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Comment by macandcheese | Hacker News Reader

So, I still need to take an extra step to view the original link and then click again to visit it. Why not just make the entire top banner a clickable link to the source article? My browser already shows the title of the page separately.

The whole AMP / SERP interaction is such a headache. They already insist on us having structured page content to source previews from, the last thing I want to do is write more quasi-semantic markup that just repeats what my original source code already states. Get out of my way Google.

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Why do you want to visit the original page? It looks the same or worse than the AMP version that already loaded.

To share the original link, to read more posts by the author, to visit the publication's home page to see what else they publish, to use their comments section which is not yet supported by AMP...

Do you share links before visiting the article? With this change, it seems like sharing the link will be the same amount of clicks.

Same goes for reading more about the author. How often do you do that, and do you do it before you even read the article?

For visiting the homepage, almost every AMP page I go to these days as a big logo at the top linking to their (real) homepage, so there's 0 difference for the user.

The only valid one is comment section. I just tried a few articles, and they seem to have a button which redirects to the real website. I think that's a fair compromise. Honestly most article sites do this anyway, load the comments after a click.

> Do you share links before visiting the article?

Absolutely, for example if I've read the story before and I'm just googling it now to reference it.

Furthermore, I care not that it is the same number of clicks, I care that users can access my website in a way that conforms to their expectations for the rest of the web. That's the crux of my problem with AMP. If it was everything except the page cache it would a lot better.

> Do you share links before visiting the article? With this change, it seems like sharing the link will be the same amount of clicks.

Before today, here's what it looked like:

Real web: 1. Click on Google search result 2. Read article 3. Click share and get real URL

AMP: 1. Click on Google search result 2. Read article 3. Click share and realize that you're on an AMP page which is broken for anything other than mobile web browsers 4. Either go back to the search results to find the non-AMP URL or navigate to the publisher's site and use site search find the real URL 5. Share the real URL

As of today, Google has made this a little faster but it's still an extra step: 4. Click on the small link icon in the header to display the real URL 5. Share the real URL

That's still considerably worse than the standard web experience. The only reason anyone is defending this is because it's associated with Google.

Because I never wanted to visit anything besides the original page in the first place!

The original page is what I wanted, originally. AMP has been a bad user experience as evidenced by the fact that this news story is near the top. AMP just boxes the user in, to the point of frustration.

A better question is why would I want an AMP page when I was originally trying to reach the original?

I want the AMP page because the original page is usually an awful user experience. If websites served up fast webpages I wouldn't want AMP. But in my experience browsing news on AMP pages has been faster and better in nearly every respect.

We wouldn't need AMP if the average website experience didn't suck. It's unfortunate that most websites cannot do this[0] without Google forcing them to, but that's the world we live in.

[0] https://www.ampproject.org/learn/how-amp-works/

Quoting myself from elsewhere:

> The issue is that google has been pushing these slow, bulky pages to the top of their results, then they swoop in with AMP to fix the problem. The problem AMP is trying to solve is very real, but the answer isn't to consolidate things further into google's ecosystem.

My news workflow is: open news.google.com and then open-in-new-tab the news stories I want to read. Then I can read the loaded pages later or offline. AMP's JavaScript hijinx break open-in-new-tab or accessing the original page's URL.

Eh, sometimes. Sometimes the AMP version is broken or outdated.

To get the URL.

Literally the only reason to use google. It just happens to be useful to click into the URL most times, but finding the URL is what matters. I can fill in the rest of the usability myself if I really want it.

Also, if I ask for an orange and I'm handed an apple, I'll stop asking you for anything.

How else is a user "converted"?

Conversions, and time on the site, matter. Becoming a one-hit-wonder at most, is a broken practice for the way the business side of most websites functions.

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