It's not just the Atlantic - it's every single site. The age of comments is just about finished, I expect more and more sites to remove them (unless the ad views are so high that it makes up for it).

My theory is that the only (or the majority) people who have the time to post are those too stupid to have anything else better to do. And once the majority is stupid it becomes too toxic for anyone else to bother.

Good forums (like this one) require very careful curating.