Disqus now compatible with Google AMP | Hacker News Reader

Disqus now compatible with Google AMP

blog.disqus.com

82 pointsangry-hacker32 comments

I think that one of the interesting features with AMP to get good performance is its free ("for now"[1]) caching system.

They also mention that "Google has provided a cache that can be used by anyone at no cost, and all AMPs will be cached by the Google AMP Cache. Other companies may build their own AMP cache as well."[2], However I wasn't able to find any documentation on how could someone build its own cache, and how to configure its AMP pages to point to your own cache instead of Google's.

[1] https://developers.google.com/amp/cache/reference/limits

[2] https://www.ampproject.org/docs/support/faqs.html

Even without AMP, Google caches pages for its search results and I frequently find the cached version both faster-loading and with less "fluff", especially the text-only option, than the actual page.

That was the first reason I tried to AMP. But the more I'm digging into it, the more I realize how responsive webdesign isn't the right solution ( a strange mix of Tetris and Cluedo ). AMP is a seductive solution to post mobile webdesign. In many ways it's the natural, non-bloated, evolution of Bootstrap's standardized layout.

Will Disqus still surprise site owners by suddenly inserting ads?

Maybe next they can figure out how to stop the spam posts that promote earning thousands while working from home.

It really is confusing to me why this problem is so hard to fix. 95% of their spam could be fixed with simple rules e.g. Blocking specific posted domains.

They just need to use that one weird trick to stop spammers!

It's called 99% fill rate in ad industry.

With this solution they can't outside the comments because their JavaScript does not run on the page directly.

This was seriously jarring to me. I use disqus so having low quality, taboola-looking ads just appear on my site one day was very upsetting. I thought something had gone seriously wrong.

Turns out Disqus just wanted to advertise without asking me.

I a not web developer, but as programmer who reads news regularly, it is quite horrifying how one company (Google) single handedly make everyone to use one technology.What about standardization?

Am I missing something? Isn't AMP for google? Now days I see every site switching to it.

Much of SPDY was integrated into HTTP/2. Much of Typescript has made its way into ECMAScript n+1. Large companies often need to prove the value in new web technology before the community is willing to standardize it. I wouldn't be surprised to see AMP become a standard in the not so distant future.

With AMP, Google doesn't only define the standard - a core point of AMP is that AMP carefully controls which scripts run on the page.

The whole standard is designed so that you cannot insert any custom script with access to the page DOM: the closest you can do is insert cross-domain iframes, and even those have weird restrictions (like they must be outside the part of the page that the user can likely see without scrolling)

On the one hand, this trivially solves many of the "obesity" problems as the AMP team can make sure every single allowed script fits their performance requirements. On the other hand, this requires contous engagement by the AMP team, something which would have very questionable implications if AMP would become a web standard.

AMP is nothing. Businesses hire tons of people just to optimize their site specifically for google. AMP is a tiny part of what SEO-ers do. Everyone uses Google so they dictate a lot about how websites must function/act/exist.

In other words, their monopoly or semi-monopoly means every action from them has severe effects on other markets, and them displaying any of their products before actual search results kills the competitors.

In other words, you’re saying Google has powers that only governments should have.

Yes and no. The AMP project is by Google, but several of the big companies are playing in this space. Eventually they don't mind if some of the practices become W3C standards and the project is somewhat open being on GitHub for people to contribute to

Google has AMP Facebook has Instant Articles Apple has the Apple News Format

So AMP is Google's version, which is really stripped down HTML to make a page load faster. (Minimize requests, don't block things, etc)

The whole project is open and on GitHub. The easiest example I know off the top of my head is to replace www with amp on Guardian pages. For example https://amp.theguardian.com/world/2016/sep/22/canada-childre... shows how an article differs slightly than its non-AMPed version

//TODO: Abstract this out so its shared with the main GA tracking

You may be even more surprised to hear that some people consider the web essentially Google's platform.

And in some countries, Facebook and "the Internet" are essentially synonyms.

Amongst my grandparents and their friends, AOL = Internet.

AMP is just a methodology which encourages a restricted subset of HTML, CSS, and JS implementation. They've chosen to implemented because the specific subset they've chosen to support eschews particularly slow-to-load features. Yes, it's Google's methodology, and yes they are planning on pushing it by highlighting AMP sites in search results - however, it's not really doing anything special code-wise besides enforcing said methodology.

Easy just use HTML/CSS and pages will load and render fast, no need to create stuff like AMP.

Just get JavaScript out of the pages and they will be loaded fast, no need for AMP contortions.

I use NoScript on one of my computers because Firefox is virtually unusable without it. The computer is not a speed demon (cheap Core i3), but there's no reason that browsing normal (I.e., just text and images) sites should bring it to its knees.

ya because no one uses javascript for anything

good solution.

That is exactly the problem. Web 2.0 should never have happened, the browser should have stayed for iterative documents.

Luckily we do have the mobile OSes making it better.

I hope this helps - I always get frustrated when on mobile I'm watching the disqus logo waiting for discussions to load. That can't be a good emotion to link to their brand.

There's an uBlock ruleset that blocks it. I've never seen anything worth reading in Disqus comments anyways.

It really depends on the website. I used to love commenting on Motherboard until they did away with comments. I just recently discovered that AVClub has a pretty tolerable and insightful community at the moment.

What's really needed is a third party JavaScript comment system you can map to your own domain, which means the Comment api would have to be cors enabled, and support custom domains i.e. So you configure the service to serve comments from blog.mysite.com. uBlock surely won't block the same domain.

Side scrolling keeps freezing on my mobile when viewing Google news. Reddit is easier to read, but slower to load.

What does it look like?

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