@ehBeth,
Quote:most of the lively wits have abandoned the site
Which I find terribly disappointing.
This site has an advantage in that moderation is done in-house. For the most part, moderators here are familiar with posters and their posting histories. At the Washington Post, moderation is out-sourced to companies who are not necessarily even in the US and who know nothing about the evolved community who post. So, for example, posts from someone with a satirical style will commonly be deleted by moderators. And many functions are automated - some person with a strong partisan bias will "report" a post and that report will usually result in a deletion of the targeted post.
Trolls are a problem everywhere, certainly in political discussion groups. And trolls most often post in a manner which avoids the moderators software programming. If (as is the case at the Post) reports automatically result in deletions, trolls will and do use that mechanism with bad intentions.
Further, because the moderation is so distant/disconnected from the community, challenges to deletions or banning cannot be effectively presented and disagreements with moderation policies go nowhere.
There's no question that moderation is a very tough problem. But I am not a free-speech absolutist and I would be much quicker to get rid of trolls than this site is. But it's not my site.