I Have Resigned from the Google AMP Advisory Committee
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The site caught on in certain circles and pageviews skyrocketed within a few months. I was not the only person pursuing this strategy at the time.
Before a year had gone by, almost all the major news sites had updated their pages with JavaScript intended to either block iframing altogether, or to “break out” of the iframe, redirecting the viewer to their actual page. We even got a few nasty letters and emails about it with terms like “litigation” casually thrown in.
The project became untenable because of this and I shut it down.
Fast forward a few years and imagine my dismay when I see Google Amp doing essentially the same thing - but on a much larger scale....
Wrapping the content in an iframe allowed the host to monetize our content by decorating it with ads. This would dillute the CTR on our ads, resulting in less money. Big sites enter into contracts with major brands for full page advertisements, which could include contractual requirements that theirs is the only ad on the page. Serving and decorating a site would create headaches for us to explain why their ads weren't alone.
The iframe also reduced engagement as reader would only read the embedded article and move on. An actual visitor of the site had a far higher likelihood to navigate to other pages. Higher engagement resulted in more money and some brand loyalty. This also dramatically hurt sharing as the browser URL wasn't ours, but the hosts (which I also hate about AMP).
Your site messed with a lot of the ways their business generated revenue, in an industry that was already struggling to adapt to "the internet".
Where would this sit on that line? It’s just an example but for the 1000 ppl trying to create laws there are 10000x trying to bypass them.
I don’t think restrictions are the way forward but as of now I haven’t come up with a viable alternative.
I love web scraping (it and tampermonkey basically got me into CS) but lets not act as if this behavior has no moral precedent.
Also, what do you mean by "disruption"? Using "their" content in a way they don't like? content manipulation on my machine is my house, not theirs.
This sounds like a PR copypaste. I don't want to "steal" content, I want to restrict the number of ways I can be influenced to view it. And "high quality content" is often not the case here; I have to get through a lot of crap to get to real news in a lot of cases. There is also the problem of who gets to judge quality - often those that tell people what they want to here are judged so - Reality has a subjective bias.
Copying copyrights is more complex.
If a content provider can dictate the terms by which their content is consumed, why not dictate linking rights too?
Most software engineers innately know that taking an open-source project, stripping the authorship, putting it your own site and running ads next to it is unethical, regardless of the licensing etc. Yet, when it comes to capturing news stories of equivalent production effort, "information wants to be free". I think that may largely be a failure to understand the work that real reporting takes.
Ironically, as prestige newsrooms have shrunk, the percentage of high-quality stories has gone down because revenue has declined and those stories are expensive. So in fact we do perversely end up with more click-bait as Google et al engineered systems to optimize for attention and click-through (the opposite of a multi-part investigation).
You are suggesting these are mutually exclusive.
See the "yellow journalism" of Joseph Pulitzer's era, for example.
Further, "expensive, pulitzer level" work may also be agenda-driven. Walter Duranty's bias and agenda, for example, aren't really in doubt anymore.
Biased isn't a boolean, it's a scale. Something that is a little bit biased is more useful for trying to understand all the issues at hand. Something that's very biased is still useful, but only for telling you what the author (and their readership) thinks.
> See the "yellow journalism" of Joseph Pulitzer's era, for example.
> Further, "expensive, pulitzer level" work may also be agenda-driven. Walter Duranty's bias and agenda, for example, aren't really in doubt anymore.
Those examples are stale. It's like saying there's no evidence that English language literature was ever common in any library, and citing the contents of some British library circa 1100AD as proof. Pulitzer's yellow journalism phase spanned from the late 1800s to about 1900. In the last decade of his life, he rejected it an apparently turned his paper into a respectable publication [1]. Duranty's reporting occurred in the early 1930s, and has since been scathingly criticized and rejected by the paper he published it in [2].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_journalism#After_the_wa...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Duranty#Calls_for_revoc...
More recent examples of bias tend to be still politically controversial, like the years of coverage of Trump-Russian collusion in the 2016 election, which resulted in 2 Pulitzers:
For deeply sourced, relentlessly reported coverage in the public interest that dramatically furthered the nation’s understanding of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election and its connections to the Trump campaign, the President-elect’s transition team and his eventual administration.
Ultimately, the investigation did not establish that the Campaign coordinated or conspired with the Russian government in its election-interference activities.
