Hey there! I'm pretty sure that those things were already discussed but imho it is left without the attention that it deserve.
I've just read the recent
thread made by theymos and here is a small quote from it:
Politics & Society is trash. People go there, look at a headline, and post a few sentences of their first gut reaction without reading any of the other replies.
If you guys dodn't see the half of the forum works this way. The only Politics and Society section is not the main problem.
The other thing is that people always discuss how to moderate the forum but tbh despite the huge efforts of the community nothing is getting better (at least globaly). I would advice you to think about how to involve users into the conversation.
For example while you are posting on the forum it might be hard to track all your posts for any feedback from the other users while you can set notifications only for threads that will completely spam your inbox with mostly useless notifications.
If people will have a chance to recieve notification once their message was quoted it will make them more involved into the conversation and make the envioronment on this forum way better. It could be a small notificaton somewhere in the top right / left of the page or at least the same e-mail stuff that we've got now, whatever. Anything will be pretty usefull.