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Google no longer requires AMP, but the replacement might be worse

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Re: Google no longer requires AMP, but the replacement might be worse

#221

Post by dannyw »

wyager wrote: post #216
scott_w wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re confusing the Internet with services that use the Internet to do business. The former is just a delivery mechanism for the latter, which is what’s being regulated. Plenty of countries require you to register for sales tax once you establish a presence in their country, whether you sell goods or services. No business operating in this environment thinks it’s unreasonable to do so. Once again “their house, their…

> You’re confusing the Internet with services that use the Internet to do business. No, you are confusing sending information with “doing business”.

The world has changed quite a bit. Sending information IS doing business these days, the world is digital.

Re: Google no longer requires AMP, but the replacement might be worse

#222

Post by jakelazaroff »

lapnitnelav wrote: post #218
jakelazaroff wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMO, the only feasible solution is to regulate surveillance capitalism out of existence. The market is not going to solve this.

Yeah sure let's bury our head in the sand and pretend all forms of media will thrive while only selling subscriptions but so far, we've seen how it went for the older ones (newspaper, radio, tv ...) Or we can acknowledge that advertisment is there to stay and we instead develop a proper framework to make it work sanely rather than all the duct-taping we've done so far. The real failure is the unwillingness to confron…

Surveillance capitalism isn't the same as advertising. But I think your point is undercut by the fact that most of the industries you mentioned are doing… fine? TV is thriving selling ads (broadcast/cable) and also subscriptions (Netflix/etc). Radio is thriving selling ads (terrestrial) and also subscriptions (Spotify/etc). Even newspapers are figuring this thing out; NYT added a record number of subscribers last year.

Re: Google no longer requires AMP, but the replacement might be worse

#223

Post by rchaud »

raxxorrax wrote: post #213
rchaud wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, I don't think so. There are hundreds if not thousands of unique domains for nearly every single query. Very few of those are providing first-hand, unique information. Take Apple product announcements; there are hundreds of high-traffic blogs basically creating identical content rehashing a press release or writing posts about newly announced products. There has to be a way of prioritizing some of these sites over…

> There has to be a way of prioritizing some of these sites over others. Those that display fewer ads and trackers? Many people would like that but somebody would really not.

You will need to use millionshort.com or a similar niche-based search engine for that. Otherwise, it is the equivalent of asking Apple to let you filter out apps that use Facebook SDK; completely futile.

The overwhelming majority of websites being created today include some kind of tracker, even if it's a single analytics script. And knowing the HN audience, that's still one tracker too many.

Re: Google no longer requires AMP, but the replacement might be worse

#224

Post by rchaud »

pradn wrote: post #137
rchaud wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, I don't think so. There are hundreds if not thousands of unique domains for nearly every single query. Very few of those are providing first-hand, unique information. Take Apple product announcements; there are hundreds of high-traffic blogs basically creating identical content rehashing a press release or writing posts about newly announced products. There has to be a way of prioritizing some of these sites over…

You're absolutely right that UX should have precedence for equal info. There's a reason why I like going to the slickly-made Verge instead of every other site for routine news like what was announced at a particular company's event. That, and I like their short summary videos.

I like their summary videos as well. Unfortunately I'm less of a fan of the website. The design is messy; they're trying to do the "website as magazine" style, but they're dependent on Google Ads so the experience feels disjointed.

Re: Google no longer requires AMP, but the replacement might be worse

#225

Post by lazyasciiart »

bcrl wrote: post #198
Fuzzeh wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Core web vitals is a joke. Literally 4 days ago it started bitching to me about breadcrumbs telling me that data-vocabulary.org schema deprecated Google ; New Breadcrumbs issue detected for site xxxxx 24 Jun 2021•Breadcrumbs So I look into it, knowing I'd fixed that ages ago.... Google ; Last crawled : 13 Nov 2019 Triggering stuff because you eventually got round to looking at it 19 months later? and it's all like th…

I tried to report a bug to Intuit about QuickBooks online the other day. 45 minutes later, the person answering the phone at the other end was finally able to give me a ticket number. I don't understand why it has become so hard to give feedback to developers to improve their product. I like it when people report bugs that give me a better understanding of how my software is being used -- am I really in the minority…

No, it's just that bugs of the type you describe are the minority of those that people want to report.

