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Comment by pwthornton | Hacker News Reader

AMP pages are designed explicitly to benefit Google over the site in question. They rob the ability to use design to make a site stickier (which would of course make the bounce rate high for AMP pages).

I also in general find AMP pages to be a bit of a UX nightmare.

Outside of raw speed, I have nothing good to say about AMP pages, and the speed is nowhere near good enough to justify using them. They make the Web a worse place for the sole benefit of Google. They are abusing their monopoly position in search by forcing AMP pages down people's throats.

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They do rob sites of the ability to load 14 fonts, 2Mb of javascript and a gazillion images before letting me read the two paragraphs I want.

Just like they also rob you of forcing me to take a survey first, or hounding me for my email, or otherwise preventing me from doing the single thing I want to do (read your content).

Your site should be sticky because you have good content, not because you've tricked me into clicking more links.

"Protect me from sites with bad UX" is a responsibility i would be surprised to see even 2% of users requested of Google. But let's pretend you are right. There are a number of solutions Google could have used to combat that very issue, such as punishing sites with long load times or exorbitant number of external assets. None of them needed to involve not sending you to a website in the name of altruism.

I don't think Google has the usability of this correct. I don't like how awkard it feels to truly get to the article on the website and the URL. Having said that, I'm enjoying the speed and readability.

Is this opt-in for the publishers?

How different is this from from browser's blocking pop ups?

I prefer not to using a pop up blocker, so I experience the web like the general population. But I was so sick of publishers forcing ad clicks on mobile by effectively blocking scrolling on smaller form factor devices like my iPhone SE, that I've switched to the Brave browser.

1. Lots of users care. Watch any senior citizen on a mediocre PC surf the internet for twenty minutes.

2. Google did and still does. Load times were still unacceptable across the board, usually not because they had to be but often times because the people running the websites don't care enough to. Same as for HTTPS.

3. AMP is a more drastic reaction. It appears to be working.

That being said, I would like to see AMP become enacted only on sites that do actually take a long while to load. At the same time, AMP is still opt in. This isn't forced altruism, but you can play nicely or be lowered in rankings in response.

-- edited for formatting

Serious question: Shouldn't average users provide or retract traffic based on these preferences, and not Google as user-in-chief?

Personally I'd prefer that Google not play party whip in setting behavior patterns; I'd rather it be as decentralized as possible. To me that's one of the advantages of the web over the app ecosystem: power is more atomized.

In general, users do make their choice. Product designers counter by making it more difficult to leave or get content.

I'm a firmly bitter user who has stopped frequenting a lot of websites because they don't load well or don't give me what I consider to be an acceptable value prop (I'll happily turn off my adblocker if your ads are well behaved, I won't take a survey to read a one paragraph article).

But most users, and especially most non-technical users, aren't willing to take that same stance despite being very frustrated. It seems to vary between "well that's just how the internet is" to "I don't know any other sources". Having google prioritize non-terrible sources is a big boon to those non-technical users in my eyes, cemented firmly when I watch my mom or other older family members try to search the internet.

> But most users, and especially most non-technical users, aren't willing to take that same stance despite being very frustrated.

That's where you can help! The next time you visit your parents or non-techie friends, install something like Ghostery for them. It's not a long-term solution to web awfulness, but it makes the web less terrible for now.

I'm a long time user of Google's Personal Blocklist https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/personal-blocklist...

I got so tired of sites with scraped content behind ads and logins. It's not perfect but it helps.

I've noticed that I visit Forbes far less often and I'm much happier for it

Serious answer: companies use aggressive and abusive tactics because they work.

Why? Because users aren't power users. Most don't know better.

So I'm supposed to keep a mental database of all the sites I might visit, and whether their ads, pushy JS popups, autoplay videos, and other crap are too heavy for my taste? And consult that database every time I see an interesting-sounding headline on facebook or twitter or my news app, before I click on the link? If it's a site I've never visited, how do I even know whether the UX will be acceptable to me before I click?

I admit I do keep track of a handful of bad offenders in my head, but I really shouldn't have to do that. Sure, it would be better if there was a trusted decentralized system to enforce rules and guarantee a decent UX, perhaps with more granularity so people could set different acceptable points, but until that exists, of course I'm going to use the presence of an instant articles or AMP icon to guide my browsing.

You should probably use a "defense as default" mindset. Why, by default, do you assume sites you go to will be safe or sane? I don't

Because that's how the web used to work, and I've been using it for a while.

But how exactly are you suggesting I browse the web? Not following links unless I recognize the destination and know it to be a reasonable site? That just changes a mental blacklist into a whitelist. And how would I ever discover new reasonable sites?

Use an ad blocker? That feels like escalating a arms race, and I'd like to avoid that if at all possible. (I currently use Disconnect, which is only a tracking blocker, not an ad blocker, although some sites seem to think it is.)

