WE don't live in an ideal world and AMP is my only option of getting de-bloated webpages. I would love if managers and directors would do this themselves and AMP wouldn't be needed, but that's just not the case.
I have to choose between downloading some text and images to read an article or load 5MB JavaScript SinglePageApp with tracking, ads, auto playing video's...
I know in an ideal world AMP would be useless, but until we reach that world I'm going to prefer AMP links over normal ones.
AMP is about getting into the carousel search results, and if AMP wasn't the only way to do that, we wouldn't feel forced to use it.
To just download text and images I use www.outline.com, but there are lots of ways to accomplish this.
Of course, google could have just favored really small/fast site that worked well on mobile... but this way they get the extra lock in.
It isn't, though. Plenty of sites out there are de-bloated, and things like Reader Mode in browsers makes the rest work just fine.
But, we don't live in that world I'm afraid. And for many news websites I don't want to even begin downloading the auto-playing video on their page. So AMP is for many the easiest choice.
Desktop mode disables AMP on Chrome Android for me. I haven't tested with iOS though.
How about de-bloating your webpages instead?
Seriously, people, come on — just put less cruft in your web pages. Don't load 500 trackers. Say no when the marketing guys come over and tell you to add 10 more. Tell your bosses that marketing is incompetent. Push back and tell people that adding cruft is bad.
Please don't bother telling me how it "can't be done". It can, but you might not want to.
I'm actually quite happy about the way this AMP thing is unrolling: the bloated crappy sites will walk into the jaws of AMP and get badly owned by Google eventually, being completely dependent on them.
For context so people don't get the wrong idea... I just want to point out that the gp you responded to (apexalpha) wrote "my option" and _he_ (as a web surfer) is not the manager in charge of those other programmers adding in the cruft. In his next sentence he wrote:
>I would love if managers and directors would do this themselves and AMP wouldn't be needed, but that's just not the case.
It's politically untenable. Marketing brings in the $$$ and you don't.
So when you can point to the carousel and say "You can either have that or the trackers" you actually have some leverage to push back on marketing.
It would be nice to just disable JS on mobile though.
Meanwhile, the easiest way to speed up pages is to stop selling ads and splitting up content over multiple clicks.
E.g. at a company we had to add "useless" content on our shop pages, otherwise google ranked the pages lower due to having not enough content.
If any feature/change introduces a regression, they will not ship it. (That kinda indicates that people outside of hn actually like amp)
Keep in mind that: amp team != search team.
Doubt. Especially "time spent on website" primarily indicates that the user didn't quickly find what they were looking for.
You'd be correct in assuming that it's a good indicator if it wasn't gamed. Since people believe that it's a ranking factor, they'll do whatever they can to increase it. Shitty SEO texts that go on and on without actually saying anything, breaking the back button, adding exit intent popovers, you name it, it's out there. All heavily increasing time on site. Are the users happy? Do you prefer a 5 sentence page that just plainly answers your question about some topic, or do you want a twenty paragraph novel that maybe, possibly somewhere includes the answer, but you need to completely read this opus magnum first?
Is that why answers are always buried in long articles or walls of text?
Seems a horrible metric.
You can easily make pages lighter without AMP, and we shouldn't so easily swallow the reasons given by Google for its introduction.
(AMP isn't even that light - Google preloads pages in its AMP carousel, using bandwidth whether you tap to view them or not)
Aren't those 2 sentences contradictory?
But as someone who's just an end user, and not working on frontend development who likes AMP, I don't bother commenting when the opinion is extremely skewed to one side.
I love AMP. The website loads faster, feels a lot snappier, and is overall positive experience for me. That's what I care about. I don't care how it got to that point, I want usable and fast loading website - and AMP gives me that.
Can this be speed and mobile friendliness be implemented without AMP? Yes. Is it implemented without AMP? Very rarely.
Of course there's the argument with google trying to get a tighter grip on web and while that is not a good thing the truth is that I, and huge majority of average consumers, just don't care if it means better results for me.
>Of course there's the argument with google trying to get a tighter grip on web and while that is not a good thing the truth is that I, and huge majority of average consumers, just don't care if it means better results for me.
What you are describing is the very common mix of "tragedy of the commons" + "pure utilitarianism". The future would be vastly better if everyone made a small sacrifice now, but each individual action counts for so little that you make the selfish but rational choice of letting others do the small sacrifice.
Maybe your page loads faster now, but this is happening by risking the destruction of the very environment that makes such pages worth reading (independent journalism, freedom from corporate control, etc.). In the long run, it means worse results for you, but your individual sacrifice is unlikely to have any effect. You feel selfish, so you rationalize a story where you are just the "common person" doing what makes sense.
The fact that we have a civilization is proof that there are ways out of this deadlock. For a long time, the answer was religion. We need something for the XXI century to play that role, i.e. making people think not only as individuals but also members of an entire species, ecosystem, etc.
Meanwhile, what you are saying amounts to: "fuck you, I got mine".
>just don't care if it means better results for me.
