In my opinion, the added value of those suggestions will not be much. ET's main problem is the high signal-to-noise ratio with flaming and nonsense. I would look to adress that instead if you want to improve the quality of ET, unless ET's charter is to be a forum for entertainment purposes and not trading education. Best regards.
More threads or forums viewable on the home page and nix the book reviews and all other reviews for space? Why not have the Forums page as the home page, with the active threads on the right side as it is now. Nothing 'changes', just home page and forums page blended. A decision to redesign the homepage: consider posting three or four mock-ups / images so the 'elite' (peanut gallery) can vote off the island the most disliked design. Stack Exchange up-voting feature is pretty cool - something like that for long threads. Don't care about the rest of the social media aspects (liking, facebooking, linkdining, yadda yadda, I'm there to read not tweet and why do we have to tell the world what is on my mind every damn minute, don't apply gamification to the site). Attracting the old higher quality of posts - not sure a fresh gui can fix that. Other than the home page limited to a handful of threads - it's working just fine. Great site.
Couldn't have said it better myself. Well done. Baron must decide if he wants to maximize this week's page views (bring on the flamers), or maximize long term value to his audience and as a result, increase long term page views. This issue has been highlighted repeatedly, however, so I think he's made his decision.
I have followed ET for over a decade. I use it mainly to get answers to the questions that come up from time to time. It is a research tool and some help to new traders learning. There are some very good traders on the site who are generally helpful. I think social sites need to become much more secure before they make significant inroads. Both facebook (recently) and Linkeln (a year ago) have been hacked. A few serious incidents will kill their usage I think. IMO, they are fads looking for a way to make serious money. Advertising drives many sites and capitalizing on groups is difficult beyond that. (I could be wrong of course.) Focus on one niche and do it better than others is the secret. Spreading oneself too thin, means you annoy everyone equally.
How about a waiting period for people to post? Or maybe a "viewing requirement" (you need to look at 20 entries before you can post). This would get rid of those annoying "join and spam" types with minimal impact on somebody who wants to join.