Bias is basically universal, but claiming neutrality while exercising obvious bias destroys credibility.
There is compelling evidence of the Trump campaign working with Russians.
https://www.pulitzer.org/winners/staffs-new-york-times-and-w...
There is also good circumstantial evidence connecting the Russian actors to the Russian government, but Mueller couldn't subpoena or extradite across the Atlantic, and declined to follow the money trail.
This undercuts your point somewhat, but on the other hand perhaps you are being intentionally self-referential.
$120 a year for a subscription might seem iniquitous to HN readers. From the business point of view you need over 1500 subscription to pay for a single dev working at non-large-city rate, e.g., in Richmond Virginia. That's just to run the website, not to generate content. It's a big hill to climb.
My estimate assumes a $150/year salary + benefits, $120 subscription, and 20% customer acquisition cost for each subscription.
150000 / (120 * (1 - .20))
My point is that you have to make real money to support these businesses, which means figuring out a monetization strategy that results in 10s or even hundreds of thousands of subscribers.
Investigative journalism is 1 or 2% of the budget of most media companies. Saying that running a media company is expensive because of investigative journalism is like saying that running a tech company is expensive because of the free snacks.
A more apt analogy would be that it was like saying Google was expensive to run because of theoretical CS basic research.
Right now it seems back to paid models for a lot, but I wonder if it's too late now with all the damaged reputation and the shift in consumer expectation (that they help create) that news and journalism should be free. I'd guess for a lot of those newspapers and magazines it will be too late, while a few will survive the onslaught and be able to concentrate the willing-to-pay consumers.
OK but they created that expectation in the 1890s. The Internet isn't the cause of the media companies' problems, it's just beating them at their own game.
Youtube personalities are aggregating and editorializing their content and making millions to pay for a staff of 1.
Others are just going and doing the reporting themselves and doing similarly -- paying for the camera crew and legal defense out of their own pockets.
Those youtube personalities dwarf the reach and viewership that all but the clickbaitiest media companies are getting.
That's what's satisfying the market need right now. That's what media companies have to compete against. They'll never get back the dominant position that they once had and ads will never work for their business again. Why would I pay for a display ad on your site when I can pay for a video ad that has much better targeting?
This is the issue that most people have missed. Advertising dollars flow to where they are most efficient. News site display ads are a shotgun whereas youtube channel, facebook page, news aggregator ads are a sniper. If any periodical is going to succeed, they're going to need to cater to a hyper specific niche that has cash.
Err no, it might look that way sometimes so that it seems authentic, but most major youtubers have staff. They are way more lean on expense than the TV pundits but still!
Also we're comparing this to entire media organizations, so it's mostly irrelevant.
The sliminess of the online advertising industry wasn't a secret 10 years ago or something.
So don't talk about it as if they ever were an ethical source of business income. (Not just talking about all the lying that is inherent in advertising, print ads suffer from that too)
They never were, they're not like inert pieces of your magazine. They're little pieces of software doing whatever the fuck it likes, control that you offer to semi-anonymous parties over your readers.
Imagine if a print newspaper didn't just sell ad space in their print, but whoever buys the ad also determines what ink it is printed with. And the ink can be any substance! Sometimes it's ink, sometimes it's poop, sometimes it's smallpox, sometimes it's radioactive.
I mean, MOST of the time it's really just ink, with only a tiny amount of aerosolized heroin, just your average respectable ads. But every once in a while, and there is really nothing to do but hope it happens to the other paper first, it'll really harm the reader.
I mean you can't really expect a news magazine to check all the ink its printed with right, just doesn't scale.
Perhaps equipment, running presses and website, etc. are large expenses too, but humans tend to cost a lot of money.
I would suppose the offices, computers, health benefits for family etc. might not count as part of the investigative journalism budget as well. Or they might, accountants of respective media companies would know I guess.
That's not just an impression, it's a fact. More than once have I seen commenters suggest (with what I assume is a straight face) that amateur bloggers can effectively replace "the media." A similar position I've seen frequently is that science reporting is worthless, and individuals should just sift through the all raw papers instead (which not even actual scientists do).
The best bloggers can do is substitute for opinion writers, since having and expressing an opinion is really a solo endeavor, regardless of where you do it. Pretty much everything else needs a bigger team and more support structure.
