It is a way of the middle but above all it is constantly evolving which does not happen for the forums that are stopped to when I started using them or 20 years ago
You are partly right, between a forum from the 2000s and a forum today there is nothing revolutionary, a forum remains a forum but we cannot say, I believe, that they have not evolved. But between the Facebook of 2010 and today, has there been a revolution? Neither. Facebook remains Facebook.
Social networks would never have existed without the advent of cell phones, which is what brought this new mode of communication between people around the world. The forums missed this shift and did not adapt to the new devices, in fact they adapted but too late. Now that the damage is done it is difficult to recover Facebook users to transfer them to forums, not because they find the tool outdated or worthless, because a modern forum has a lot to offer and as long as 'we get a taste for it, we would start to hate social networks at the same time, but this population of social network users would feel alone, no more hundreds of likes every day, no more thousands of views on the photo of their cat in the garden, etc.
The fight is not technological but social, people want to show themselves, speak to the wider world, obtain a certain recognition, even virtual, and from this point of view Facebook and other Instagrams benefit from their user base which counts in hundreds of millions of users. Redit has its own operation which is more like a forum than a social network, but it is popular, very popular, because you know that if you ask a question there in a few minutes you will have answers and probably the good one.
All this to say that forums are not dead, they are just misunderstood, victims of their year of birth. A forum... LOL, this rotten old thing to discuss there?? No, it's no longer a crappy thing, it's just not a showcase for cats, swimsuits, beaches on the other side of the world and great chef's pastries...