Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

How to fight back against Google AMP as a web user and a web developer

markosaric.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

451–460 of 570 posts

Re: How to fight back against Google AMP as a web user and a web developer

#451

Post by thereisnospork »

Udik wrote: post #420
thereisnospork wrote: post #403

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> That is why AMP has been successful >This is not. If google removes ranking incentive, people will forget about AMP the next day Google giving ranking incentive to sites that are faster seems like the exact sort of thing they should be doing.

> Google giving ranking incentive to sites that are faster seems like the exact sort of thing they should be doing. Really? I thought Google's purpose was to find information in the web, not to give me fast links. If I am looking for an article, I want that article, not a different but faster one. If I am looking for a piece of information, I want the best fit, not the second or third best but faster fit.

Information delivered slowly is less useful than information delivered quickly[1]. If there are 5 takes on an AP-wire article I want google to give me a fast site over a bloated slow site. The finer points of how they get to a fast site don't particularly matter to me.

[1] One of the nicer features of HN is that it is snappy and responsive - ime the polar opposite of many non-AMP news sites.

Re: How to fight back against Google AMP as a web user and a web developer

#452

Post by AlexandrB »

thereisnospork wrote: post #451
Udik wrote: post #420

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Google giving ranking incentive to sites that are faster seems like the exact sort of thing they should be doing. Really? I thought Google's purpose was to find information in the web, not to give me fast links. If I am looking for an article, I want that article, not a different but faster one. If I am looking for a piece of information, I want the best fit, not the second or third best but faster fit.

Information delivered slowly is less useful than information delivered quickly[1]. If there are 5 takes on an AP-wire article I want google to give me a fast site over a bloated slow site. The finer points of how they get to a fast site don't particularly matter to me. [1] One of the nicer features of HN is that it is snappy and responsive - ime the polar opposite of many non-AMP news sites.

> If there are 5 takes on an AP-wire article I want google to give me a fast site over a bloated slow site.

I'd want Google to give me the accurate, well-researched site. When the difference between "fast" and "slow" is a matter of seconds (or often milliseconds), I'm not sure why better information delivered a few seconds later should be ranked lower.

Re: How to fight back against Google AMP as a web user and a web developer

#453

Post by AlexandrB »

emodendroket wrote: post #62
soyyo wrote: post #30

I worked on amp for a leading newspaper, and everyone who says that amp is about "making the web faster on mobile" is either very naive or doing marketing for google. For publishers, amp is about trying to top the results on google search and capture traffic, it's their only motivation to publish their content using amp, and the only metric they look in order to evaluate the results. Once they have their amp content,…

No, I'm well aware that that's what it's "about," just like I'm well aware that the search engine is mainly about advertising. I just don't care what it's about so long as the results are beneficial to me -- which they definitely are. When I see the AMP icon I know the page is going to load much faster

> I just don't care what it's about so long as the results are beneficial to me -- which they definitely are.

Are they though? With the search engine example, how do you know that the engine is not biasing your opinion so that you act against your own self-interest and to the benefit of the advertisers?

The AMP situation is a bit more complicated, but how are you sure that AMP is beneficial to you in the broad, long-term sense?

Re: How to fight back against Google AMP as a web user and a web developer

#454

Post by nonbirithm »

I find it sad that Google bloats the web with all its analytics and fonts, and then offers a solution to fix the bloat by providing AMP instead.

And there are so many other third-party elements that are detrimental. It's sad that we have to use things like Firefox's tracking protection to remove all this bloat that people insert on webpages just because it's possible to do so today and it wasn't fifteen years ago.

It feels like a Pandora's Box at times. We can complain a lot but nothing is stopping you from adding just one more JS package to your app if you want to, because it's as easy as 'npm install' and you don't see the downsides.

Re: How to fight back against Google AMP as a web user and a web developer

#455

Post by hayyyyydos »

brentonator wrote: post #82
soyyo wrote: post #30

I worked on amp for a leading newspaper, and everyone who says that amp is about "making the web faster on mobile" is either very naive or doing marketing for google. For publishers, amp is about trying to top the results on google search and capture traffic, it's their only motivation to publish their content using amp, and the only metric they look in order to evaluate the results. Once they have their amp content,…

I invite you to go to your local Fox/ABC/CBS channel's website and TRY to read an article vs AMP. AMP is about stopping....that. It's indescribable how horrible these companies have become. 1. Auto-playing ads 2. Scroll-jacking 3. Overlay...after overlay... after overlay. 4. Popover 5. Paywall 6. Popover again for good taste. 7. Oops you scrolled too far better redirect you to another page entirely. 8. You wanted the…

> 3. Overlay...after overlay... after overlay.

amp-sticky-ad, amp-video-docking, amp-app-banner

> 4. Popover

amp-fx-flying-carpet

> 5. Paywall

amp-access, amp-access-poool

> 7. Oops you scrolled too far better redirect you to another page entirely.

amp-next-page

> 8. You wanted the video version of this article right? Better force you to read the article in 20% of the screen so all of our ads, bars, and video can fit on the page.

amp-sticky-ad, amp-video-docking

Re: How to fight back against Google AMP as a web user and a web developer

#456

Post by thereisnospork »

AlexandrB wrote: post #452
thereisnospork wrote: post #451

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Information delivered slowly is less useful than information delivered quickly[1]. If there are 5 takes on an AP-wire article I want google to give me a fast site over a bloated slow site. The finer points of how they get to a fast site don't particularly matter to me. [1] One of the nicer features of HN is that it is snappy and responsive - ime the polar opposite of many non-AMP news sites.

