Dallas Mavericks owner and Blog Maverick blogger Mark Cuban has decided to disable the commenting system, practically shutting down the readers ability to comment directly on the blog. He closes a post about being called names by saying, “For the record, Im not turning on comments, they have devolved to the point where they add no value.”

This post happened just two days after the team lost in the NBA finals to the Miami Heat. People are wondering if he would turned of comments if the team won. May be that was just an emotional decision, because he has been open to feedback throughout his entire career.

Steve Rubel of Micro Persuasion is among others who thinks it’s mostly a technology problem. He think that the major culprit is because the tools for moderating and mining comment data are pitiful.

First, let’s take a look briefly at comment spamming.

There are some solutions available, but none of them allows bloggers to keep their hands off from the problem. For popular blogs who typically receive hundreds of comments a day, this has become an issue.

Akismet, the most popular commercial solution to fight comment spam, reports from their site that 93 percent of comments are spam. On my blogs, I believe more than those are spam.

The question is: does the work involved in moderating comments takes so much resource that it is not worth the effort, even compared to the value of conversation?

Is this what Rubel talking about? Or does he refer to a set of tools that can automatically detect trolls, which haven’t existed yet?

To be true, I don’t think comment spamming is an issue why Cuban turned off comments. He said it was lack of substance in the comment, even those which are not spam. Trolls pollute the conversation.

I understand that probably the kind of comments Blog Maveriks received are not those he expected. But it is also a fact that only a handful of very popular blogs exist in blogosphere. This by itself doesn’t devalue the commenting system available on a blog.

Via: Micro Persuasion.
Link: Mark Cuban’s post.