> Use an ad blocker? That feels like escalating a arms race, and I'd like to avoid that if at all possible.

Yes, I'd also recommend a JS blocker. If you don't want to do that, that's OK, but don't expect any sympathy if you get compromised in any way. If you don't lock your front door, don't be surprised if someone breaks into your house.

I do.

If a site obstructs the content in any way, or starts playing sound and I didn't expect it (for example video sites may be acceptable) I hit back immiedately.

I don't expect most users behave in this way.

Most people don't give a shit. Plenty of my friends don't block ads. They don't care enough to care about anything "technical." Kind of like how my dad refuses to learn how to upload documents in an email. So we might make decisions and change our behavior, but I can assure you that the masses just go with the flow and probably don't care. It's why people shop at Walmart and don't change their privacy settings. They don't care enough to do differently, or sometimes it's not feasible. It takes a while to lock down your Facebook properly, and even then, they still collect so much data on you. Pretty much everyone I know wouldn't care to hear about the NSA, security, Facebook, etc. None of it matters. This is a pretty poorly worded and incoherent post, but my point is that many people don't even know what could be better. They don't realize the flaws in websites or companies or government programs, and they don't want to think about it. At least that's been my experience.

The fact is, we shouldn't need AMP to refocus our efforts in favour of the user... we should be making lean and performant pages as a matter of course.

I do agree that if Google really want to do anything to help the cause, they would more heavily lower the ranking (or completely remove from their index) any sites that don't meet basic performance and readability thresholds.

AMP is clearly a play into their own walled garden.

> heavily lower the ranking (or completely remove from their index) any sites that don't meet basic performance and readability thresholds.

This seems like a much tougher problem than AMP.

From an API design standpoint, it is much easier to build and maintain an endpoint that receives data that must be in a specific, proprietary data format instead of an endpoint that allows the user to input data in any format and then attempts to parse that data after receiving it.

So apparently google has decided the standards of good content. Great.

For the people using their product, yes. If you're using Google, you implicitly trust their result ranking and presentation (else you wouldn't be using Google.)

What is the problem here?

The problem is that they're leveraging a search advantage to force sites to change in a way that objectively ruins my experience by optimizing page load times over displaying the result URL I can click into. It's a search engine, not a cdn, and I resent their cutting out the results to serve the content they deem superior.

We can do all that without using AMP pages.

I understand and appreciate the benefits of AMP, but it would be great if there was a clear and consistent link/button to tap through to the original article on the source website.

Sometimes I want the source article because it had more features (comments, related articles, etc), and sometimes AMP is just glitchy.

We added that button to Google Search on the web about a month ago.

You added an obscure icon that when tapped reveals the link, which then must be also be tapped. That's a little more obtuse and undiscoverable than 'added that button'.

The fact that people here on HN are still requesting it says it's far from well implemented - I wouldn't have known about it if I hadn't read it somewhere when you added it. The more conspiratorial among us probably assume that implementing it poorly is intentional.

It'll be replaced with a standard share button once navigator.share() API launches.

Given that you are the tech lead on AMP at Google, maybe you can clarify a bit on this...but why the decision to group this interaction under Sharing? It seems like people are trying to just visit the original site, not share it, and one of the big criticisms has been that this is buried. Presumably putting it under Sharing is also a bit confusing because to many, "sharing" implies sending content to someone which describes a very different interaction than opening the original page.

Is it because "Sharing" in this case us meant to imply pushing the content to another medium (such as an external browser) vs. just the implied meaning of "sharing with another person?"

I'd love any context you can share from internal discussions around how prominent to make that functionality. I think it is hard to deny that Google benefits from it being harder to find, which is where the criticism from the parent is likely coming from.

Only a tiny percentage of users wants to use the "click through to original" feature. Sharing is a major use case that strongly benefits publisher. In the end one has to make trade offs what to make prominent in a UI.

As a user who frequently wants to change the rendering, I don't think I would have ever thought to look under share. I associate the 'share' section with tracking code and buttons for social networks.

And yet, it's what a search engine is supposed to do: link you to someone else's site.

Yes, solution is sub-optimal, as djrogers says :)

Also: using browser's native sharing option, shares the Google URL's, not the "real" one

On our radar to get browsers to change and they have been receptive to our proposal.

Cool! That's good news :)

Nope.

I literally loaded Chrome for Android after reading your comment, searched for a Reddit thread, and no button, nor any other way to bypass AMP without having clicked the AMP link already.

Screenshot: http://i.imgur.com/Xnrlzcs.png

They refer to the moment you open a AMP result.

Before, there was no way to get the original URL. Now they display a "link" icon on the top so you can get the original URL.

