I remember discovering MetaCrawler in the 90s (before Google was even founded) and it quickly became the go-to search engine because its aggregate results were superior to any of the other options at the time. I don’t think its source mix was tunable, but that sounds like appropriate progress for 30 years.

but translation certainly isn’t [done on device]

Google Translate has downloadable language packs and runs on device, including offline in foreign countries without roaming data. Including the live video OCR and replacement.

That’s not to say that what you experienced isn’t creepy, but it’s not necessarily cloud-driven.

That is certainly one of the conclusions in The Man Who Killed Google Search.

But you can no longer be sure you’re getting unsponsored human opinions there. It’s already been ruined by bots and management decisions. Seems totally fair for the original content generators to salt the earth on their way out.

There’s also the possibility of adding to the wonderful irony of making the AI more useful than the original by having content that’s no longer accessible through through the original. It doesn’t get more enshittified than that, even if Prashanth Chandrasekar is too out of touch to ever regret his decision.

It’s true that it’s mostly a symbolic act, but the rebellion matters, especially from old accounts. It’s also a nice way to mark the time after which I never participated in SO again. After my ban expires, I’ll deface my questions again. And again. Until they permaban me.

They seem to only be watching the questions right now. You’re automatically prevented from deleting an accepted answer, but if you answered your own question (maybe because SO was useless for certain niche questions a decade ago so you kept digging and found your own solution), you can unaccept your answer first and then delete it.

I got a 30 day ban for “defacing” a few of my 10+ year old questions after moderators promptly reverted the edits. But they seem to have missed where I unaccepted and deleted my answers, even as they hang out in an undeletable state (showing up red for me and hidden for others).

And comments, which are a key part to properly understanding a lot of almost-correct answers, don’t seem to be afforded revision history or to have deletes noticed by moderators.

So it seems like you can still delete a bunch of your content, just not the questions. Do with that what you will.

I recently showed up here from Reddit and it’s pretty disappointing. I found a few interesting-to-me niche communities, but most of them seem to have a dozen or so posts from 8 months ago and then nothing. That timing coincides with Reddit’s API changes, so I’m left to assume there was a burst of activity driven here at that point but that it fizzled out quickly.

The infrastructure and UX here seem ready, but the network effect is very slow for a long time. Without a lot more real users (and diverse niches), it will be difficult to attract and retain a lot more real users. The initial confusion about federation and technical concepts also needs help to get them started, but the niches are needed for retention.

Tldr, I don’t want to read about technology and Star Trek, I need cast iron and Costco, 3D printing and landscaping, cycling and idiots in cars.