Does your poor esteem for bloggers apply to activists like me?
That's exactly it. I elided some thoughts about sustainability from my comment, but I basically think reporting is so much more labor intensive than opinionating that no configuration of amateur or part-time bloggers can substitute for all the vital civic functions of a newspaper.
That's not to say that bloggers can't to real reporting, but when they do, by necessity it will have a far narrower topical focus and will either burn out an amateur blogger or force that blogger to professionalize and evolve their blog into something a lot like a traditional media organization.
Given how much easier opinionating is, I'd wager 99%+ of bloggers will stick to it (and other easy things like link aggregation) 99%+ of the time. If you skim the cream, you could probably come up with something more-or-less comparable to a newspaper opinion page.
Only notion I have for addressing this is some kind of grant or fellowship, meaning just give prospects cash.
The major difference is people going in to journalism tend not to be domain experts or leaders in their field. That means bloggers can easily substitute for investigative journalism - university professors, for example, are usually better researchers than news reporters.
In fact, in this rather divided era, it is fair to question character of most journalists and ask exactly what is positive about their contribution. Good intentions do not make good outcomes, and for most things I care about the formal media is more effective at silencing real concerns than amplifying them. Bloggers sometimes get upset about issues that are important to me and tend to sustain the coverage for years. Consider https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groklaw . No competition I'm aware of in the media circuits for that sort of work. I'll take the bloggers thanks.
A rather older sense of "profession" (maybe concurrent with people calling themselves amateur journalists) meant any job which entailed a primary responsibility to the public, like a doctor, a lawyer, or a journalist. Unlike the other professions, one didn't need any educational credentials, bonding or special license to be a journalist.
Journalism is unique among the professions: in at least some sense of the word, if one considers oneself a journalist, one is a journalist.
Among many parts of the public, the perception (that IMO is correct) is that serious news gathering and reporting is the rare exception, not the norm. It certainly seems like most news pieces these days take the form of uncritically reporting anything the government proclaims as fact, thinly veiled activism, and meaningless outrage click farming. The respectable journalists out there with a shred of integrity and effort put into their reporting are very rare. Maybe a Glenn greenwald (who is an idealogical opposite of mine) is a rare exception. But I’d struggle to name more than like 5 journalists i think are even largely interested in truth, willing to take some risks, and have a bit of integrity. The business model of journalism has changed (outrage based click farming) and the profession’s respectability (to me) has changed with it. Journalism was respectable before you could measure clicks and therefore profit.
Not just governments, but also corporations and universities. Very often 'news stories' are just thinly veiled press releases.
I think what they failed at was actually putting in the time and effort. I read news stories every day that fail to include basic pieces of information. How many news stories have you read that say "The Republicans proposed X dollars and the Democrats proposed Y dollars" that don't make any sort of historical or international comparison? It seems to me that "serious news gathering and reporting" would include comparing the amount of money to similar situations in the past or to similar situations in other countries, and yet, I almost never see that. The word "stenographers" has become more and more common for a reason - news stories, particularly political news stories, increasingly include quotes from the few active actors on the topic today, but no serious research or serious context outside of the people who literally called the reporter.
only "stripping the authorship" makes it unethical, all the other things are totally fine and approved in the open source world.
Make an entire copy of debian software repository? People will thank you for another "mirror".
create a webpage which hosts existing docs (like man pages or software package documentation)? Totally fine as long as the docs are not modified (so any AUTHOR section is intact)
create another "how to get started with ZZZ" website, which is three quarter official docs? Ok as long as license allows remixing. Many do.
start a business which took over many project's discussion forums and centralized information in one place? And then the said business gets millions from ads and kills many previous forums? People love this, some even say that Stack Overflow is "the best thing that happened to programming"
and so on... so for people used to open source model, news aggregators are totally fine, as long as content is not modified and there is a clear attribution. The GP comment mentions "iframes", so both of those would have been true - it's not like you can blank out author name from a third-party iframe.
Yes, the journalism is different and the open source rules do not apply to it. But hopefully you can see where does this "information wants to be free" mindset is coming from.
The entire point of RSS was to put the reader into exactly that position though.
I blame marketeers trying to control the brand, messaging and experience.
