Ameliorated, maybe. Here's an interesting post decrying the death of trackback (and comments, etc):

Originally there was no weblog spam and yet conversation and discussion still existed. If an individual posted something and another individual wanted to respond to it, they simply wrote a post on their own site linking to the original. This environment was entirely free of spam. It was completely clean. I can't help thinking that maybe we need to start thinking in terms of approaches like that - where there is no automated functionality that could be robotically exploited. Or perhaps we should be looking in other directions - how can we abstract out the kind of social networks that lie behind Flickr to structures that we could overlay across the internet as a whole. A question I think we should be asking is how could we build services that let you decide precisely which groups of people should be able to see, link to, 'trackback' or comment on the work you do in a decentralised, disaggregated way?

That approach has problems too. The way you figure out that someone has linked to you is via referers. If you spend 5 seconds looking at that list, you'll see that it's been spam bombed, just like everything else - whether you make the list public or not (referer spamming is so cheap a trick that the perps don't bother checking their work; what's the point?).

I make my referers public, and I have to add keywords to my blacklist daily. I have to spend more time dealing with referer spam than I do with comment/trackback spam - Silt handles that for me pretty well at this point.

The net-net of this is, I don't think there's a final answer to this. Just ongoing drudgery.