It turns out that if you strip most of the JS bloat from a webpage and serve it from a fast CDN, the page loads way faster. Shocking stuff.
People talk a lot of trash about AMP, but until there's another solution that allows me to go to a news website and actually read it, I'm an AMP supporter.
But still you are loading ton of unnecessary content. Ad blocking on iOS still sucks (no custom filters).
If anything I prefer this way of working - Apple alone are responsible for maintaining a high performance adblocker in Safari, the wider app ecosystem just provides the block lists, rather than rely on app developers to write performant browser plugins.
Shills and Kool-aid-drinking zealots mostly - they are the ones usually motivated enough to do 'journalism' for free. Don't expect any professionalism, depth or any form of investigative journalismbeyond tweet-storms.
There's similar blogs for every small community, run by people who care about that community. Usually unfunded, and only covering stories of interest to that community.
We outsourced our opinions and fact-finding to journalists for a few hundred years. Now that time has past. Journalists themselves have destroyed their own industry by producing a poor quality product. Maybe in future journalists will re-invent themselves as purveyors of pure factual reporting, and those that care about that kind of thing will pay for it. But it is a niche market. Democracy, decency, enlightenment and society will suffer of course. But those things were never guaranteed with any kind of real safeguards.
If you think this was ever the case, rose colored glasses are in effect.
Unless you’re doing tree shaking, which AMP can’t do duplicate, compression has rendered “minification” useless long time ago anyway.