That's part of the issue though, isn't it? Privacy advocates on here and elsewhere point out frequently that part of the problem is that people don't care enough. There's a similar dynamic in this case.
Google's, Bing's, Baidu's, etc.'s users by and large also love AMP or else they wouldn't spend the money on the infrastructure.
I present to you AMP tech lead: https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=cramforce
I think AMP provides the tools for a good UX but many sites don't provide it because they want the user to go to their site, because they mistakenly don't think they can get enough ad revenue or CTAs to get the user to sign up for mailing lists or add a product to a shopping cart on the AMP page. These are supported. So they only show an excerpt of the article on the AMP page and you have to go to the site in order to get it.
I’ve been using DuckDuckGo for over a year now and it’s just painful.
And their image search is far inferior.
AMP isn't limited to Google cache. Websites and CDNs (like Bing and Cloudflare) can roll their own AMP and cache it themselves, while still getting the icon in search results.
Example: https://amp.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/6yj6iw/what_did_...
1: https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/blob/master/spec/amp-c...
We need more pushback against Google doing stuff like this, even when at first glance what they push for seems "positive."
No obstruction of the contents, branding or attribution of the original AMP document.
In that specific case, isn’t Barb correct, no chills needed?
Of course Google can't host illegal content on their service, right? And won't host content that goes against a future AMP user agreement...
From there they can tighten the screws against competitors, or future attempts at privacy, or basically anything they get away with.
Also, I think what AMP was pitted against--Facebook instant articles--no longer exists, or at least doesn't particularly matter (now that FB is several pivots beyond the whole 'newsfeed is full of articles' stage).
(Disclosure: I work at Google, not on AMP, and I'm only speaking for myself)
I'm not sure where you're getting "selflessness". The faster pages load from search the better people's experience of using search is. This directly benefits both Google and people who use search.
Everything else is the result of that original decision. And the continuous apologetics for the myriad bad and malignant decisions are the direct result of that decision.
Yes, only a tiny minority of technical users will know what amp pages are and switch search engines to avoid them. But, a larger group will likely find the amp pages annoying, even if they can't precisely articulate why. This weakens google's hold on the market.
If the amp page displays what you expect, it works well. It it makes you click through, it doesn't.
Of course, users may or may not realize amp/google are the reason a site is broke.
Dunno how many people have issues like this though. Reddit was the main one for me, plus a few random sites having issues.
(assuming Google is not stupid so Hanlon's razor may not apply)
https://twitter.com/johnath/status/1116871240432660480
Downthread:
""" And every time, they’d say, “oops. That was accidental. We’ll fix it in the next push in 2 weeks.” """
At best they wanted to test user reaction, or at worst, they were hoping it wouldn't be discovered (see Wi-Fi scanning, Safari cookies block bypass, tracking Android users' location at all time, even when "disabled", etc).
Don't attribute to stupidity what can easily be explained by profit incentives (did I just invent a new saying/law?!).
But now that Google has removed the link to visit the site, it is clear they don’t want you to visit the actual news site but do everything through Google.
This means that only the Google ad network will be allowed, so they stand to benefit from this arrangement, and news sites can have no hope of receiving any traffic.
But they did it to themselves. i.reddit.com is fast as hell.
m.reddit.com loads 100x the Javascript.
Thus Amp fixes a probme they created bc reasons.
Most of the JS is part of the different ad tech networks anyway. Hell, maybe that's their drive? Making it harder to have competiting ad tech?
I though links was a pretty important part of HTML, and so people took care to ensure they work?
However, in my experience the header is totally different. There is an (i) icon in the upper left corner that shows the link when tapped, and the upper right corner shows the share icon and tapping it opens the share dialog. Note this changed for me recently (I used to get the link icon like the poster).
So Google is clearly testing different behavior, which probably led to the bug. In any case, I'd note the version I got that I think the (i) is much less clear than the link icon, and I'm sure the end result is people clicking through to the source site less often. Fuck Google and their aggressive attempts to hijack the web even more than they already have.
Just use another search engine like DuckDuckGo. It is sufficient for over 90% of my searches and I haven’t seen an amp page in ages.
AMP for SEO is another discussion, in that case it is kind of forced on you if you want to rank high on the Googlenet.
Even though I don’t use Google for search, my friends do and they’ll gladly share AMP pages with me.
I actually love AMP on mobile. Every site I've used(1) that has an AMP version loads faster and works better even with some ads than the normal version on Firefox mobile with uBlock Origin. Given that it's possible for people to host their own AMP cache (like Cloudflare does), I really don't see the problem with AMP itself.
(1) Other then Reddit, but considering how much of a dumpster fire their normal mobile site is I honestly think that it's broken on purpose to try and make people use the app.
The easiest way to to get rid of all AMP pages in Google search results is to disable javascript on www.google.com/*.
It's the circle on the bottom right in the first frame of the video.
And the follow up thought: "move fast and break things" suggests that we should think twice before relying on these companies for anything close to critical infrastructure.
The broken feature is the exact feature that lets you not use it....
