The better question to ask is...
What is the impact if I don't display this content on mobile?
Some quick stats from December 2013 concerning mobile:
- Amazon: More than half of customers shopped using a mobile device during the 2013 holiday season.
- ESPN: 47.4 million people used mobile properties in September 2013, the first month ever in which more unique people visited ESPN mobile than ESPN.com.
- Facebook: 101 million US daily mobile users make up 78% of its 128 million daily US users.
- Yelp: As of September 2013, 60% of all searches came from mobile.
- Twitter: 60% of users are on mobile.
- Weather Channel: registered 1.1 billion online page views in October 2011 and 1.3 billion page views on mobile devices.
(Source: Luke Wroblewski)
People want content wherever they go. If your content isn't easily accessible via mobile, chances are it's not your content that's the problem: it's way you're delivering it.
You can't make the assumption that mobile users are "people on the go." In recent Breaking Development Conference talk given by Luke Wroblewski, he shared some further statistics:
- 86% of US phones are used with a TV
- 90% of users use multiple screens at the same time.
(Source: "It's A Read/Write (Mobile) Web" (PDF), presented by Luke Wroblewski. Stats taken from pg. 64)
People use their devices all the time. Are there instances where they need a phone number right away? Yeah, sure. But the overwhelming majority of statistics show that people use their mobile devices for entertainment purposes and to kill time.
Getting to Stack Overflow and Stack Exchange, as an employee here I should state first that this is all my personal opinion. Other people have different opinions here. That's fine. In my opinion though anything that we show on the "desktop" version should be available on "mobile." Just because the way I engage with a website changes doesn't mean that level of my engagement will. I still want access to information. I still want access to tools. A user shouldn't lose access to content because their context changes. We need to find a way to deliver content better. Forms can always be simplified. Content can always be prioritized. Layouts can be modified to best deliver content.