Here's what I said about Bitcoin Discussion three years ago:
This is bitcointalk, first and foremost a forum about bitcoin. Bitcoin Discussion should be the main board people are interested in. It's the first board most people will visit when they discover the forum, and it gives off a terrible first impression. As it stands, many senior members won't even venture in to it because of all the spam. The sub needs a dedicated mod that can clean up the spam and monitor any thread that reaches 5+ pages, as 99% of them are spam mega-threads which OP has long deserted.
Nothing has changed. More and more senior members either don't post in it or ignore it entirely. 90% of the replies in any thread over about 3 pages are just repeating what has already been said. Trying to have a good discussion is near impossible - you can maybe get 4 or 5 good posts in an actual discussion before the spam starts rolling in and drowns it out.
Locking spam megathreads is one thing, but as I've said elsewhere, it does nothing to address the underlying issue. Given that there are tens of thousands other threads, and anyone can open as many threads as they want, the spam will continue until we either starting actually punishing spammers and their signature campaigns, or we absolutely blitz the section and spammers learn not to post in it anymore, such as you get in Mining or Technical Discussion. The second option will just lead to the spammers spilling over in to other boards, though, since they have to hit their quotas and we don't punish campaigns which pay for this trash.