Last night the 11yo broke down the Google Slides middle school Chatroom for me:

1. At first they used a Google doc but the infinite scroll was too chaotic
2. In the slide deck each new slide is one “post”—some all text, some images, some both—
3. They use slides’ comments feature to “reply” to each other’s “posts”
4. This allows participants to easily flip between posts using the slide thumbnail navigation, so they can find the conversations they care about easily
5. He owns the file & if anyone spams it, deletes other people’s posts, or gets nasty, he can revert the file to its previous save state & remove the spammer’s access
6. He did share the file with me on purpose, I think because he was proud & wanted me to see what he’d made

Essentially they’ve created a chatroom with moderation in Google Slides, so they can get around the school’s ban on platforms like Discord. It’s kind of brilliant

1. SEARCH QUALITY DEGRADATION

It •used• to be that if what I was searching for was on the web at all, it was almost always the first or second thing Google showed. Now that link is buried under heaps of unhelpful widgets and doodads and AI-extracted snippets and mile upon mile of content farm garbage results.

Google Search’s main appeal was search quality. That advantage is gone. If I’m going to have to scroll anyway, might as well protect my privacy.