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I decided to disable AMP on my site

alexkras.com

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Re: I decided to disable AMP on my site

#171

Post by acdha »

athenot wrote: post #147

Maybe I don't understand AMP, but what value does it bring over having a very lean CSS and keep JS to the strict minimum? Last time I checked, a plain vanilla HTML page with a bit of embedded CSS (and perhaps a few async JS functions for stats) is lightning fast even on mobile.

The main value is to Google: it keeps people on google.com and using Google Ads.

The only value to the user is that if you work somewhere dysfunctional you may be able to say “AMP doesn't allow that” and have it stick in a way that saying “This will bloat our page load times” will not.

Re: I decided to disable AMP on my site

#172

Post by vorpalhex »

acdha wrote: post #166
vorpalhex wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AMP is opt in. Full stop. You choose to participate in AMP. You can't choose to not be throttled by an ISP, or to bypass censorship.

That's an over-simplification: 1. Users have no control: if you want real URLs or the full experience, you have to work around AMP or stop using Google. 2. It's technically true that publishers can choose whether to use AMP but Google rank is a make-or-break issue for many publishers and that means the decisions is made under the threat of losing out to competitors who use AMP even if your site is already just as fas…

1. Correct, I mean opt-in from the publishers, who seem to be the exclusive people complaining

2. Yes. As a user who really enjoys amp and really hates that every single text-based news source takes over a minute to load on a 100Mb/s+ connection, I feel not bad at all. Not even the tiniest bit. Publishers entirely brought this upon themselves. Internet speeds are faster than they've ever been, and websites are the slowest they have ever been. This is fundamentally unacceptable.

It would be better for users, and by extension, the web, if publishers stopped building horrendously bloated websites. Since they absolutely positively refuse to, AMP seems the appropriate answer - if there's demand to take away their toys, someone is going to feed into it eventually.

Re: I decided to disable AMP on my site

#173

Post by marcuslager »

fgandiya wrote: post #95
ClassyJacket wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google's approach to design has always seemed to be to wall off a bunch of teams in separate soundproof rooms with no communication with each other, meetings, or contact with the outside world. Also they're only allowed to use iPhones. This is the only way I can imagine we ended up with 437 different messaging apps and counting, and the problem you described.

> Also they're only allowed to use iPhones Why is that? Seems a bit ironic...

Hey fella. U alright? You seeem a bit sarcastic.

Re: I decided to disable AMP on my site

#174

Post by apeace »

> It “traps” users on Google. If user were to click “x” in the screenshot above, they will be taken back to Google search results. A normal redirect would have landed users on actual BBC site, maximizing their chances of staying on that site. Instead, AMP makes it easier for users to return to Google.

As a user, this is what I want. I don't care about the BBC's site, I care about what I searched for. If I want to see their front page, I'll go to bbc.com.

I think this article (and most AMP-bashing articles) are mostly fluff about how Google is "taking over" and "forcing" people down a certain path. When in reality everybody knows this is helping users.

As I've said many times: propose a better solution for users to be able to load article content very quickly.

The real, valid issues I'm seeing mentioned in this article are:

* Links are to google.com, which really screws up sharing.

* Apparently images and scrolling can be wonky, though I have never noticed this myself (and sounds like it could be easily solved[0] if it's true).

So again, if you can solve this problem for users in a free, publisher-opt-in, global way without the links pointing to a third party, please share your solution.

By the way, if you use CloudFlare, you can enable AMP without breaking normal links[1]. It is only the Google search engine that breaks links for AMP, not AMP itself.

I do hope that Google adds an option in your account settings to opt-out of AMP results. That way the detractors can turn it off, and everyone else can be happy that pages load in [0] https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml

[1] https://blog.cloudflare.com/accelerated-mobile/

Re: I decided to disable AMP on my site

#175

Post by acdha »

jsnell wrote: post #142
dayjah wrote: post #72

There's a deep irony in AMP also, purely anecdotally it doesn't seem to help with slow connections. I'm traveling and as such my US carrier restricts me to 2G speeds while roaming somehow, which is resulting in me seeing a lot of butchered pages. As the author mentions: > AMP tries to load an image only when it becomes visible to the user, rendering a white square instead of the image. In my experience I’ve seen it f…

You're saying that AMP doesn't help with slow connections, based on AMP not loading all resources on 2G. But you're missing the data point for non-AMP pages on 2G. Are you sure it's not even worse? It's hard to believe how bloated many modern websites are, before trying to load them over 2G. We're talking megabytes of data and tens of connections to display what should be a 20kB of text.

