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AMP for email is a terrible idea

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Re: AMP for email is a terrible idea

#231

Post by martinald »

thomasruns wrote: post #191
antaviana wrote: post #185

Personal communications are gone from email. They now happen in Whatsapp. Gradually some one-on-one business communications are also moving to Whatsapp. If Whatsapp ever figures out business communications at large, email is practically dead. Excluding viagra spam, this means that nearly 99% of legit communications that are today received in personal email accounts are automated emails (transactional or bulk email).…

Living in the US I literally know 0 people who use or have ever used Whatsapp. That's not a judgement on their app, just a reality that in this country it's not something people use.

US is definitely the exception. I've visited South/Central America, Europe and at home in the UK and WhatsApp penetration is extremely high.

Re: AMP for email is a terrible idea

#232

Post by z3t4 »

birksherty wrote: post #210
ChuckMcM wrote: post #141

Because they didn't internalize the feedback from Wave well enough I guess. /s I agree with the article, email is email. But it points out something which is fundamentally a problem for the industry. Some software is done as in doesn't need to change any more. That is a scary place since all those Gmail engineers need to do something so if it isn't adding new things to Gmail what will they do? Interesting parallel in…

That's exactly what I thought about new Youtube web interface. It's slow to load and consumes more CPU. Previous design worked great everywhere. There was no need for the UI change. But, people can't just do nothing and get paid. So, they will create the need. And now spend months to make it, fix it, get busy again.

The interface might be perfect but if it doesn't change users will eventually think it's "too old", some users like you and me will happily use the "too old" interface because it's fast and works well, but the normal people want something "fresh". Design is like fashion, some design patters stay, but the look is constantly changing.

Re: AMP for email is a terrible idea

#233

Post by Tepix »

jbg_ wrote: post #205

There's a recurring theme in the discussion of this (and actually any time there is a discussion about email), that self-hosting email is really hard. That hasn't been my experience. I've been self-hosting four mail accounts (with moderate to high usage) on one server since about 2007. I briefly tried gmail when it came out but never switched to it. In 11 years of self-hosting my mail I've had one deliverability prob…

Yep. When you setup your server with a project such as sovereign you get great, secure defaults and day-to-day maintenance is minimal. Mostly keeping debian packages updated and upgrading the distribution every couple of years.

Re: AMP for email is a terrible idea

#234

Post by pasta »

ehnto wrote: post #69
makecheck wrote: post #31

Nothing says “we’re listening to your concerns about AMP” like rolling it out further to interfere with a function that is even less suited for AMP. Also, technology companies have a real problem assigning appropriate value to maintenance tasks that just keep things stable and usable. I’ve had infrastructure responsibilities over the years and the hardest thing about it was that nobody really knows or cares how much…

Part of why I don't advocate for CDNs when you don't need them is because I want to build robust sites that work for years untouched. For timespans over a year, anything not on your server is brittle. Oops, CDN changed its URL/didn't update their ssl ciphers/went bust and shut down completely and now {js-framework}/{css-library} is missing and my site is broken. What an unforeseeable circumstance!

Dont't forget build tools.

Good luck updating a site that used the latest and greatest build tools that are now depricated.

Fun thing: a lot of times I download the Javascript from a CDN because then I don't need build tools because it was already built for me on the CDN...

People focus too much on ship fast.

They get in trouble when the product becomes a success.

Re: AMP for email is a terrible idea

#235

Post by CaptSpify »

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #106
CapacitorSet wrote: post #20

Related reading: Against an increasingly user-hostile Web , https://www.neustadt.fr/essays/against-a-user-hostile-web/ >It all comes down a simple but very dangerous shift: the major websites of today's web are not built for the visitor, but as means of using her. Our visitor has become a data point, a customer profile, a potential lead -- a proverbial fly in the spider's web. In the guise of user-centered design, we…

I remember reading that article and thinking that the author either isn't old enough to remember the 90s web or has memory loss about how hostile it was to the user. Ubiquitous banner ads, "free" 56k if you use our browser and click links, cookie bonanza, link hijacking etc... have been part of the web since day one.

> Ubiquitous banner ads, "free" 56k if you use our browser and click links, cookie bonanza, link hijacking etc... have been part of the web since day one.

No they haven't. I definitely remember the web before those were common, and it was great.

And while yes, the web was hostile back then, we also thought about it as hostile. There's been a definite shift in how the web is presented. Back then, we taught "Don't put anything personal online, it's all shady." But now, we want users to give us everything they can, and we've changed the language to allow it. "It's OK for you to give this data to us. We're Google/Facebook/Twitter/etc. There's no way we'd be irresponsible with that data"

It's not like we've come up with some new, super-secure way to store that data. The web is even more shady nowadays, but we're training users not to think about it that way.

