Quite possible. Though, playing devil's advocate, I wonder if requiring propriety still manages to filter out the majority of bad actors. I certainly see a de

Quite possible. Though, playing devil's advocate, I wonder if requiring propriety still manages to filter out the majority of bad actors. I certainly see a decent number of commenters who are clearly rude and not making an effort to cover it, whose comments wouldn't pass muster even if they weren't rude, and getting modded away. (There's also some amount of rudeness that looks reasonable to the political tribe being rude, which generally remains in place; it's hard to establish objective-seeming norms around this so I'll set that aside.) Lastly, I can think of only one recognizable commenter who I'm pretty sure was acting like a deliberate troll on a few occasions: starting out with what I'm pretty sure he knew was a straw man argument, and then using his rhetorical skill to just mess with the people arguing back, rather than making a coherent point.