I have a suspicion that journalists rely on RSS more than the general population, which gives the technology support within news organizations themselves.
And we maintain feeds for the Canadian government archives.
I can only imagine American outlets do something similar.
In 1972 Alan Kay predicted that one of the first programs the user of a global network would write would be a "filter to eliminate advertising."
However, I don't know if he foresaw that opportunistic republishers would strip the original ads and replace them with new ones.
Because in that case there is no good guy, no "other side", just garbage.
Stuffing the WWW with ad networks isn't exactly saving it.
Iframe is a security trainwreck. You could clickjack Google's login widget iframe to steal account details as late as 2018, maybe even later.[1]
Whatever legitimate gripes you may have with AMP, it's not the same as iframes at all.
That seems like it should be relatively fixable. For example, iframes could be visible, clearly marked (including the URL), and sandboxed like any separate page. One could go further by insisting that they are display-only and can only be displayed rather than interacted with. Then an iframe would basically be a glorified jpg with a URL.
But if you just want to embed completely static article, I suppose it could work, but then there’s no incentive for anyone to allow them.
[1] Yes, I pulled that number out of my ____.
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Headers/X-...
Edit: looks like Safari, IE, and Edge don't check all ancestors which is a potential flaw. Chrome and Firefox do though.
Amp isn't even close to the same thing as iFrames. And the difference is they did it with the publishers' consent. Why is it okay to put their content on your own site?
As for a business model we've found that a freemium model with a modest subscription fee is a good way to monetize while making this accessible to a wide audience.
No matter how much they want ligitate and threaten they wouldn't actually know who to send the threat to, and it wouldn't be possible to take it down.
Web feature: works as intended, allowing aggregation and republishing
Businesses/lawyers: we hate that, shut it down!
> Fast forward a few years and imagine my dismay when I see Google Amp doing essentially the same thing
Google has the deep pockets to defend itself against spurious lawsuits.
Brutal, but at least we know an insider agrees that AMP is hostile to the web. If others leave, will that push Google to make better decisions? Probably not.
Related: Can we start an HN trend of replacing the word Google in posts with !G to throw some shade at the evil empire?
Or:
3D printing layer shift !r
We're still beta testing (and launching early next year) but you can get the browser testflight beta from here https://insightbrowser.com/ and the AMP disabling extension here http://share.insightbrowser.com/8
Would love feedback or any changes you'd like to make. Feel free to respond here or abhinav@insightbrowser.com
A lot of this is reddit’s fault, as they completely undoubtedly have deliberately ruined their own mobile browser experience to try and force you to download the app, but AMP makes it at least doubly bad
Certainly not. If decision-makers believe it is in their interests, and they can get away with it, they will keep doing it. So you can try to convince decision makers that it is not in their interests, or you can try to show them that they can't get away with it. Quitting an advisory board does neither.
Note that the OP didn't really say they thought or intended it would. They said they were glad they tried to impact AMP positively, they don't think they succeeded, and they are choosing to spend time on other things such as an educational program. Of course by making a public announcement perhaps they hope to affect something, but probably more encourage others in the struggle; after seeing how they couldn't have much impact on the advisory committee, I am sure they know they won't have much impact simply by resigning from it, at least not impact on Google directly.
> To respond to the threat of header bidding, Google created Accelerated Mobile Pages (“AMP”), a framework for developing mobile web pages, and made AMP essentially incompatible with JavaScript and header bidding.
1.https://www.texasattorneygeneral.gov/sites/default/files/ima...
The premise that the web ought to compete with native app experience is flawed to begin with. Executing that goal through a corporate gateway is perverse.
The kind of web pages that people install as apps are made significantly worst by amp - like reddit is unuseable monstrosity with amp.
And when people answered with tangible good reasons to use app instead of web ... you move goalposts.
Google holds a large amount of sway over HTML's direction. This is derived from the fact that WHATWG is the standards body for HTML. (W3C is just a rubber stamp per the agreement between the two last year.) And this group is directed by four companies--Apple, Google, Microsoft, and Mozilla.
The power balance in this relationship heavily favors Google. It controls the purse of Mozilla. Microsoft's browser is based on Chromium. And Chrome already owns the majority of the market.
