Agreed. There are too many trolls out there. Newspaper websites in particular are bad; I avoid visiting the San Francisco Chronicle website both because it's a dreadful website for an increasingly irrelevant newspaper, and because the 'comment crew' there are so obnoxious.

I'm biased in favor of the ability of people to comment, not least due to >20 years of internet use...but increasingly, I think that the best way to host public discussion is in forums rather than comments, which are vastly more likely to result in heckling and trolling as there is no obvious structure to the discussion, and thus no (social) penalty for saying something glaringly stupid.