I've turned off both G+ commenting and comments in general, here on the blog. Why? The answers are simple. I've been decoupling from G+ over the last few months (I have stopped actively posting over there), and pretty much the only sharing that I do to the site is automated. G+ had a great run, and I met some cool people because of it, but the handwriting is on the wall, and I would rather turn off the G+ functionality myself than find out (too late) that it was going away.
Turning off commenting has more to do with how I interact with social media these days. There are basically a couple of ways that I share content online these days: short term sharing and long term sharing.
Short term sharing are things like sales occurring on the OneBookShelf site, or places like the Humble Bundle or the Bundle of Holding. These things are ephemeral, and there's really no need to create a record of them that we can look back at in a year, or five. Things like that will go to my Twitter and Facebook accounts.
Things that I want to keep around for long periods of time, like reviews and commentary, come here to the blog. These are things that I want people to be able to reference years after I have posted them.
For some, blogs have developed into forum-like communities, and that is cool, but for me a blog is simply a way to share content or ideas in a more-or-less permanent manner. Social media was designed for commenting and conversation, so I would rather continue to have conversations in those places (see the above links). Back in 2002-2003, when I started seriously blogging, commenting wasn't even a thing yet. The idea of blogs was to share links to the places around the 'Net that you thought were cool and interesting. They were a bookmarks folder that you shared with the world. Because of that, I've never really associated blogs with places where people meet and talk about things, and with the rise of social media, this angle is even less relevant to me.
There are as many approaches to blogging and social media as there are people using them. These approaches are mine and if you use your blog and social media differently, that is awesome.
In a few months, I'll have been posting to this blog for 14 years, and this time next year it will have been 15 years. It is weird to think that I have been using this blog for as long as I have, but I think that allowing my approach to the blog, and to blogging in general, is what has allowed this blog to live for as long as it has.
I hope to see you on Twitter or Facebook. Let's chat!