Why we’re changing — and we hope you’ll come with us

Last Updated on June 9, 2025 by Aaron von Frank

We started this blog (named in honor of Susan the Tyrant) in 2010 with zero expectations. We simply wanted to share some of the things we were learning from developing our gardens and foraging for native plants and fungi in our bioregion. Then, in 2013, we got our first ducks and started writing about our experiences with duck keeping. In each of these activities, our actions were informed by in-depth learning, aka reading books, learning from real-world experts, gaining hands-on experience, testing and improving.  

In those early years, we never considered the possibility that this website could be an actual business that made money. In fact, we didn’t create a single new article in 2014 since we were tied up with other projects. Then, in 2015, Susan happened to check our Google site traffic and said, “wow, there are a lot of people coming to our website.” Our complete lack of planning and effort had paid off – ha! 

“A lot of people” back then was about 10,000 visitors per month. It was then that we decided we should start taking this website more seriously. We started creating lots more articles and resources around gardening, foraging, duck keeping, and recipes. Within a year, we had over 30,000 visitors each month and were accepted to the MediaVine ad network, a great company that helps small mom & pop web publishers like us make money from their websites via ad revenue. 

We kept going. We learned as much as we could about what Google’s search algorithms wanted in order to have our articles rank as high as possible in search results. Before publishing, each article was carefully crafted to conform to Google’s guidelines for search engine optimization, since our articles’ ranking in Google’s search engine results pages (SERPs) was what ultimately drove much of our site’s traffic and advertising revenue. However, we only ever wrote about topics in which we had deep hands-on experience and expertise. Where we lacked personal expertise or experience on a topic, we reached out to scientists, medical professionals, and others who could help inform us and our audience — or we cited their research.  

Soon we crossed 1 million page views per year. Eventually we got to about 2 million, which happened at the perfect time… We had a newborn at home, the pandemic had just started, and we were able to take many months off to focus on family, while this website happily hummed away generating “passive income.”          

Taking time off came at a financial cost though. Other websites began stealing our content and ranking higher than us in Google for the same keywords / topics. At the same time, advanced search engine optimization (SEO) tools became mainstream, so countless new websites began fiercely competing (using the same SEO formulas) for the same keywords. You could click on ten different links for the same search query and all the sites at the top of the search results had virtually the same content, formatted slightly differently to try to edge out the competition in search results.

Many of these sites were (and still are) well-funded “content mills,” paying young contract writers $50/article to write as many articles per week as possible from a list of assignments. It didn’t matter that the authors had zero real-world experience about an assigned topic. All they had to do was take the information from other websites and reformat it. However, since the content mill websites regularly produced loads of new content and their content was hyper-optimized to be search engine-friendly, search engines like Google loved them. Thus, the content mill articles rose to the top of search results, despite containing stolen content, numerous mistakes, inaccuracies, and/or lack of nuance. 

It gets better! Within the past year or so, you’ve probably seen your search queries answered by generative AI (artificial intelligence). These are highly sophisticated algorithms hosted on supercomputers that generate answers to any question imaginable. Does a synthetic brain have actual experience or expertise? No. Rather, it mines (aka steals from) websites like ours and uses our actual experience and expertise when synthesizing answers to your questions. This outcome is presumably “better for the user,” because you don’t have to suffer through the effort of clicking a link to take a deeper dive to learn more about the answer you’re seeking. Problem is: the primary sources that the robot brains are stealing from are often themselves using stolen or inaccurate human-generated content. It’s kind of like a game of telephone between man and machine. 

It gets even better! Today, Chat GPT and similar AI tools may well upend the old search engine business models. Who needs to Google something when you can just ask ChatGPT? Yes, the AI might lie, hallucinate, or make mistakes, but so do humans. Yes, the AI’s creators have to “train” its synthetic brain on volumes of stolen books/libraries and web content, but it’s still an undeniably remarkable tool that many technologists excitedly tell us will make most human functions and jobs obsolete within 3-10 years. And hopefully our AI friends won’t ultimately decide to kill us like ants after the singularity. Tradeoffs.  

What does this mean for us? 

The current digital landscape means many web publishers like us are increasingly becoming financially disincentivized to create original content. Many web publishers we’re connected to have seen their website traffic and revenue drop by 75-90% over the past year despite “doing everything right” under the terms of the old rules. Others are “embracing the future” by creating entirely AI-generated websites focused on high potential topics where they have no actual experience or expertise.  

We’re not luddites, but, ultimately, our concern is this: the more each of us outsources our thinking to someone or something else, the stupider, lazier, more incompetent, and less motivated we become. Our college professor friends tell us that kids in their classes are increasingly unable to read books, write original papers, or even form coherent thoughts/arguments. How could you if you’re dopamine-addled brain is getting pummeled by Tik-Tok all day, and ChatGPT will write the paper for you about the book you never read? This isn’t a “damned kids” argument; many of the adults we see aren’t doing much better, they just have the benefit of having a bit of life experience stored at the back of their brains that formed prior to the age of smart phones, social media, and AI. 

What are we going to do? We’re going to keep “humaning” as best as we know how: learning, working, thinking, doing, iterating, loving, sensing, connecting. We’re going to further build the soil in our gardens, develop our food forest, tend our hilarious flock of ducks (and get more rescue ducks in the years ahead), forage, cook, ferment. We’re going to build the bonds within our family and build our extended community (real world and digital). The 400+ articles, videos, and other resources on this website will be here as long as we’re alive (if the T-1000 robots don’t terminate us) any time you want to learn more about something we’ve done that you might also be interested in doing yourself. 

One thing we’re NOT going to do ever again? Create or format a single bit of content with search engines, algorithms, robots, competition, or super computers in mind. Rather, we’re going to create for the purest, most human reason possible: joy. The joy of sharing something good with our community, and the joy of seeing that community grow better as a result. 

Every day of the year we get to eat delicious, healthful foods we produce and/or find in the wild. We get to learn so much about the other life forms and ecosystems around us. We get to laugh at our hilarious flock of goofy ducks. We get to revel in the wonder of this world, which in our mind is far superior to — and more relevant than — any synthetic world that can be generated through screens, goggles, or headsets. In short, each day and year that passes we feel more deeply entrenched in the history and ecology of this amazing planet while gaining a greater appreciation for this one beautiful life we’re fortunate enough to experience inside the most powerful supercomputer in the known universe: the human brain.     

So Tyrant Farms will become our attempt to maintain our humanity (and sanity), while also fighting for a version of humanity that we hope to see made manifest on planet earth. We hope you’ll come along for the journey.