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The Problem with AMP

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Re: The Problem with AMP

#261

Post by unethical_ban »

dajohnson89 wrote: post #246
coldtea wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They are a business, doing exactly what they are supposed to be doing. There was such a thing as ethical and societal responsibility for businesses. Thinking making profit by any means as long as they are nominally legal is acceptable for a company is just something some people believe. No natural law that says it has to be so -- we could easily (and have had) believe the opposite.

>There was such a thing as ethical and societal responsibility for businesses. Since when? Standard oil? Or going back further, the Dutch East India Company?

Corporate social responsibility want a thing on the silk road, but we expect it now.

Re: The Problem with AMP

#262

Post by a_imho »

wheelerwj wrote: post #172
greenspot wrote: post #162

Google is abusing its powers. The search rank is our currency and Google has pushed AMP sites to the top for some while. So, everybody is now building weird AMP layers for their sites. We went from a free to a proprietary mobile web in just a few weeks. And we can't do anything. It feels like the times when the Internet Explorer tried to rule except that more people were complaining. The open solution to a faster mob…

> Google is abusing its powers. They are a business, doing exactly what they are supposed to be doing. It's up to us to find a way to kill google and take back our internet. Edit, i love the downvotes for this. Google is legally required to act in their shareholders best interests. You all should understand fiduciary duty. They are building long term value for a massive (and growing) customer segment at the expense o…

Criticizing Google too strongly e.g. kill google is a surefire way to get downvotes. Which is pretty much the same logic you described. HN is frequented by googlers, even if it is not exactly a duty to downvote comments like yours, it makes some sense. Or maybe I'm just seeing things.

Re: The Problem with AMP

#263

Post by mysterydip »

jshen wrote: post #70
tehlike wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am really curious if an ordinary user gets frustrated with AMP as much as an HN reader does. PS: Not intending to be sarcastic. PS2: I work for google, but not on something amp related.

I've seen ordinary users get frustrated with it, but they don't understand why. They don't know what AMP is, and they don't realize they are on an AMP page. For example, the URL bar says they are on Google but they are reading a Slate article. The web is already confusing enough, and AMP makes it worse. Many ordinary users think they are reading content from Google, like that famous CNN interview where a lady said, "…

I'm one of those frustrated mobile users. I like to think I keep up on tech trends (being here for one example) but I hadn't heard of AMP before. I have experienced it, though, without knowing what the issue was until now. I like to share news with friends, and recently more frequently when I try to send the url it was google instead of the domain I expected. I had to go out of my way to send them the actual source, but it didn't happen everywhere. Now I know why.

Re: The Problem with AMP

#264

Post by akras14 »

mikk14 wrote: post #174
akras14 wrote: post #133

I wrote a similar(although not as concise) article about 3 month ago: https://www.alexkras.com/google-may-be-stealing-your-mobile-... After which I was invited to meet Google AMP team and to express my concerns, you can read my Q&A here: https://www.alexkras.com/i-had-lunch-with-google-amp-team/ TLDR; A lot of concerns are getting addressed 1. Minor, but the bar at the top is now scrollable on all devices, including…

He, it's a bit funny your last remark, unless it's tongue in cheek on purpose. It's akin to say "I have mixed feelings about crashing with my car. On one hand I got to my destination really fast, on the other hand I died." The downside of AMP seems to me so comically larger than the upside that this should be much more a black-or-white issue than it currently is. Good that they are moving to fixing it, but very bad t…

It's sort of is.

I recognize that they are solving a real problem for users and I don't want to throw out a baby with the bath water.

At the same time I am VERY concerned with caching aspect of AMP. I am holding back on my judgment until they have some time to address some of the concerns, to see if I feel better about it.

But may be people on this thread are right, and a more aggressive stance is warranted...

Re: The Problem with AMP

#265

Post by vajrapani666 »

There's little power for us when Google abuses the trust the community has afforded to them.

Let's assume this got much worse, and evidence came out that private political interests worked with Google to interfere with informed consent by reprioritizing what some called "fake news", when really what was being called fake news was actually anti-government activists pointing out collusion between tech companies and the government. Clearly, Google would be an agent to destroying democracy.

I imagine detecting that a visitor came from Google, and showing them an interstitial informing the user they have come from a state-sponsored search engine, and letting them know what that means and the alternatives to Google.

I think it's actually pretty trivial to build something like this with recipes for the popular CDNs and servers out there. Even a JS snippet would be totally fine.

