Judicious use of the Ignore feature, both for posters and for entire sections of the forum helps, but new users aren't going to start out knowing where to begin.
Yep. That's to be expected, unfortunately.
It's a trend with all good Internet communities. They start out good, because they are a niche, but if they are really good they invariably become highly popular and so begin a rapid descent. I came here, to this forum and Bitcoin actually, from Hacker News. I haven't been back there in a long while, but before I left there for here the admin/creator Paul Graham was openly soliciting the community for ideas on how to fight off the decline cycle he saw coming. He was trying to stave it off as long as he could, mostly with programming/vote tricks to separate signal from noise, but those options are limited here.
LMAO you guys aren't serious? I really hope not, maybe you should just go make your own private forums. Everyday I see amazing threads on here, but I guess I know where to look. Old members will never be happy cause they liked having all that attention less people, more attention. Also this is how bitcoin becomes mainstream, this is why it is at ~$300 and not $0.20.