Re: Google no longer requires AMP, but the replacement might be worse

#226

Post by pradn »

rchaud wrote: post #224
pradn wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're absolutely right that UX should have precedence for equal info. There's a reason why I like going to the slickly-made Verge instead of every other site for routine news like what was announced at a particular company's event. That, and I like their short summary videos.

I like their summary videos as well. Unfortunately I'm less of a fan of the website. The design is messy; they're trying to do the "website as magazine" style, but they're dependent on Google Ads so the experience feels disjointed.

I can see that. It's still a far cry from a website with interstitials and auto-playing video, but perhaps I'm setting the bar too low by comparing to like CNN.

Re: Google no longer requires AMP, but the replacement might be worse

#227

Post by bcrl »

onli wrote: post #210
bcrl wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On Friday I completed the install of a new fibre connection for a customer. They had been stuck on a flaky 1.8Mbps ADSL service for years, and the incumbent wanted $30,000 to go 5 poles down the road to their hours. Yes, in 2021 there are still people who can scroll faster than images load.

Granted. Like I specified, I talked about broadband there. He preferred to wait all the time until images are loaded to start reading articles, with a flaky slow connection, or to try start reading while parts of the site still load? Especially on a slow connection not having to load the images immediately, or at all if the visitor does not scroll down as much, can make browsing so much better.

Your definition of broadband is wrong. Even 1.8 Mbps counts as broadband. Please be more precise in the terms that you use.

The main problem the customer I was referring to had is that the user interfaces for these websites would not function until they finished loading after 30 to 90 seconds, despite the fact that the user interfaces rarely changed. These were for cloud based accounting and scheduling platforms the business was required to use.

Developers really should have to try to use the systems they build on systems that have low bandwidth / high latency network connections rather than the typical fibre fed office environment. If you can build a website that works well for that use case, it's probably going to be incredibly snappy on a fast connection. Judging by how bloated the web is these days, that is rarely the case in today's world.

Re: Google no longer requires AMP, but the replacement might be worse

#228

Post by raxxorrax »

rchaud wrote: post #223
raxxorrax wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There has to be a way of prioritizing some of these sites over others. Those that display fewer ads and trackers? Many people would like that but somebody would really not.

You will need to use millionshort.com or a similar niche-based search engine for that. Otherwise, it is the equivalent of asking Apple to let you filter out apps that use Facebook SDK; completely futile. The overwhelming majority of websites being created today include some kind of tracker, even if it's a single analytics script. And knowing the HN audience, that's still one tracker too many.

Yes, it is, especially if a user doesn't want to be tracked. Flag the website as malicious and the problem would go away quickly. It doesn't serve any purpose anyway. Companies as advertising consumers just want to be on equal footing.

Re: Google no longer requires AMP, but the replacement might be worse

#229

Post by eli »

gerash wrote: post #109
jsnell wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, no. You're moving the goalposts. The criticism from eli was not e.g. that using page speed as a ranking criteria is intrinsically bad. It was that the data was sourced only from Chrome (including the italics). It's like I've fallen into a crazy parallel dimension. For more than *five years* HN commenters have been ranting about how AMP is not needed, and all that's needed is using page speed as the signal. And…

I remember that. Every other post on HN used to be how bad AMP is for the future of human civilization and how Google should have used page performance in their ranking instead. Well, Google did just that and now eli et al. moved the goal post. The morale of the story is it's impossible to make everyone happy.

I'm not an ambassador of HN opinion and I didn't set the first goalpost.

But there's no contradiction in asking for a neutral way to include performance in the rankings and then being disappointed when the solution considers only performance of Google's own browser.

Re: Google no longer requires AMP, but the replacement might be worse

#230

Post by eli »

jsnell wrote: post #136
thejohnconway wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then don’t go with the stupidest most naive way of benchmarking, and actually try to replicate some real-world scenarios? This would be utterly trivial for Google.

Synthetic benchmarking with actual end-user network conditions, or actual end-user browser+hardware combinations is in my opinion functionally impossible. (And you've excluded real world telemetry as an option). Just how do would you fairly benchmark Safari on iPhone performance on billions of web pages?

If it's truly not possible to measure these performance metrics in a way that takes non-Google browsers into account then they are bad metrics and I'd prefer something else.
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