and the numerous distractions it introduced, along with the general increase in the speed of life as technology has advanced.
Despite all this, I still prefer long-form content. Both for creating it and for consuming it. For example, I try to read a little bit on Threads (and maybe reply) when I have time, which isn't very often. That exhausts me much more than reading a post. Maybe that's because topics succeed unrelated and my brain has to make an effort to jump from one to another.