> If there are 5 takes on an AP-wire article I want google to give me a fast site over a bloated slow site. I'd want Google to give me the accurate, well-researched site. When the difference between "fast" and "slow" is a matter of seconds (or often milliseconds), I'm not sure why better information delivered a few seconds later should be ranked lower.

Slower sites should be ranked lower for the same reason a dictionary that isn't alphabetized is less useful than one that is and both are less useful than dictionary.com. I'd rather have Webster than Oxford if Oxford will take twice as long and I'd rather not have urbandictionary.com over either -- hence a weighting.

Moreover that even if google could give me the canonical result[0] to my query its likely I will need to visit and view several sites to get the information I am searching for - information I will obtain faster when the sites are faster.

[0]Any ranking will be probabilistic and in all likelihood for common topics there will be multiple candidates within the expected error - why is it so great a sin to order them by accessibility?

Re: How to fight back against Google AMP as a web user and a web developer

#457

Post by NegativeK »

feanaro wrote: post #385
nvr219 wrote: post #349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Normal people don’t know how to do that

Normal people know how to use Firefox which has it built-in.

Most people don't go that route because they have more important things going on in their lives.

AMP isn't about solving one-offs or making users improve their own experience. It's about improving most people's experience by default.

I don't like AMP, it frustrates me, and I think Google's fucking up in their implementation, but it actually _does_ do a good thing.

Re: How to fight back against Google AMP as a web user and a web developer

#458

Post by dang »

dmitriid wrote: post #378
gregable wrote: post #348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Publishers who implement Signed Exchanges get AMP links directly to their site with no iframe viewer on browsers that support the technology: https://amp.dev/documentation/guides-and-tutorials/optimize-... https://github.com/WICG/webpackage/blob/master/explainer.md

Hello, gregablr, who works on AMP and doesn't disclose it. You mean: - signed exchanges created an pushed by Google and Google only to solve a problem that didn't exist before AMP - "implemented by some browsers" as in "implemented only in Goigle Chrome" even before there was any consensus or standards work as yet another avenue of creating Google-onlu web.

Personal attacks will get you banned here, so please don't post like this. We've asked you more than once, including https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19811041.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Edit: between the parent comment and these, you were outright harassing another user:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21716790

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21716648

And you did it here too:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21716607

This is bannable behavior on HN. I'm not going to ban you because not only have you posted good comments to HN recently, one of them was an Aleksander Blok translation. That's first rate. But please don't do anything like the above in the future.

It's important for HN that people be able to discuss their work, or their employers, without being harangued. Should they disclose it? Sure, in principle and when appropriate, but that doesn't mean every comment has to include it like boilerplate. The range of appropriateness has some elasticity. Neither gregable nor joshuamorton was out of line (anyone can just check their profiles). Your attacks on them were out of line though.

Using people's employment information to attack them just disincentivizes them to participate in threads that they probably know a lot about, since most of us are experts in what we work on. That's a really bad tradeoff for HN, so users need to pull their punches.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

Re: How to fight back against Google AMP as a web user and a web developer

#459

Post by knlam »

justinph wrote: post #24
shadowgovt wrote: post #22

"How to make your sites faster than AMP without using AMP" leaves out "locally cache a copy of your site in a CDN that is geographically close to your users." Which is the actual mechanical part of AMP that makes it technologically interesting / valuable to content providers and countries distant from the creation of most content.

It also omits the part where google starts preloading and rendering the AMP page when the user is still on the search results. Without that, AMP is often no faster than many non-amp pages.

This should be higher. By googling, you are using way more data because of AMP pages, that is big minus especially if you are on mobile plan

Re: How to fight back against Google AMP as a web user and a web developer

#460

Post by tomComb »

ogre_codes wrote: post #221

I'm not a fan of Google's proprietary web, but it's worth pointing out that this is largely a response to the increasingly shitty way publishers treat their users. Just reading basic articles on the web has become a painful exercise in dodging "Subscribe" faux-pop-ups; trying to scan text while your vision is bombarded with unrelated video; and user-hostile scroll capture effects. For much the same reasons Google AMP…

It's worth noting that Apple News take a 50% cut of the revenue. On the web, a publisher is free to do whatever they want so when Google can insert themselves into that, it is a fraction of the cut that Apple takes.

It's the sort of thing that reminds me why I want the web platform to remain competitive with iOS, Facebook, and Android. If not AMP, something like it was sorely needed.

Post reply on HN