What Google wants from HTML, Google can get. Even if there is push back from others, they only need to release "beta" versions of their changes for the standard, wait for developers to take advantage of them, and then reintroduce the suggestions. At that point, Apple and the others will have little resource.
Google is simply too powerful and a threat to the open Web.
Perhaps instead of looking at which companies release browsers, they should just start putting the Chromium, WebKit, and Gecko teams there.
True, but that assumes without google, that's what we have. In fact, many of the content providers themselves don't want free exchange, every website trying to be it's own walled garden.
If google can force the hand of those trying to lock their content in their own formats, there maybe benefit to the clout of google.
I don't see this as Google trying to open up other sites, as much as it is trying to rebrand and gut other sites.
I feel bad for any other provider out there who thinks they 'have to' create AMP pages. They really shouldn't, if they don't it'll die like so many other Google fiascos.
There's lots of extremely qualified people fighting over working with/for Google, even for free.
Also, there are many idealists, who believe that they, alone, can "bring light to darkness."
I can't really blame them, but I'm old and cynical, with a singed tuchus, from playing that game, so you probably won't find me sitting on these committees.
Absolutely. I'd take it. I'd probably try to undermine the effort, but I'd still take the position!
I think the era of subversive engineering is dawning. We've had wave after wave of high-profile resignations and data leaks in the name of ethics, only to see their position filled with two worse candidates: a hydra of corruption!
How soon until ethical engineers realize protests don't work and start to corrode monopolies from the inside out? (like when Agent K jumps down the throat of The Bug in MiB.) Is that in itself ethical? That's a tough question, we'll know it when we see it?
I've followed your participation from time to time, and appreciate the lengths you've gone to keep an eye on them and push them in the right direction, but it's pretty clear what their goals were from the start.
Whenever I'm on an AMP website I make an effort to use the "real" version instead by following the link in the top right corner.
Nine times out of ten that non-AMP page content is harder to read – the notifications more intrusive, the content jumps around while loading.
It looks like Google are now taking a more-refined approach to prioritising pages in mobile results, but I like that AMP forced publishing companies to take a hard look at page performance, for the first time in a while.
There are so many other things you could do that fixes your problem WITHOUT handing over the internet to a single company.
You will note that Wikipedia, for example, doesn’t have the type of bloat that an online newspaper article does. Why is that? The question is one of incentives.
It seems pointless to bring up a volunteer run website where people do charity work in a discussion about business practices of businesses that need to have cash flow to pay employees.
It's Google's arbitrary proprietary subset of web technologies.
It's only fast because Google preloads all of JS while you search.
It aggressively hides the origin source, depriving sites of user traffic.
Google prioritizes AMP content over any other content even if that other content may be better and/or load faster.
What does this mean? If I click a link on an amp page, I may end up on the full site, and if not, analytics and ads are supported. What do I lose other than the cost of rendering a page view?
You don't land on the original page. You land on a Google page. Even the URL says google.com. To get to the actual original page, you need to click on the tiny (i) in the corner. And even there the link is styled as non-clickable link.
If you swipe, for example, you end up on the next Google property ^W^W that is a news item that Google displays on its own domain.
And AMP may provably drive traffic away: https://kinsta.com/blog/disable-google-amp/
Yes. So what? If I, from the AMP page, click on a link, I'll go to the full site (I just checked this on CNN's amp pages). Ads and analytics are still supported.
> If you swipe, for example, you end up on the next Google property ^W^W that is a news item that Google displays on its own domain.
This didn't happen when I just attempted it.
> And AMP may provably drive traffic away:
If you read the article, they say that they got more clicks and pageviews, but fewer conversions, likely because they hadn't spent time optimizing the AMP site for conversions.
One could just as well portray "downranking slow pages" as "boosting fast pages". With the latter system developers would be encouraged to reduce filesizes and JS bloat on their existing pages. As a mobile, and desktop user, I would appreciate that.
Also, the parent said there was many things the GP could do, while the GP was talking about as an end user, not a developer. As an end user if my choice is between a fast smooth sleek amp page or a 10 second blank screen and a page that hides the content, has autoplaying videos, and required me to dismiss a 1/3 cookie banner, I'm going to pick the amp version.
I realise the irony as this still relies on Google, but: I'm surprised that such user-hostile designs are still around, considering Google presumably takes steps to punish such designs in their search rankings.
