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Comment by tyingq | Hacker News Reader

>Can anyone explain the reason why people think its ethically bad

This is just one of many reasons, but try this on a mobile phone.

Go to Google and search for "Trump"

Note what choices you have to pick from without excessive scrolling. They all end in either ads or Google urls.

Click one of the featured stories in the carousel, almost guaranteed to be an AMP site. Seems to be a prerequisite to sit in the carousel.

Lets say you land on a Washington Post story. What do you think a "right swipe" should do? Should it navigate to a competitor of Wapo? This is Wapo's page, right? So it should go to another Wapo page. Nope, it goes to Fox News.

Okay, so now you've navigated from Wapo to say Fox News. Hit the back button. It should go back to the Wapo story, right? Nope, goes back to Google.

How this isn't viewed as a land grab is a mystery to me.

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For some reason I'm not experiencing the same at all.

I googled "Trump". First five stories in carousel (wapo, bbc et all) are not AMP. I see only one AMP link in the first page results. Click on it, page loads. Swipe right/back button gets me to Google results (as expected). Is it because I'm on an iPhone and this is an Android thing?

Not an iPhone issue - https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=trump returns. I thing but amp pages I’ve the carousel or the first page of results other than the links to Wikipedia and his Twitter page.

Same search though ddg with !g comes out completely different though....

what is this right-swipe business? You swipe and it, what, just takes you to a page that the makers of the current page think you should read next in your infinite time-sink staring at your phone‽

Well, in this case the makers of the previous page (Google) are deciding what right swipe on the current page (Washington Post) does.

It certainly makes it clear that the content owner of an AMP page is not the page owner.

I get that, but what is right-swipe supposed to or expected to do? Why would people be right-swiping ever?

Many reasons. A popular one would be to flip through a gallery of photos related to the story. That one's VERY common.

Also, I missed mentioning the [X] button on the AMP header banner. I bet that most end users think that [X] button should make the AMP banner disappear, while leaving the page content there. Pretty common pattern, like for the EU cookie warning. That's not what it does, though.

Back to the "right swipe", at the very least, it should do nothing, assuming that an AMP page belongs to the publisher.

Ok, sure. Going through a slide-show makes total sense. So, you're saying that there's no normal behavior on a plain website for swiping right (yes? I don't use mobile much myself), but AMP adds a Google-centric swipe-right function regardless of whether there would otherwise be no swipe-right function or some other expected one. Am I understanding now?

Yes, that's it. Google hijacks the back button, swipes, and the [X] button on the AMP banner...in favor of Google, and to the detriment of the publisher.

That is indeed horrible. I am glad to learn that there isn't otherwise some new trend of people constantly right-swiping for no apparent reason though.

> I bet that most end users think that [X] button should make the AMP banner disappear, while leaving the page content there. Pretty common pattern,

Dark petterns, MS, google, facebook etc. It's becoming the norm for the behemoth corporations to do this.

Thank you! I’ve been wondering what this AMP fiasco was all about when I have never seen such a site. It turns out I have developed banner-blindness on the Google search results. I have always scrolled to the “real” first result without ever considering the ads and carousels.

Also, before there was no guarantee that the organic results would contain Google ads as publishers could relatively easily find higher CPM payouts elsewhere.

Well, with AMP, the the mobile results are basically ads, then AMP results which are guaranteed to have Google ads. So the percentage of searches makes Google money increases while similar reducing revenue from competitive ad networks who are not approved.

So in other words, ad blockers should block Google's "Top Stories" ?

The argument that swipe behavior should be entirely within the control of the publisher feels like an oversimplification. Plenty of UI elements are designed to work at a higher level of scope than the document: back, bookmark list, [X] button, home button, etc.

Yes, I did mention how Google hijacks the back button on AMP pages as well. The point being that AMP is a walled garden to serve Google's needs...not an honest effort to make sites perform better.

You mention the [X] button. How many end users do you suppose think that the [X] on the AMP header bar should make the header bar go away...versus functioning like a back button, going all the way back to the google search? I suspect they are conditioned by things like the EU cookie warnings that an [X] on a header bar makes it go away.

An AMP page you reach from a Google search is Google's page, period. It's not the publisher's page. And that's no accident or side effect. It's the whole point. Performance is a secondary concern.

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