Google is pursuing AMP not because it wants to promote a better experience on the web, but because Google wants to be the provider whose technology and own practices perform best on SRPs. They are acting like capitalist pigs, and we should coordinate a protest against Google to let them know they can't just walk all over us with no consequences.

January 20th seems like an ideal day.

Re: The Problem with AMP

#266

Post by sametmax »

vog wrote: post #204
sametmax wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But we don't need an excuse. However the explanation seems necessary given that: - we saw it happen once; - we said it would happened again; - we said how; - we said why; - and it happened again. And apparently nobody gives a damn. People are still trying to get short term gains by adapting to Google's will and wrecking our industry, efficiently sawing the branch we are all seating on. So yeah, we need to give the ex…

> Before Google there was others like MS, and after they will be others MS had their cases in court where they had to pay a lot of money for violating laws. Maybe it's time for Google to go through the same phase.

It didn't change MS. They just adapted. Now they have better PR, so people comes to HN, reddit and imgur to sing their song for them instead of doing quircky adds. Right now Gates is having so much praise it's like he is Mandela and Buddah's outspring.

Re: The Problem with AMP

#267

Post by d23 »

ryao wrote: post #183
davedx wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I'm tired of not being able to load Reddit from Google SERPs on my phone. Really tired of it. Time to give DuckDuckGo another try I guess...

Reddit AMP links break on the iPhone when the Reddit app is installed. I do not know exactly why but my guess is that the open in Reddit app functionality is incompatible. I am not sure how to report this to Reddit.

Could you submit something to /r/bugs?

Re: The Problem with AMP

#268

Post by sametmax »

ionforce wrote: post #223
sametmax wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But we don't need an excuse. However the explanation seems necessary given that: - we saw it happen once; - we said it would happened again; - we said how; - we said why; - and it happened again. And apparently nobody gives a damn. People are still trying to get short term gains by adapting to Google's will and wrecking our industry, efficiently sawing the branch we are all seating on. So yeah, we need to give the ex…

You are making an assumption (an incorrect one, I think) that providing explanations causes people's behavior to change.

You are kinda right. But not making sure the explanations keep being spread does make it easier to forget or ignore it, and even fewer people would care. It's not a good strategy to gain traction, but not doing it make you loose it even more.

Re: The Problem with AMP

#269

Post by tehwebguy »

tehlike wrote: post #63
freyir wrote: post #6

AMP is one of the most frustrating experiences I've had with Google. the fact that it's foisted on users, with no option to disable it, makes it borderline infuriating. If you're stuck on an AMP page in your mobile browser, you can click on the browser's "Request desktop site" option to load the full page.

I am really curious if an ordinary user gets frustrated with AMP as much as an HN reader does. PS: Not intending to be sarcastic. PS2: I work for google, but not on something amp related.

The difference between Google and Apple:

Apple: These article webpages are annoying - let's add a client side button to make it readable.

Google: These article webpages are annoying[0] - let's force[1] everyone to grant us a royalty-free license to their whole website.

[0] The real problem might be that Google results are "getting bad" - a thing people bring up all the time but which can only be measured individually.

So people tap the first 3 results and don't get the info they were looking for. On top of that it's slow af so people are wasting time. Now Google serves up faster pages so they'll tap through 4 or 5 results.

So why not fix the real problem instead?

[1] Yeah it's optional but only to a point. First the spammiest blogs implement it and they get a free pass to partially skip the line. Then some bigger sites implement it and even things out. People here are rightfully afraid that within 12 months you can't even hit page 2 without AMP.

Re: The Problem with AMP

#270

Post by usernam »

greenspot wrote: post #162

Google is abusing its powers. The search rank is our currency and Google has pushed AMP sites to the top for some while. So, everybody is now building weird AMP layers for their sites. We went from a free to a proprietary mobile web in just a few weeks. And we can't do anything. It feels like the times when the Internet Explorer tried to rule except that more people were complaining. The open solution to a faster mob…

> The open solution to a faster mobile web would have been so easy: Just penalize large and slow web pages without defining a dedicated mobile specification

It's obvious they have a different view on this. You can see this first-hand on their pagespeed tool. Pagespeed ranks your pages mostly according to random features, irregardless of size and performance. Actual test you can perform: 1kb web page with no compression ranks lower than 1mb web page after compression: "because you should enable server-side compression".

Their mobile assessment tool is similarly a joke.

The sad thing is that I'm likely getting a lower ranking on my website with has 5kb vanilla uncompressed js (gasp, not even async!) compared to the glittered rating of a 5mb homepage which loads 5mb+ more excluding webfonts from external CDNs.

You can taste that this has spread into google monoculture by the performance of their own web services.

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