Write for yourself, not the audience.
Who is the audience - they're the people likely to read your writing. The audience is a useful tool. A means, not an end. Having your writing read and scrutinized gives you healthy skepticism towards your ideas. A counterbalance to ego. That's why it's so important to write to an audience, not write for them.
Don't aim to do the audience a "service" by writing. The audience can be wrong! For a variety of reasons groups of people are not always so smart compared to individuals. The dance between how individuals can be right/wrong and how groups can be right/wrong is what makes writing so thrilling. Truth lies in some tension between the two, not in one or the other. Write to be understood by the audience, but not liked by them.
I'm not just talking about socially or politically controversial topics. Mundane prose about boring cut & dry topics, can be frought with this tension between the individual's thought and accepted groupthink. Writing about what something is leads to the risk that the group doesn't share the same definition as you do. Or possibly the group is wrong, and has a set of cargo cult practices that don't amount to much.
For example, the most boring Wikipedia pages have talk pages where (perhaps subtle) details of the author's understanding of the topic are challenged. If you're in technology, the newbie's innocent "stupid question" can often point to the big elephant in the room none of the senior practitioners want to think about.
I'm not saying that you, the writer, exist to inform the audience of the error of their ways. To me, that's not the point of writing. Arguments, especially written ones, almost never work to convince anyone of anything. At least this was the conclusion I came to after a good year of engaging people who disagreed with me over twitter.
Even if it did work, many topics you write about, changing the audience isn't a useful goal. The audience is the means. Like a competitor in sports, they sharpen your abilities. Unless you're a sociopath, you'll feel that healthy smidgen of embarassment at being challenged by real or perceieved criticism. You'll second guess yourself. That's the point. You're writing to test your ideas, to juggle your conviction against the chance you might be wrong.
Don't write to convince people, instead write because you're hunting for the truth. The 'truth' lies somewhere between your ideas, and the group's accepted norms. The truth, is of course, elusive. You can't claim access to absolute truth. Only degrees of refinement over years of expertise, debate, and engagement in our field of practice.
As you write more, this experience of being critiqued happens not just after you publish, but as you actively write. You hear all those voices criticizing your ideas as you refine what you've written. The debate plays out in your mind as you craft prose, letting you arrive at perhaps something closer to the truth before publishing. Yet still, when you publish, you hear unanticipated points of view challenging and pushing you in new ways.
Eventually, it becomes too easy to anticipate your audience's useful critiques. You may seek to grow your audience, to push into new groups, hear different points of views. Learn from them all the new and unique ways you're wrong.
Here's where you can encounter a huge risk: believing your own hype. 'Growing an audience' can mean being obsessed with vanity metrics: page views, inbound links, followers, and the like. You must always remember, you're doing this to be made humble NOT to chase fame, glory, and riches. To dare to ask hard questions, then to be made low. Not to be placed upon a pedestal. You're not writing to please an audience, or to satisfy your ego. You're writing to test ideas against the audience and arrive closer to your own understanding of the truth. In short write to be wrong not right!
In these situations, some of the audience has indeed been cow-towed. They've decided, perhaps, we have "expertise". We can be "trusted" in this field. This is a sign to push and dig deeper, to stretch even farther outside our comfort zone in your field. Take on bigger sacred cows. To make the audience a little uncomfortable having accepted our so-called "expertise."
It's also a chance to find, amplify and support your critics. Like great competitors, the people in your audience are key to your ability to get closer and closer to a truth. Key to remaining humble, they need support and a platform to challenge & disagree with you.
Whatever you do, don't believe your hype. It's the end of the line, a road to stagnation. Always stay thirsty my friends, and keep writing. The best path to the truth is regularly being wrong!