AMP puts 100KB of JavaScript in the initial render path, and a bunch of CSS. That doesn't mean that other sites cannot be worse but it means that there's no way to make an AMP page which doesn't require transferring at least that much data.

I notice this fairly regularly in marginal network coverage (subway tunnels/platforms) where AMP pages load no faster than any well-optimized site unless the stars are aligned and you actually get a cache hit.

Re: I decided to disable AMP on my site

#176

Post by LunaSea »

Gigablah wrote: post #91
int_19h wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because such centralization gives Google immense power. The sheer potential censorship implications alone are very concerning, for example.

So how about other CDNs like Cloudflare?

Well you don't have the choice with AMP. In an open and neutral Internet, choosing your CDN would be up to you and optional and you could switch to anyone you'd like if concerns arise.

Re: I decided to disable AMP on my site

#177

Post by noxToken »

corobo wrote: post #164
noxToken wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a user, I don't mind AMP. The Web is a mostly hostile place for end users. Malicious ads, 5MB+ pages just so you can read a 1 minute text article, auto-playing videos with volume set to 100%, obtrusive ads - AMP aims to fix this crud and give users a better browsing experience. Ideologically, I'm opposed for all the reasons listed in TFA. People work to create something, yet the content and website are being ferri…

You make good points on the size of pages and load speed. How about instead of AMP we have something that's hosted on the server instead? Something like RSS but with built in single-article views and a standard (or at least lightweight) framework? On the other hand you say AMP aims to fix this - anyone doing that for the ad views etc would simply not enable AMP on their site. AMP does not fix this.

I meant that AMP aims to make a holistically better browsing experience. We should not need anything special to make the web better, but until we can get some sort of unified contribution model, making money for producing web content tends to be a race to the bottom. There are in-house subscription models and sites like Patreon, but those seem to be only moderately successful to pointless.

I just want a Web where people write a lean website that delivers your content with low overhead. Then do your best to use ad networks that aren't trying to set your users' computer on fire.

Re: I decided to disable AMP on my site

#178

Post by nobleach »

Let me stress this major point. Google is NOT the web. They are but one major player. Yet when we speak of "SEO" we mean "pleasing Google". I find that reprehensible. Google is NOT fighting for a better web experience. They are trying desperately to achieve what Facebook has done... keeping users engaged. While I appreciate what Google has done to encourage web standards, they are totally screwing up with their attempt at recreating AOL. AMP is simply the latest example of keeping users on a Google site.

Re: I decided to disable AMP on my site

#179

Post by zeveb »

> Of course, the reason we have AMP is because Google wants users to see ads, something that is mostly missing with JavaScript disabled.

Ding ding ding — this is IMHO the real reason for both AMP and the downvoting (and down-moderation) of anti-JavaScript comments on online forums (to include HN). It's all about money. Google aren't evil; neither are publishers, startups or venture capitalists. But it's hard to make money from a web in which end users are in control, and easy to make money if they are relatively powerless. Google, publishers, startups & venture capitalists alike all want to make money, and thus it's in their interest to encourage technical measures which decrease end-user power. It's also in their interest to discourage social discussions which support technical measures which increase end-user power. They don't consciously think in this terms, of course (in the words of Upton Sinclair, 'It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it'), but that is why they act as they do.

The thing is, every one of is an end-user at some point. Every Google employee, every CNN investor, every startup founder, every venture capitalist uses technology constantly.

It's vitally important to the freedom of the web that we resist the temptation to require JavaScript, that we resist the lure of AMP, that we resist the siren song of further net centralisation. We have nothing to lose but our chains!

Re: I decided to disable AMP on my site

#180

Post by xiaoma »

matt4077 wrote: post #57
michaelt wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sites that are traditionally called walled gardens (facebook, AOL, compuserve...) often combine four features; (a) all the content is hosted under the walled garden's domain; (b) the walled garden designs key parts of the navigation and layout, understandably acting in their own interests; (c) the walled garden has content policies and declines to host certain content; and (d) users must have accounts and be logged i…

The feature that defines a walled garden is the wall. AMP doesn't have that wall: it is perfectly usable by any other search engine/spider to replicate the experience. The website itself can link to the AMP version if that makes sense for users. Mobile browsers, or web servers, could check for and redirect to the AMP version. There's a slightly-higher wall for advertisers, I believe. But Google is rightfully afraid o…

Here's the wall: could any competitor to Google itself ever be on AMP? (E.g., a competitor to search, Gmail, YouTube, or adsense/adwords.)

Or would it have to be something on the open web? And if only AMP pages get ranked well on Google in the future, how much harder would it be for such competitors to ever get noticed in the first place?

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