You Don't Get AMP | Hacker News Reader

You Don't Get AMP

blog.153.io

10 pointsquarterto34 comments

Cleverly leaves out the part where Google siphons your traffic. AMP is the trojan horse and I don't "get" those welcoming it into the gates.

If you use Cloudflare as your CDN, is Cloudflare "siphoning your traffic"?

Does cloudflare take users to a webpage that isn't yours with a header with a button that doesn't lead to your site?

The page is still yours. You have absolute control over the branding, the analytics, the monetisation. Just because it happens not to be served from your domain doesn't mean it's not yours.

Let's also not forget that AMP is actively encouraging alternative caches: Cloudflare Ampersand[1] was announced literally an hour after my post. It's a whitelabelled AMP cache aimed at solving this exact problem.

[1]: https://www.cloudflare.com/website-optimization/ampersand/

> Just because it happens not to be served from your domain doesn't mean it's not yours.

This is exactly what means not be yours. It's Google and they lease it to you.

Yes you still control most of it. My argument is that the traffic /would/ be going to your actual site (where you aren't limited at all) but now it is going to a google AMP page with strict limitations. Which isn't great, but the big deal is that bar on top that doesn't link to your site. That is so bad for your site and massively increases the bounce rate.

That is a sticking point for me. Alternative AMP caches (with alternative UX, e.g. Ampersand generally keeps users on your site when they bounce) go some way towards solving this, but they're not (yet?) first-class ecosystem citizens:

> But these are just guidelines, and Google can’t guarantee they’re behaving well, so they’re not first-class citizens.

> I’d love for this to be something you could statically verify, just like AMP HTML, so that anybody could add a Cache to the ecosystem and get a lightning bolt on Google search results and Cloudflare links and Twitter Moments™, but I’m pretty sure this reduces to the Halting Problem.

For now.

AMP is a PROXY/MITM service, with all the perks that come from being such a service. There is nothing stopping google ,or whatever company owns them after they become a Yahoo!, from changing their "policy" to better be aligned with their interests.

As soon as Google stops providing value to publishers, they lose their power in the industry. For now, we work with what we have.

> As soon as Google stops providing value to publishers, they lose their power in the industry

As soon as Google stops providing value to publishers, they are the industry.

> Tap a Top Stories card, and bam, you’re in the article. Takes maybe 100 milliseconds, just at the edge of perception. You can’t do that with a full page load: not on a 3G network, not on a mobile CPU.

Yes you can, quite comfortably. Pre rendering is just patching the bloated web, not fixing it. If you want to make the web better focus on less javascript, with noscript on I get AMP like speeds almost everywhere.

But that's the point: AMP allows far richer pages than just totally cutting out Javascript. Like it or not, the web is an application platform.

What does amp give me that a non-js page can't?

Also, applications aren't the target for amp.

Can you write a carousel without JS? A live blog? Lazy loading images and ads? A stateful e-commerce product page?

Have a look through the list of AMP components, you'll be surprised what's possible. https://www.ampproject.org/docs/reference/components

Good examples, but none of that is anything that I want. I'd much prefer small, simple, static pages to any of that. Additionally, they will load faster, and be easier to read. Those things are just trimming pages down to what Google wants, not users.

As somebody who has implemented AMP for a major newspaper, these are in fact things that publishers want.

And as a user: IDGAF what publishers want. Sorry, they had their chance and blew it. And this is the problem: Publishers increasingly are ignoring what their users want. Instead of providing quality products, they keep circling the drain to get the lowest-quality content. GLWT

Adding shit because publishers want them is how things got so bloated in the first place. If it weren't for that we wouldn't need AMP.

We can have all of that and have sub 100ms render times without AMP, we just have to cut out all the bloated javascript and trackers everywhere.

Google loves AMP because they (and only they) get to still track users.

> they (and only they) get to still track users

Wrong. https://www.ampproject.org/docs/reference/components/ads/amp...

Am I misunderstanding this? It looks you you have to request the tracking data from them?

As someone who has developed for mobile web, it can be surprisingly hard to push back on bloat from marketing / seo / analytics teams. I hope this becomes a W3C standard so us developers can show them the finger the next time they want to bring mobile web to a crawl.

Does Google not have any guidelines that say to keep pages small and fast? Seems like they should have a list of things to keep in mind when looking at search-rankings

It does, although only can only assume the effect of performance on search rankings. It's non-tangible metric as far as revenue is concerned.

Then what would be the difference between showing them the AMP standards, and just pointing them to those documents?

Oh, I get AMP just fine. I get that it's a power play by Google. The problem AMP is trying to solve is very real. But instead of trying to fix the problem, Google is using it to take an even greater chunk of the web.

No thanks

> Google gonna Google. They’ve been dangling carrots in front of publishers for twenty-one years.

I don't buy it. If that's true, how come all of the top results I get are slow, heavy bloated sites, yet small, simple, fast sites are ~10 pages deep?

Sure, speed should be a ranking factor, but I'd much rather have a slow site that's relevant than a fast one that isn't.

How about a relevant page that is fast. We can have the best of both worlds.

Wouldn't that be nice. But Google don't control how relevant or fast something is, they can only decide how to rank them.

... thats my point.

This is a problem that Google created. If they would prioritize small, simple, fast sites, and rank them higher, people would make more sites like that. Google is the one pushing slow, bloated sites to the top of the list. Now they are coming in to "fix" the problem that they made.

If you let GOOGLE control the browser, OS, search engine, keyboard, maps, and user created video content, what could possibly go wrong?

OP: You don't get HTML

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