Comments and Moderation are a major pain point for people running community sites. In order to manage trolls (and spam bots), you had registrations on, and that really cut down on both the good and the bad ones participating. Still not nearly an effective solution.

I think this is a side effect of Facebook comments. I have noticed that whenever there is a "validated" commenting system, where the user cant just create a fake id and rant away, but is connected to his/her social profile somehow, the trolling rate drops significantly. And on the positive side, because there is a linkback to your entire social community about your viewpoint, it also extends the reach of your content among active users. Its a win-win from the content creators point of view.

Just makes sense.