The m.foo.com usage has been around for ages in Internet time, it could do with some standardization and tooling to ensure it gives the quickest page loads possible.
True and false. It forced companies to pay attention to page performance... and then create an entirely separate version of every page they have, using up valuable developer time that could have been spent making the original pages faster.
Google should (and now/soon are?) assess the performance of the page and rank it accordingly, not force everyone to make two versions of their site. But this is where the sneaky part of AMP comes in: they wanted that side-swiping carousel that meant you never engaged deeply with any one site and instead stayed on google.com (and kept those google.com ad cookies, natch). There was no way to force people into that without AMP.
I think the point you're actually making is that without AMP forcing these sites to be faster, they would still be slow. Which I agree with. But as I said in my original post, Google ranking sites according to their performance would have the exact same effect as forcing AMP on people, except that it would let sites choose their own implementation rather than be strong-armed into one controlled by Google.
Again, no. The argument was that time spent focused on page performance would have the same effect. If Google punished slow pages in rankings that is all the incentive needed, not the creation of an entirely new platform.
If the reading I've done is accurate, Google tried this for quite a long time before AMP. The issue seems to be that there are just too many other factors with higher ROI for speed to be prioritized consistently.
IMO, AMP put companies in a position where speed mattered and most other things didn't. It focused minds in ways that using speed as a factor in ranking did not.
That argument makes zero sense to me. Either they rank faster and lighter sites higher or they don't. AMP is completely orthogonal to that.
With that said, as far as I can tell, the difference between two sites is almost never a simple as a single factor. There are hundreds of things that influence rankings. So companies can and do worry more about other concerns, including squeezing more ad income out of each pageview and getting into more search results in the first place.
AMP took away a lot of the other things that companies would invest developer time in.
Having to edit url would matter little on PC, but massively sux at mobile. And it is overall slower then however slow original page was.
Maybe Google should just build something like this if usability is in their interest. Someone pitch this idea to them!
They do not, and they will not.
I don't like amp. I don't like that unrelated amp results get promoted over the actual content i was looking for (that can't be amped because it's dynamic content) in search results, I don't like that have to use to inferior search engines on mobile to get rid of it, and I don't like how watered down amp sites are.
I ended up opening duckduckgo and it was on the first page.
Did google just forget that static article content does not exclusively make up the internet?
I'm gonna re-post the rant I posted last time this came up:
> As a mobile user, I hate it.
> I hate that every fucking google search result on mobile web has its stupid little icon
> I hate that there is no way for me to disable it as a user
> I hate that it has muddied the waters in what the url bar means
> I hate that it has trained users to not question fake url bars.
> I hate that cloudflare so thoroughly jumped on its dick
> I hate that we invented a way to fake the address in the url bar just for this stupid fucking feature.
> I hate that we now have a system where somebody can share a page url with a friend, and that friend can view it on the same device model using the same browser with the same settings, and will get a different page because one was viewing an amp page but shared it's real url.
> I hate that every fucking amp page is lower featured in some way, and almost never works in desktop mode.
> And most of all, I hate that it leads to everybody offloading shit onto google's servers.
> AMP is not fast because it's served from google's CDN. AMP is fast because it's incompatible with 99% of the bullshit client cpu heavy tracking and ad libraries, so they don't get included inside AMP pages.
That is wrong. AMP is fast because it prerenders. Everything included in AMP is designed to enable safe prerendering. That is the entire point of AMP markup.
> 211. Google falsely told publishers that adopting AMP would enhance load times, but Google employees knew that AMP only improves the [redacted] and AMP pages can actually [redacted] [redacted] [redacted]. In other words, the ostensible benefits of faster load times for cached AMP version of webpages were not true for publishers that designed their web pages for speed. Some publishers did not adopt AMP because they knew their pages actually loaded faster than AMP pages.
The AGs of 10 states disagree with you.
They are reducing margins and removing control from those content creators.
So that content you love so much? Over time there will be less and less of it, as less and less publishers can stay afloat in a world of rent-seeking and monopolistic Internet gatekeepers.
Enjoy it while you can...
It breaks zoom on a lot of pages, and the pages don't load with whatever settings you have saved on the site (nothing fancy, maybe a night mode or something).
It also removes the url, which is really annoying.
