Losing My Religion: When Do You Give Up on a Blog?

It's the weekend, and news tends to be slower. This is usually the only chance I get during the week to sift through my feeds, catch up with everything I missed during the week, and hopefully get the number of unread feeds under 100. This week, however, I've been trying to weed out feeds I'm no longer reading to make way for all the new ones I've added, and I've deleted a few that might shock you.

A short while ago, Allen Stern asked a question on Twitter that's stuck with me: "How many of you have actually deleted a feed from your feed reader based on poor content or a blogger you lost trust in?" (Sorry I can't link to it, but Twitter is horked. Again.) In the year and a half since I switched from browsing tech news to the firehose required to write it yourself, I've definitely lost trust in a lot of the blogs that I once hit first thing in the morning and throughout the day.

All blogs evolve over time, simply because they are written by people. Especially with blogs like Profy, where authors come and go, the voices will change, and even the voices who stay will change as they learn and grow. At the same time as I posted my thoughts on The Social Contract, we were getting an email from one reader who expressed displeasure with the current evolution of the blog. As I said in that article, however, there really isn't a contract. Everything changes, and if a blog or someone you are following on Twitter is no longer of interest, you simply delete it.

There was one blog whose feed was hovering in limbo for me. Most days, the updates were either a fast "mark all as read" for the whole blog, or I'd run through a quick skim just to see if there was anything of interest. It's been very rare the past few months that I've even bothered to click through to an article, and I can't remember the last time I commented there. Today, I finally deleted the blog from my feeds, and it was a relief knowing I won't see those articles adding to my growing total in my reader of unread items.

In this volatile world of blogging, we live and die by the pageview. Bloggers obsessively check stats to see what articles get the most hits, and how many unique visitors arrive over a month. And I do understand that when a blog is a full-time job and dependent on the revenue stream from ads to survive, those stats are vital. But on every blog, there comes a time when you make a decision: do you try to get the mass appeal that results in more eyeballs or do you focus on the in-depth analysis that may not see the same explosion in stats, but gets you more respect.

The eyeballs are tempting, and it's easy to see when reading anything on the Gawker sites how the authors struggle to find those items that will draw in visitors. Their payment is dependent on hits. I read their blogs mainly for entertainment, knowing that the occasional news is in there somewhere. But when you see a blog you respected starting to head in that direction, with rumors that articles are cribbed from lesser-known bloggers while others are focused on link bait instead of the more in-depth coverage you once loved, you are left with a choice. You can keep reading, or you can move on.

I don't feel in any way that blogs like that had a contract with me; after all, I'm only one reader. But it doesn't make me any less disappointed when I click that delete option.