I'm hesitant to say it, but I do think Bitcoin Discussion is getting slightly better, based on the hours I spend in there going on reporting sprees. A useful thing to do is to sort by new posts (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?board=1.0;sort=first_post;desc), and report all the trash threads that get created before they have time to take off, and reporting spam threads for locking rather than individual posts if you don't have enough time to trawl through pages and pages of spam.

As issue I am finding is that the spam posts get deleted promptly, but the reports to actually lock threads sometimes take a week to be acted upon (I assume these reports are being left for a higher mod?). In that time, the thread has filled back up again with another 5 pages of spam. Until we can get these threads locked down promptly, it is an endless game of whack-a-mole. Although I wish more people would actively report, I honestly can't blame people who are running out of steam over the whole thing.