Forums Are Dead, Long Live Forums
Here's my ForumCon 2013 keynote, Forums Are Dead, Long Live Forums -- you'll have to juxtapose the video with the slides manually, unfortunately, but here they are side by side.
Update March 2022: Unfortunately the video in this post has been marked private and is no longer available.
People seemed to really enjoy it, and I believe it got the positive, hopeful message across that I intended. I've been thinking about the forum problem for over a year now, and much of that thinking is reflected in Discourse itself. But if ForumCon is any indication, the larger problem facing the forum industry is the massive numbers of legacy forums out there that aren't going to be upgraded any time soon, if ever.