Because of Yahoo! Answers.
It is a fantastic piece of flypaper.
I stand corrected. In my defense, I have never heard anyone use the verb predominate before.
It’s a paltry defense, and I was entirely wrong. I will make myself scarce and apologize on my way out. Mea culpa. (Not in the sarcastic sense at all.)
I would agree that Facebook and Twitter accomplish much the same social interaction - especially in terms of surrounding yourself with like-minded individuals.
I know quite a few “old” folks who would never come here - we won’t just nod and agree with a lot of their political and social issue comments. Plus, they would be shocked to discover people here have real life experience and facts to prove them wrong.
For instance, my older brother is quite the right-wing Republican. On Facebook, he and his cronies can pass along “facts” from Fox News and other questionable sources and they will all shake their canes and rant against those liberal, commie, gun-hatin’ Democrats, and nary a sole will put forth an alternate cite or viewpoint. If he, or any of his Facebook friends, came to the SDMB they would be (deservedly) flamed from all sides.
So I don’t think it is just the “young-ins” who aren’t flocking here in droves - I think there are many older folks who don’t want to be surrounded by others who might not agree with them. Say what you want about SDMB, we really don’t suffer fools lightly - and I still have some battle scars to prove it.
I’m still at NationStates, and I feel ancient compared to most of the membership (I’ll be 35 in 3 weeks)
15 year-old here. This message board is actually pretty hard to find. I discovered the message board when I was trying to solve something. So I searched and searched and saw there was a thread about this that came up in a Google search I did. Then I thought, “These people seem smart,” and then I joined and started a thread of my own about the subject.
Before this, I never saw any straight dope threads after years of searching for things. Plus most teenagers aren’t really interested. I have tried to get some of my friends to join, but none of them are willing to.
Because there aren’t any flashy avatars, amirite? 
Yeah, blaming the graphic elements IS oversimplifying, I admit. And I tend to agree with MsWhatsit that the younger generation has cooler, much more widely known places to hang out online. But there’s a certain contingent of people who won’t sign up because this place looks really boring.
Where’s the “Like” button? I think this is it in a nutshell - we have different priorities than a lot of youths that were raised on a steady diet of Facebook (I won’t lump Twitter in with Facebook, because they’re not the same).
It’s part of a rich tapestry.
Verbing weirds language.
Yeah!
It was a great post - it just wasn’t, you know, accurate. 
I made my apology and I’m not going to retract it, but can someone explain why the verb predominate exists and means the SAME FUCKING THING as dominate?
pre·dom·i·nate
/priˈdäməˌnāt/
Verb…
Synonyms
prevail - dominate - preponderate - reign
WTF?
To dominate in advance?
Flammable: inflammable. Is your mind boggled yet?
No one tell zombie Carlin. (Link spoilered because it has NSFW language.)
Predominate and dominate don’t really mean the same thing. Predominate means “to outnumber”. Dominate means “to rule”.
In my opinion, even if new young kids did find it, they might not see the point. The board likely seems boring to them. It doesn’t talk about the types of things they’d be interested in, nor does it have the same style of humor.
Going by that poll, no one group seems to dominate this board. The 20-30s, the 30-40s, and the 40-50s are all in roughly equal proportion. I wonder how common that age distribution is on other boards.
I teach some introductory Microsoft Office classes at a community college, and as we talk about using the Internet, I point them to the Straight Dope. They even see it on my favorites bar.
I show them some of the postings but warn them about it being moderated, leans to the left, and consists of largely college-educated people who value clear writing. That seems to scare them off!
My favorite thread that I share with them is the one about decorating Cracker Barrel restaurants: All that old stuff on the walls…. I share with them that even a Google search will find that thread.
I think it’s a combination of Google, Wikipedia, and Facebook, each serving different needs, that keeps people from NEEDING SDMB. In fact, just this last week I had a student ask me what is the Straight Dope. My short answer was, “It’s what people did to talk with each other before Facebook.” That seemed to answer him.
I am a young person, but fairly unusual in that I spend more of my time than normal (although not excessive, especially offline) both online and offline with older people (and not to upset all of you, but I really do at heart see 40+ as old) and what it comes down to is values.
First of all, you may ask why am I “hanging around” old people off or online in the first place? The reason for me is that it’s because I can absorb knowledge and get advice that I just can’t get from my generation. In return I try to assist older folk with stuff people my age get - especially comptuer related things (this is offline I’m talking here in particular) - you would be amazed how many hell 35 year olds are frigging inept at anything technological beyond the very very basics. This is no Faustian pact, I do have a good time with older people, but I have to be honest, I don’t have as much fun with old people as I do with people my own age, especially offline. Online it’s not so bad in a way because internet culture is a bit more youthful and tolerant anyway.
But this board is rather different to places like say reddit or bluelight or pistonheads or certain chans (to name four forum/forum like places I am very active) in that it skews old. And I would think that this would be immediately apparent to anyone visiting it. I know there are threads in ATMB all the time about what vbulletin version this site is running but that kinda thing is irrelevant or at least I would never notice it - what is obvious and leaps out at you immediately is stuff like no avatars, join date 1999, fighting ignorance since 1973. 1973!?!?! My mum was 13 years old then! Oddly, if t’were 1873 you would just assume it was nostalgia, but that kind of date you assume that this is a continuation of some thing from the past.
The real mystery for you is not why this place is not predominated by youth, but why there are any youth at all. For me the reason is the same reason that I will go to the pub with old people in real life, and a member of a couple of societies/clubs dominated by the grey haired - it’s for the knowledge, and advice. At this, this website currently excels. On some forums/clubs/societies it’s for the connections as well, but I don’t think I’ll suprise anyone when I mention that I am not looking for networking opportunities here…
By the way, be aware that this community is extremely vulnerable. The right subreddit would destroy it, or at least for any youth (read new members) at all. I don’t want to say anything that would get me banned, so I will be cautious and just say that no one under thirty could possibly understand the behaviour of certain moderators some or all of the time, or at least not on an empathetic level (maybe anthropological). Once you’re recruiting no one, or almost no one, then it just becomes a social club on, what, livejournal or myspace or some other thing that probably no young teenagers even now have heard of…
One person (I can only assume it was a teen) signed up on the SDMB for the sole purpose of posting “It’s called signature ownage” with a long complicated bunch of code for a sig file. Now, I don’t read code very well, but I could tell that this was one of those huge blinking animated sigs. Then she asked why her sig wasn’t showing. When informed that the SDMB didn’t support this sort of thing, she stormed off in a huff, vowing to never visit us again. Apparently, she only joined message boards to show off her sig file. We are the poorer because she and her kin won’t post here.
Wow. Someone who might have been a teenager once tried to post a graphic in her signature?!
You guys are right. All teenagers are obsessed with graphic animations and that’s why they hate the SDMB. It’s so clear now.
Well, I am an exception.
Sorry, but it doesn’t mean the same fucking thing, by which I mean it cannot be interchanged in all uses. Both words have a range of meanings. Those ranges overlap, but are not identical.