If you've ever watched American TV - they frequently set their lead characters in the favored 18 to 35 demographic. They'll squeeze a 25 year-old actor into a senior FBI agent role - even though the years would never work in the real world.

Someone else mentioned this could be an effort to switch their platform to an advertising base. That's certainly possible. To many advertisers, the world is composed of 7.4 billion people - age 18-35 and everyone else is - well, just there.

Or it could be that they sent an urgent memo to their algorithm and asked it, "what survey questions they should ask?"

Since it did such a stellar job in assigning readers to writers and writers to readers - why not give it the seriously important job of figuring out where the platform is heading and with whom.