Forum are more of a slow rhythm, deep tought, knowledge intensive conversations (yeah WO thread included), while other media look to me more like instant gut-feeling dominated brawls.
I couldn't agree with you more about your analysis of what bitcointalk is compared to the social media sites you mentioned, and I hope this forum doesn't start pandering to the zero-attention span crowd (and I'm not sure how that would be accomplished, but I'm sure it could). Admittedly, my own attention span is asymptotically approaching the zero point, but with bitcointalk being what it is, it forces me to slow down, read, and put effort into what I write. Anyone should should do the same when making posts, whether they're in a bounty/campaign or not.
- mobile theme. Allowing decent navigation from mobiles (something I already expressed in my interview
This is probably the only suggestion of yours that I'm 100% behind. Cross-posting on Reddit and other sites I don't personally care about and would be fine with, but there are a lot of users who access the forum on their smartphones and I've done so myself in the past--and it's a pain in the ass trying to navigate the site without it being mobile-friendly. Even if that new forum software never comes out, the least Theymos could do to improve things is to make a mobile-friendly version of the site. That could be done prior to releasing whatever changes he has planned with the upgraded software I'm sure.
On the merit front, I still think it's a bit too early to judge whether Theymos's recent changes have had or are going to have a significant effect on the number of merits being distributed. And whether or not there is such an effect, I don't hear too many members bitching about not being able to rank up--certainly not like they used to a couple of years ago. So I hope the changes help, but if they don't, I'm not convinced it'll be a crisis for the forum as a whole.