From the results themselves, no, there is no way to bypass AMP (like there is with App-indexing)

I also really wish there was a useful way to turn AMP off - it very much interferes with my browsing habits.

I find messing with the user agent (mobile firefox plugin "phony" lets you pose as lynx, for example!) can be effective, and also I saw on a google products discussion page that using the url https://news.google.com/news/i#0 returns non-AMP results.

Why it can't just be a user option to disable it, I've no idea.

The better answer to those problems is to lower their page rank, not to mirror their content and steal their traffic and then lower their rank if they don't agree to having their content mirrored and traffic stolen.

> or otherwise preventing me from doing the single thing I want to do (read your content)

Google amp could play an important role in the future if net neutrality changes significantly. It also brings up some questions about whose content you're actually reading if Google is acting as a middle man between producer and consumer. In the worst case scenario, the amp'd version of a page could be different from what the original author intended.

I completely disagree that the speed isn't good enough to justify using them.

In fact, my bounce rate is high on AMP because I can near-instantly figure out if this particular article on this topic I searched is the one I actually want to read or if it's uninformative trash. I usually flip through 2-5 before settling on the one I think is good.

These are the same sorts of complaints people have made about every change to search ranking. And while, yeah, I'm sure Google's not being altruistic, the implications of most of their actions in these spaces is pretty consistent:

If you want people's attention, don't ship trash.

Agreed. As a user, I couldn't care less about your bounce rate.

Completely agree

BUT, the problem stated in the article has nothing to do with that behaviour. It refers to the inability to track the user journey correctly due to Google's AMP distribution system. It doesn't matter if you click on an AMP result an go back in 2 seconds, or if you click on an AMP result, read 30 seconds, and click on a link inside the content that takes you to the original website: both cases are considered bounces.

Yep pretty much. Can a publisher choose who caches his result, and pick the ones that give him the best deal money wise? Otherwise, Google turned into a bookstore with a printer in the back and no way for the publishers to trust the reseller.

I don't believe so. Google's AMP Cache is opportunistic with no opt-out for valid AMP pages. Further, according to the AMP Cache Guidelines at https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/blob/master/spec/amp-c...,

> In the AMP ecosystem, the platform that links to content may freely choose which AMP Cache (if any) to use. It is an inversion of the typical model where content delivery is the responsibility of the publisher.

If you work for Google, push back on this in whatever way you can. Especially now that the government is putting a fox in every regulatory hen house, developers need to hold their employers to basic standards. Connecting visibility in listings to the AMP project is classic monopoly abuse, even if they use load speed as rationale.

All I would ask is for AMP links to have a link at the top of the page that says "press here for original article" to quickly go to the source. The only way I currently know how to do this is by going to the URL bar, which isn't that great on any mobile device.

They finally added a way to easily get the original URL (click the link button in the AMP header). Not ideal, but better than trying to get it out of the address bar.

I had to check moments ago, and you're right. It must have been very recent!

The actual answer to the question posed by the blog post is purely technical in nature. Sorry, no conspiracy theory to find here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13838756

I am a very happy user of amp content. After all that's what amp is designed for to load clean content quickly.

APM is making users happy and frustrating content providers grey patterns for retention. Seems like a win-win.

Talk of robbing and forcing implies a level of coercion that simply isn't there.

For the end user, AMP links are clearly marked, and non-AMP news results are readily available.

For the content producer, Google only publishes their content via AMP if the content producer permits it. Indeed, it is up to the content producer to make the AMP version of their content.

> For the content producer, Google only publishes their content via AMP if the content producer permits it. Indeed, it is up to the content producer to make the AMP version of their content.

Content producers are being strong-armed into this by Google because AMP capable pages are being given preferential treatment in the SERPS.

Is it possible that AMP pages are preferred because they're a better user experience?

Google prefers them because they give Google more power.

They also:

  - break the web

  - hijack content

  - reduce the value for the publisher

  - make it impossible for the publisher to monetize their content

  - are a step back from an open web

Pretty soon you'll be 'certified information provider' to Google rather than web publisher.

Why stop at mobile?

>break the web

Okay, how? AMP is built on HTML5 standards.

>hijack content

AMP Cache is different than AMP. Do CDNs also "hijack content", by serving them from faster servers?

>reduce the value for the publisher

By offering them an option to make pages load faster?

>make it impossible for the publisher to monetize their content

Incorrect. Read up on the allowed tags in AMP. Both ads and analytics are possible; they're just delayed until after the content is shown.

>are a step back from an open web

Built on open web standards.

>> break the web

> Okay, how? AMP is built on HTML5 standards.

Will only comment on this: it should be easy to figure out a way to break the open web using HTML5 standards:

- browser sniffing

- crazy javascript navigation

etc. Just from the top of my head.

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