It is all very well to change the focus of the blog over time. What you all seem to be assuming is that the quality remains unchanged when you do that.

If your blog attracts a big audience, it’s bound to attract some people who complain when you post about something they don’t like. What we’re seeing now is bloggers getting upset at this newly discovered law of nature.

What I really can’t stand is when it gets dark at night.

Why didn’t they leave when I posted the Bugs Bunny cartoon entry? Or the *Playboy* bunny entry?

Anyway, my problem is that some people are complaining about what I write as if they are paying for it. I expect people to disagree with me on many topics, and I certainly would expect some to be unhappy if I posted nothing but political rants day in and day out. But the majority of my posts are on astronomy and skepticism, and that’s what Bad Astronomy is all about.

I’m going to have to stop reading your blog.

CH has a good overview: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000910.html#comments

It’s a submeme of the “blogging” is “destroying all that is good and pure and noble in human civilization” usually alternating with the “wikipedia is destroying eduction” meme.

Beyond the memes is an unspoken wariness about the increasingly subtle distinctions between an “echo chamber” blog and a splog — the more sophisticated splogs are eerily similar to low end commodity blogs.

I’ve nothing else to add to the good comments above, save perhaps that my own very low readership blogs are really written for these audiences in this order:

1. Myself. It’s how I learn and think.
2. The GoogleMind: building inferential links for search and retrieval.
3. People who find my posts searching on a topic (esp. tech.kateva.org).
4. My tiny audience.

However, I also don’t see any reason why readers can’t let bloggers know how they feel about their content selection. If bloggers have a strong “I’m going to blog about what I want to blog about, and I’m not interested in anybody else’s opinion” policy, they can let their commenters know about this and take appropriate action (from comment deletion to banning, depending on the level of the offense). But barring such a claim, again, why shouldn’t readers comment on the choice of topics, just as they do anything else?

My own view is that there are several different issues that “content-complainers” are concerned with. One that hasn’t really been mentioned is focus-drift, where a blog changes its focus over time to become in many ways a different blog. Readers who come to a blog, and stay because they like its mix of topics, may start to get annoyed when the blog changes that mix over time. PZ’s blog, in particular, has seen some of that over the years. He’s always blogged quite a bit on politics and atheism, of course, in addition to science, but in my possibly mistaken perception, this ratio has changed over time (a smaller fraction of science posts) as has the overall tone of his religion (or should I say, anti-religion?) comments. If former readers are being pushed away by a change in tone, why shouldn’t they let him know?

(By the way, by my perception, Sean’s “mix” hasn’t really changed that much, though now that he’s on a group blog it can be a little harder to tell…)