Thanks for this, I'm passing it on to the developer. We've been assuming email verification is important to combat bots/trolls. I'll bring up the observation it isn't widely used. It often seems to be something to do with problems we've been having.
In fairness, I can see why the accusation of being spammy is justified. But to address the issue of scamminess - Although we don't mention the site address yet, here's it being talked about by the Mod Team on r/futurology
https://www.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/15pbknv/do_you_have_some_time_to_take_a_look_at/
You've reminded me there's an error there (confusion with nomenclature) that I'll go & fix.
Thank you. This is very helpful. Someone else questioned why we are even using email verification as they said few other instances are using it.
We'd assumed it was important from the perspective of bots, trolling, spam, etc But it seems to be at the root of the problems we've been having.