I recently visited the Gun Blog Blacklist site. One of its key features is lists of gun and prepping blog sites. The “Prepper Blogs”, down in their lower-right column. I was taken aback when I found that the majority of those linked sites are now either offline, or they haven’t had any posts in more than two years. And of the few that are still active, many of those have switched to all un-dated posts, presumably to obfuscate a bit on how often they post. (Which in fact is infrequently.)
Next, I tried visiting the Top Prepper Websites ranking site, but found that it had been shut down. Then I visited a couple of other aggregation sites and a click the links in several blogrolls, and had mostly similar — quite depressing — results.
The Twilight of the Blogs
I, of course, realize that the peak of the blogosphere was back around 2010. In the contemporary World Wide Web, there is more interest in video blogs. Ironically, in these days of “short attention spans”, many folks under age 40 would rather watch a 30-minute video than spend 5 to 10 minutes reading an article. Go figure. But even the shift to other content is not enough to explain the demise of so many legitimate prepping blogs in the past few years. They are simply gone.
My hunt for genuine human-written Old School blogs continued. I clicked through umpteen blogrolls, all with similar results. Most of the prepper/survivalist/homesteading blogs that I remembered were absent. And of the few that were still there, most were there in name only. They had been swallowed up by the now ubiquitous AI Behemoth.
The Good News is that there are several Old-School preparedness and homesteading blogs that are still actively posting, with frequent, fresh human-written content with visible and legitimate posting dates. Here are some examples:
The Bad News is that I found a very long list of sites that have radically changed, or that have been neglected, or that have disappeared. These fall into several categories:
- URLs that return “404 – Not Found”
- Defunct URLs that show up as: “This domain is available for sale.”
- Abandoned and co-opted URLs — with many taken over with URL auto-redirects, often to p*rn sites.
- Moribund blogs, with no new posts for more than two years.
- Switched to podcasting or videoblogging. (But that can sometimes be a good thing. For example, Todd Sepulveda now has a very useful podcast: Ready Your Future.)
- Switched to all product sales or marketing.
- Many blogs that had been posted weekly or semi-weekly are now posted monthly, or even less often.
- Switched to other topics or specialties. I noticed that a few have switched to Product Reviews Only or Book Reviews Only. I suppose that this approach maximizes their income from the Amazon Associate program.
- And, all too often, “Gone Zombie” — that is, taken over by AI-generated schlock content. Most of these bloggers let their URL registrations lapse and then the domain names were snatched up by marketeers who just want clicks and orders. At these zombie sites, the supposedly “staff-written” articles are quite obviously AI-written, and often contain bad or even dangerous prepping advice.
These trends are quite disheartening. I didn’t compile any exact statistics. But, in general, I can conservatively estimate that the prepping blogosphere is now about 80% fake AI-generated Schumer.
Links and topical search engine queries now mostly lead to zombie pseudo-blog sites. If you wander into a survivalist/prepper/homesteading blog that looks suspect, just take a minute to run an AI checker on it. Unfortunately, you will find that the vast majority of the prepping blogs and websites that you find are unreliable AI-generated junk.
Fear Not, Folks!
I’ve resolved to continue posting SurvivalBlog daily, just as I always have. We’ve only missed a few days of posting in 20 years. Rest assured that we do not allow any AI-generated articles. And I promise that when I do retire from blogging — most likely in about 10 or 15 years — I fully intend to leave the blog in the hands of a trusted relative or a close friend who will keep SurvivalBlog useful and vital. I will insist that they continue to keep SurvivalBlog all either staff-written or reader-written. – JWR
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