It's full of little things like that, I'd be interested in knowing if when consumers encounter things like that they'd even know to blame google.
Everything else about it? Awful.
How do I share the page I'm on without sharing the amp link. It's an extra 2 clicks and heavily obfuscated.
When browsing history, if I'm expecting to see something from news org but instead see amp garbage?
Human readability (for URLs but also in other contexts, like json) is a feature.
Amp throws away most features of web browsing in exchange for page speed. It's a devil's bargain, and it's not even a necessary transaction. You can get fast web pages without sacrificing everything else.
That last point is literally the drum that hn has been banging since amp came out. If Google wants to reward pages for being fast, then do that. Don't reward them for being amp.
What are you talking about?
At least on iOS Safari, I can use the regular browser share button (1 click) and it shares the regular (non-AMP) URL.
AMP also provides a share button of its own in the upper-right hand corner (also 1 click) that brings up the identical iOS share sheet, again a non-AMP URL.
So sharing works perfectly at least on iOS. Zero obfuscation, zero extra clicks. Is it different on Android or something?
Sharing from the browser share button works correctly in mobile Chrome but not in mobile Firefox, which is my preferred browser.
I usually prefer to share links via copy/paste vs the Android share button (it's much easier to switch to the app I was just using vs the share button, which is a bit hit or miss) -- and bizarrely copy does one thing while the share button does what I want (something I never learned because when I see that ugly url I've always clicked out and tried to use the amp link)
Finally, the amp link on android/chrome is also abysmal. It's like a worse version of the default android share where you have to swipe to a more (...) menu where you can access the normal android share menu
This counterintuitiveness & needing to reinvent the wheel for how to share pages (meaning change user habits) -- these are all reasons why I hate amp
It just doesn't need to exist. And if you told people "from now on Google will reward pages that load more quickly" you can bet that seo seeking news organizations would make their pages faster, without amp
The thing is, no one was stopping the websites from having fast pages before, but they were just not doing it. Google kind of forced them to be fast (again, it's the end result that I'm talking about, not the ways to reach there).
They instead pushed a proprietary page format
Web pages adopted amp because of the seo carrot
That carrot could have motivated page speed without the existence of amp
Why does the community hate AMP if publishers opt in to it?
Also, publishers could easily create fast-loading pages without AMP as well if they just reduce all the bloat -- GDPR popups, banners, flying "subscribe now" popups, third-party ad libraries (use first-party ads for much faster loading times), weird JS scrolling effects, trackers, all that crap. That's why pages get slow.
HTML alone is fast -- AMP isn't necessary for a fast experience.
Some issues:
- back button breaks
- difficult to share links
- when sharing with others, the URL prompts distrust
- parts of the page broken (this happens on a lot of Reddit amp pages where I try to expand comments and nothing happens)
If you want a standard you can specify a standard, if you want a framework you can specify a framework. But requiring it to give you client-side permission to run scripts is something that requires more justification that I've seen anyone give.
(I haven't checked the official amp website in a year or so, maybe things have changed since then).
> Publishers and caches that re-host AMP JavaScript files...
https://amp.dev/documentation/components/amp-geo/#self-hosti...
https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/blob/master/spec/amp-f... says that as of April 2020 self-hosted pages don't pass validation:
>The AMP Project is looking into options for validation of AMP pages that use an AMP framework hosted outside of cdn.ampproject.org (#27546). As of April 2020, these AMP pages do not pass validation.
The linked issue is still open: https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/issues/27546
And if I look at the official Specs page ( https://amp.dev/documentation/guides-and-tutorials/learn/spe... ) it says this:
> Any AMP document MUST [...] contain a <script async src="https://cdn.ampproject.org/v0.js"></script> tag inside their head tag.
So it seems they're planning on supporting self-hosting, but it's not there yet (and it might be complex to get working).
Why isn't AMP a great web citizen? As far as I can tell, it's just a web component framework. Google took a very unique approach in inventing web components. Most people who invent web frameworks just put them out there as their own arbitrary unilateral design like Django, React, etc. and if enough people sign on board it's a thing. Web components was the one time when someone who wanted a new framework, actually put the time and effort into attracting the involvement of the browser authors and web consortium and standards bodies. That's a real long road and it's incredibly hard. Google did that. It's something worth respecting, even if web components don't feel all the great to code.
