I believe that Bitcoin Talk has forked. There is an underworld of bounty hunters and scammers, and an outerworld of members interested in Bitcoin and the better crypto-economies. I hoped that the mods could keep the underworld posts and posters on the underworld boards, but this doesn't seem to happen. The members inhabiting the underworld venture out to try to gain merit on the main boards, and because they have no interest in the main board topics, they contribute nothing to the forum. It would help if the underworld had its own beginners' board. This would allow genuine new members to find their place in the new world of digital assets.
Some of us users are the nodes which are rejecting the current fork, and wish to continue on the existing one without the spam, and bounties. Then there's the newer generation supporting, and contributing to the "problem". I would agree that there's several issues right now, but I must say merit fundamentally changed the way people go about their business on Bitcointalk, and I see it as a generally good move.
Unfortunately I think as the spammy topics are started to get deleted from Bitcoin Discussion on a higher volume (people reports them and mods delete spam topics) so spammers realized that there's no use opening meaningless topics in Bitcoin Discussion anymore (OK, all of them haven't realized that already, but a few...) so they are trying to find other places to spam... And they don't read the rules, so they don't know that the posts are not counted in the Serious Discussion.... poor souls
You see, those who are programming spamming bots are smarter and know that those posts are in vain if it's about activity count, so they don't let their bots to spam there...
You could still very easily go there at certain times, and report up to 50 posts within the first 20 pages for breaching the rules one way or another. This isn't just referring to spam though. I don't think they've migrated to other sections it's just that there's a lot more of them venturing out into other areas of the forum on the hunt for merit.