Comment by lmm | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lmm | Hacker News Reader

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> AMP pages are fast to load (so fast to crawl), easy to understand (thanks to mandatory structured data), and devoid of any unwanted clutter or mess (as that breaks the standard).

Oh, how horrible it would be if the whole web were fast to load, easy to understand and devoid of unwanted clutter or mess.

I hate AMP because it makes my web experience slower and worse - lately it seems like Chrome on android has taken to loading broken "offline" versions of any suggested pages, making me refresh to read anything, and whenever a search takes me to reddit I have to edit the url to get a version that respects my page settings (and, strangely enough, loads a lot faster than the AMP version). But I don't see the chaos of the current web as inherently virtuous; encouraging web pages to load faster and be easier to read is absolutely something Google should be doing, and I'll certainly favour a search engine that prioritises fast, easy-to-read pages over one that doesn't.

> encouraging web pages to load faster and be easier to read is absolutely something Google should be doing

Completely disagree. They should focus their energy on fixing their search engine. And all the bugs in gmail. And the bugs in their advertising engine. And maybe stop tracking everyone. and...

> I'll certainly favour a search engine that prioritises fast, easy-to-read pages over one that doesn't.

I won't. I'll favour a search engine that gives me pages that have the best information on them. A search engine that helps me to find the hidden nuggets of information that are hiding in the far corners of the Internet, even if they don't appear on a fast, popular site that earns revenue for google through google ads or by harvesting user data via google analytics.

> I'll favour a search engine that gives me pages that have the best information on them. A search engine that helps me to find the hidden nuggets of information that are hiding in the far corners of the Internet, even if they don't appear on a fast, popular site

What use is the "best information" if it's on a page that takes forever to load and is so cluttered that you can't actually find the information there? I don't search for the sake of searching, I search because I want to find a particular piece of information, which means the end-to-end process - not just finding the "right" page, but finding and understanding the part that I actually wanted from that page - is what's important.

> that earns revenue for google through google ads or by harvesting user data via google analytics.

That sounds pretty backwards - IME the fastest, least cluttered sites tend to be those with the fewest ads.

Are you serious? Even in really bad examples the info is still there and readable even after closing several popups and muting videos. It should be punished to some extend, but giving you pages irrelevant info is a complete failure.

Completely irrelevant info is a failure, sure. But slightly less detailed info on a significantly better page is probably better than slightly more detailed info on a page that's a pain to deal with. There's a balance to be struck; a fast-loading, uncluttered page is not the be all and end all, but it's not nothing either. (And frankly those tend to be the pages with the best information anyway).

My main annoyance with AMP is reddit because their version is especially shitty if you expect the logged in version. I've found the easiest way to get normal Reddit is to click the upvote button.

I havent got any amp in a while and thought it went away only to realize that it was because I use Duckduckgo. Its a true relief, Amp is a horrible excuse to accaparate the web. Down with amp and the google supremacy.

Not that reddit web is much better than AMP.

I've switched to their android app for this. Much faster and better experience.

Thats the idea. They cripple the web version so you use the app that can spam you with notifications. I use i.reddit.com which loads up a super fast version clearly designed to work well with an iphone 3.

I switched to Compact reddit a few years ago - much easier ride than the full site or needing a separate app.

https://www.reddit.com/new/.compact

Faster relative to the website but reddits app just seems... ill. Just not very good.

I have been on connections ranging from 500k, to 500M, to ~2.1G (presumably bottlenecked on the wifi but you get the idea) and the app seems to load at exactly the same rate for me.

Barely related but I've yet to find a home run of an app for this site. I'm using materialistic at the moment but it's nigh impossible to manage replies and I can't see votes.

Google could have given its users the same advantages of AMP without AMP just by saying: we'll penalize slow and cluttered websites in web searches, in favour of fast and clean ones.

That would have been equally painful for the developers, but not for the users.

They actually do penalize slow and cluttered websites but not enough. I've seen some companies websites download 20mb for a simple landing page and still come up higher than other pages that are way faster.

They should penalize more instead of forcing us to use AMP almost as a power move from them.

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