And with dead I mean “no longer engaging readers.”
I would say yes. I didn’t run the numbers and my observation is purely based on anecdotal evidence (assuming such thing exists), but the majority of interactions with readers happens now on social media.
Blogs are just a way to dump lengthy content and then link to it from Facebook/Twitter/Google+.
I would even dare suggesting that turning off comments in blogs would make little difference.
Feed readers/aggregators are flourishing lately, probably because of the death of Google Reader, but they do not favor direct comments to blogs, instead they promote social sharing of the content. Ergo, blogs are just empty shells. The real action happens elsewhere, which is just fine.
Or is it?