Re: AMP for email is a terrible idea

#236

Post by alkjhadgukdsg »

kuschku wrote: post #154
ChuckMcM wrote: post #141

Because they didn't internalize the feedback from Wave well enough I guess. /s I agree with the article, email is email. But it points out something which is fundamentally a problem for the industry. Some software is done as in doesn't need to change any more. That is a scary place since all those Gmail engineers need to do something so if it isn't adding new things to Gmail what will they do? Interesting parallel in…

I have to disagree on the topic of systemd. A lot of what it does definitely needed changing — although systemd implements that change suboptimally. Take the logind concept: In the past, Linux screensavers were simply a fullscreen window in front of everything else. They crashed? Your system unlocked. With logind, you have one tiny separate daemon that spawns your original X session, and the screensaver. As long as t…

> If the screensaver crashes, it gets restarted, or, if that fails, you get in a lovely TTY font "open a tty, login as your user, and type loginctl session-unlock".

This is really offtopic, but you seem to confuse KDE with systemd. There is a bit of KDE that tells you to use loginctl to tell KDE's display manager to unlock the session if KDE's screensaver doesn't work properly.

Re: AMP for email is a terrible idea

#237

Post by Daycrawler »

adamsvystun wrote: post #220
mankash666 wrote: post #207

I'll get down voted for saying this, but the HN crowd's hypocrisy is baffling. 1. Gmail is a channel that Google has under monetized for a decade. This is an opportunity for them to extract value from the said channel. If you're allergic to Google offering free services that use your data for advertising, go pay for email. Google isn't a charity and you aren't entitled to a Gmail of your choosing. 2. Apple is a prime…

> 1. Gmail is a channel that Google has under monetized for a decade. I disagree. Gmail brought Google millions of customers. It's all about the ecosystem that they are building, which helps them retain customers. If you use Gmail, than there is higher chance that you will use Google Drive than competition. Another example of this is Google Keep. There is no reason for them to have free notes app, other than making y…

Gaining customers doesn't mean monetizing, and it's particularly relevant to point out that a channel is under monetized specifically when this channel has a lot of users.

Re: AMP for email is a terrible idea

#238

Post by ekianjo »

mankash666 wrote: post #207

I'll get down voted for saying this, but the HN crowd's hypocrisy is baffling. 1. Gmail is a channel that Google has under monetized for a decade. This is an opportunity for them to extract value from the said channel. If you're allergic to Google offering free services that use your data for advertising, go pay for email. Google isn't a charity and you aren't entitled to a Gmail of your choosing. 2. Apple is a prime…

> I'll get down voted for saying this, but the HN crowd's hypocrisy is baffling.

I did not know we were a uniform, homogeneous crowd...

Re: AMP for email is a terrible idea

#239

Post by kuschku »

alkjhadgukdsg wrote: post #236
kuschku wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have to disagree on the topic of systemd. A lot of what it does definitely needed changing — although systemd implements that change suboptimally. Take the logind concept: In the past, Linux screensavers were simply a fullscreen window in front of everything else. They crashed? Your system unlocked. With logind, you have one tiny separate daemon that spawns your original X session, and the screensaver. As long as t…

> If the screensaver crashes, it gets restarted, or, if that fails, you get in a lovely TTY font "open a tty, login as your user, and type loginctl session-unlock". This is really offtopic, but you seem to confuse KDE with systemd. There is a bit of KDE that tells you to use loginctl to tell KDE's display manager to unlock the session if KDE's screensaver doesn't work properly.

Sure, KDE implements that bit, but the important part is that logind makes it possible to implement that bit in the first place.

Before logind, the alternative was custom handling and detection of screensavers in your session, or simply it crashing back to the session.

Re: AMP for email is a terrible idea

#240

Post by CaptSpify »

xivzgrev wrote: post #76

I, for one, welcome our new AMP overlords. As a marketer emails are really limited. This opens up possibility of higher engagement and less friction for what you want Gmail customers to do. I work for a loan company - get a rate quote IN YOUR EMAIL! Customer saves time and I just cut 2 steps out of our funnel. The required coding and browser compatibility scare me a bit though. Nothing to piss off consumers than an e…

> As a marketer emails are really limited.

This is a feature, not a bug.

What is currently stopping you from sending rate quotes in email nowadays? AFAICT, rate quotes are able to be represented via plaintext.

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