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

481–490 of 570 posts

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

#481

Post by Kiro »

Kiro wrote: post #169
buboard wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

from USERS PERSPECTIVE, amp is meh. yes it's faster, does it really matter if you re getting an article in 1 second when you -obviously- plan to spend 2 minutes reading it? i dont know anyone who thinks so, perhaps your USERS do > A strealined conent delivery platform prioritizing UX that the publishers failed to create what you re implying is, Google failed to improve their algorithms to bypass obvious SEOs, so they…

You clearly don't speak for the users in the developing world with bad connections. Speed is anything but irrelevant.

I know it's not kosher to complain about downvotes but I said nothing about AMP, just argued against the statement that users don't care about speed. Anything that could possibly be interpreted in Google's favor gets downvoted immediately. It's carpet bombing with collateral damage.

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

#482

Post by zelly »

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…

uBlock Origin and uMatrix can give you the AMP experience without AMP, but the vast majority of users won't use them. I see the need for AMP but it just enables these bad corporate websites, as if CNN/FOX/Quora etc. can't afford to clean up their pages.

It would be better to just completely penalize blogs that paywall or otherwise make content unreadable. It's not like news articles are ever scarce. I don't know what they're doing as a search engine if I get any results that are this opaque.

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

#483

Post by mda »

martin_a wrote: post #97
mda wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have any data that Google's services were the actual cause of the slowdown of websites?

Ever ran a website through Google Lighthouse/Page Speed Insights and saw that Google recommends to set proper cache timing for Google Analytics etc.? If that's not proof enough...

That is not a proof or data at all.

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

#484

Post by martin_a »

mda wrote: post #483
martin_a wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ever ran a website through Google Lighthouse/Page Speed Insights and saw that Google recommends to set proper cache timing for Google Analytics etc.? If that's not proof enough...

That is not a proof or data at all.

It's as good as any proof. Not even Google knows how to set up their pages so they are running well and are considered to be best-practice by those checking tools.

But, to be fair: At least they don't exclude their resources from Lighthouse.

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

#485

Post by bscphil »

stephenr wrote: post #479
bscphil wrote: post #445

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> how using amp is beneficial to Google You are correct, most people are leaving this out. I think an emphasis on asking why Google is pushing AMP, and whether that interest aligns with consumers, would be helpful in this thread.

Most people seem to intrinsically understand that a single browser-making ad company dictating what features a website can or can not use is about that company flexing it's muscles to control things. Is that really not obvious to some?

> Most people seem to intrinsically understand that a single browser-making ad company dictating what features a website can or can not use is about that company flexing it's muscles to control things.

But the point made up-thread was that "controlling things" is not intrinsically bad. The problem was that (according to some users) Google was abusing a monopoly position to control things in a way that would be beneficial to itself, but harmful to others. The question the parent to my comment was asking was, beneficial to itself how? You saying that Google is "controlling things" just takes us back to where we started, but doesn't answer the question of what Google stands to gain.

Let me give an example. Suppose by "controlling things" you mean incentivizing ("""forcing""") web developers to create pages that are better because they have lighter scripts and higher security standards for third party content. (In fact, this is what some supporters say Google is doing.) I don't think most people would have a problem with that. So presumably critics have something interesting to say about what "controlling things" really means that explains why it's bad in this particular case.

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

#486

Post by squiggleblaz »

esrauch wrote: post #414
JoshMnem wrote: post #399

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The 8-second delay is there to punish users who block JavaScript that is loaded from Google's servers (with ad-blockers) but still have JavaScript enabled.

I think that's a bit unnecessarily tin-foil-hat. If they didn't put in the 8 second css rule it would just show blank for those users right? So adding that rule is making it work at all instead which doesn't sound like "there to punish them".

Why is there an eight second delay instead of, say, an 0.8 second delay? Or no delay at all?

I mean, if the goal is to make the page display only once it's fully loaded, and the point of amp is to make pages load quickly, eight seconds seems gratuitous. Even slow sites load within eight seconds.

(I don't deliberately use any Google products, so I'm completely unfamiliar with amp.)

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

#487

Post by Kaiyou »

JohnFen wrote: post #252
Kaiyou wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's the point of switching to DDG, though? Under the hood it's just a combination of Google and Bing, isn't it?

DDG aggregates from a large list of search engines, but primarily Bing. I don't think it uses Google at all.

"Large list". There are only Google and Bing. There are no other usable search engines that do the search themselves. (Though, I guess a few days ago there was news about a third search engine trying and kinf of working.)

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

#488

Post by stephenr »

bscphil wrote: post #485
stephenr wrote: post #479

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most people seem to intrinsically understand that a single browser-making ad company dictating what features a website can or can not use is about that company flexing it's muscles to control things. Is that really not obvious to some?

> Most people seem to intrinsically understand that a single browser-making ad company dictating what features a website can or can not use is about that company flexing it's muscles to control things. But the point made up-thread was that "controlling things" is not intrinsically bad. The problem was that (according to some users) Google was abusing a monopoly position to control things in a way that would be benefi…

> But the point made up-thread was that "controlling things" is not intrinsically bad

Well that point is wrong. If you can't see how a single, privacy abusing company having dominant control over the web is bad, I can't fucking help you.

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

#489

Post by bscphil »

stephenr wrote: post #488
bscphil wrote: post #485

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Most people seem to intrinsically understand that a single browser-making ad company dictating what features a website can or can not use is about that company flexing it's muscles to control things. But the point made up-thread was that "controlling things" is not intrinsically bad. The problem was that (according to some users) Google was abusing a monopoly position to control things in a way that would be benefi…

> But the point made up-thread was that "controlling things" is not intrinsically bad Well that point is wrong. If you can't see how a single, privacy abusing company having dominant control over the web is bad, I can't fucking help you.

> a single, privacy abusing company having dominant control over the web is bad

I agree that that's bad. I also don't think you (or most people in this thread) have made coherent arguments for why AMP is helping Google do that. That was the parent comment's point, and I tried to highlight that because it's downvoted.

Note that "control things" is a different claim than "having dominant control over the web". It's obvious that in some sense Google is doing the first. It's obvious that the second is bad. The issue is how you get from saying that they're doing the first thing to saying that they're doing the second thing.

Google has a monopoly position, granted. But not everything a monopolist does is bad just because they're a monopolist. Another example: one thing Google does is lower the page rank of sites that show the full content to the GoogleBot but paywall real users. I think this is great! It's an attempt to control the way publishers design websites and the way their servers respond to user agents, but the point of that control is making the web a better place. Many people feel similarly about AMP: that it's getting publishers to create faster pages that make the web a better place. Can you say why they're wrong?

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

#490

Post by wor3q »

kccqzy wrote: post #327
deminature wrote: post #275

Probably highly unpopular opinion, but as a user I've never had anything but positive experiences with AMP-enabled sites. They load massively faster than normal sites, especially on poor mobile connections where main sites sometimes hang indefinitely trying to load javascript, ads, etc. While content publishers are continuing to overload their sites with further trackers, ads, javascript, remotely loading assets whic…

> They load massively faster than normal sites, especially on poor mobile connections where main sites sometimes hang indefinitely trying to load javascript, ads, etc. Have you tried the normal mobile websites with an adblocker?

I'm from Poland, a country which has one of the highest percentages of adblocker users. Most pages adapted to it by either doing nasty tricks to bypass them, or just slapping an unclosable popup telling you to disable your adblocker...
Post reply on HN