Meeting your Blog Readers' Expectations

Recently, a prominent use.perl.org blogger (and a Perl contributor) started posting many political posts to his blog, which I found annoying and disturbing. After commenting to him about it, it started a conversation and I ended up writing a comment about the importance of meeting your blog reader's expectations. I'd like to copy it here:

You say you only want to have one blog where you'll post about everything, including political posts. In that case, let me tell you a story from my own experience.

I used to have only one blog - first at Advogato and then at LiveJournal. I posted everything I wanted there whether technical or non-technical. At one point I received some important input in which that particular reader said that they were not interested in my technical posts (like vim tips, Linux bugs, etc.), and would rather have them separated. I commented (later in the link) that I agreed, and so started a separate blog for technical matters. I also mention (in the previous link) the fact that a blog I used to read and enjoy deteriorated after its owner became a mother, and started posting exclusively about her motherhood experiences. As a result, I unsubscribed from that blog's feed.

This separation of my blogs proved fruitful afterwards, because several planets have opted to syndicate only the technical blogs (or in the case of Perlsphere, only the Perl subset of them).

Moreover, when I discussed blogging with a certain famous blogger, he said that he reached the conclusion that specialisation of blogs was the key to success, and that people will only subscribe to blogs that concentrate on topics that interest them.

My point is that in blogging, you need to meet your readers' expectations. I am subscribed to the feed of all of use.perl.org's blog entries, because I'm interested in reading what Perl enthusiasts say. I don't mind the personal posts (or otherwise posts that are tangential to Perl) but I find political posts disturbing and annoying and would rather not read them.

So far your blog has received no special treatment as I read it along with all the rest of the posts. But if you don't guarantee that you're not going to post political posts here anymore, I will filter it out, and stop reading everything you have to say, including the Perl-related, and other non-political posts. So you'll lose me as a reader and possibly some other people who will opt not to read your blog.

It's your blog and you can post what you want to it, but I hope you understand that your subscribers may opt out of it, if they feel your blog no longer meets their expectations.

I received quite a lot of heat in that discussion, in what seemed to me like an innocent intention on my part to warn someone of an unpleasant trend in their blog, before I unsubscribe. Eventually, he didn't take my advice, and as a result, I wrote a script to filter posts from use.perl.org based on the author and am now filtering out his posts from the feed I'm reading.

I unsubscribed from some blogs that started not to meet my expectations before, but this was the first time I tried to warn the blog owner about a bad trend.

I should note that once, before blogs became popular, I was subscribed to a mailing list, where I've written many posts. At one point, I had written many posts of a similar theme, only to have learned later from someone else, that many people disliked them, and as a result decided to filter out all of my posts to the list, while receiving the posts of anyone else (using mail filters). I felt offended by this fact, and wished they would have told me (or the list in general) how they felt.

Unsubscribing from a blog is probably less of an issue due to the technological nature of web feeds, but I still think that if a blog that you used to like has deteriorated in some respect, you should let the blog owner know, and I hope to continue in doing this.