Beyond being a web component framework, I have no idea who the hell these AMP people are, and why they're forming consensus committees acting like they're steering the future of the Internet. We can see how quickly that fell apart into public metadrama the moment they lost their big stick SEO, since IIRC Google recently stopped explicitly favoring AMP results.
If Google was smart, they would have invented an algorithm that can tell "your website is a slow bloated popup laden piece of crap" and we're going to officially demote your SEO because of that. If Google actually did that, rather than granting favoritism to the slow popup laden websites like NYTimes, then the mobile web would instantly transform itself overnight. And then they could say, hey, if you're not sure how to make web pages that don't suck, use AMP, which is guideline for the confused on how to achieve a mobile friendly ui that isn't downranked.
> Google’s thesis is that the mobile-web is dying and people prefer to use apps
And I'm still sitting here spending most of my time in a terminal. What is dead may never die. If the mobile web dies then Google only has its own stewardship to blame. Google once understood that its interests were tied with the success of the open web and I'm sorry but they surely didn't think that a horse which died due to their policies would come back to life if they moved its corpse out of the barnyard and into a closed barn? Since that's basically how all this comes across.
Google does exactly that, which is one reason so many publishers were tempted to adopt AMP.
https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2018/07/search-ads...
However, sometimes a slow site is still the best site for a particular query. There are multiple factors to consider when ranking pages.
> If Google actually did that, rather than granting favoritism to the slow popup laden websites
Again, Google already penalizes sites for popups and interstitials.
https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2016/08/helping-us...
> And then they could say, hey, if you're not sure how to make web pages that don't suck, use AMP, which is guideline for the confused on how to achieve a mobile friendly ui that isn't downranked.
That was the reason Google ostensibly introducted AMP in the first place. Unfortunately, it also breaks a lot of standard web interactions and forces publishers to cache content on Google infrastructure.
Looking at your comparison of AMP with React, it's safe to say you are a little bit confused about what it is.
The root problem is search engine ranking policies. Frameworks can't fix that systemically. If Google was actually downranking websites that go too far with bloat and popups then people wouldn't do it. It's not complicated. What frameworks actually do is help you "check off a box" for misguided views Google holds about things like mobile friendliness, which punish small web sites, and favor big bloated complicated ones that can afford to devote engineers to sitting around checking off boxes.
The whole point of amp was suppose to be that google could host the amp'ed pages on their servers. They claim that by hosting it on their servers they can prefetch it from search results (they could otherwise, but it would expose details about the user and their searches to sites the user never ended up visiting) and that this would make it faster. in practice this rarely leads to more then low 2 digit MS improvements over normal because the cache servers are so overloaded dealing with all the prefetch queries. Googles CDN is not what it used to be and i've even taken the step of moving my google fonts off of google and on to my cloudflare'ed domain for my 70mil/ppm website because it made things faster.
When yelp started replacing the phone number of restaurants with their yelp delivery service partner's phone number to intercept the sales and use their own provider, everybody on hackernews rightly called it out as shit, but when google does the same shit its "not everybody's cup of tea".
No, you can't divorce AMP from how Google uses AMP. Google made AMP and Google shaped the core foundations of AMP that lets them do this. You can't just hand wave that away.
To be a good citizen of anything implies an awareness of a broader context, as well as actions and intentions within that context that create benefit to others. By saying it's 'just a web component framework' you're completely divorcing the technology from its context, which is that AMP was part of a strategy to annex part of the open web by acting as a gatekeeper between users and publishers.
What automatic things do people do to get rid of amp links to see “the original”? In an ideal world I wouldn’t even load the amp. I’m especially interested in solutions for Safari on iOS and Firefox on OS X (will not ever write macOS willingly).
Along the same thread, it used to be that when I clicked an Apple News link on my laptop it’d open in a browser and redirect to the original. Now Apple has “helpfully” provided my with an OS X version of News—a browser without any of the plugins I like. How can I intercept the URL handling and send it to Firefox rather than News?
And yet you did.
News app -> preferences -> Open web links in News might help
It was unwilling.
When I navigate to
OS X 11.0.1 -> News -> Preferences
[ ] Restrict stories in Today
(... description ...)
[ ] Restrict stories with explicit content
(... description ...)It's snappy---the redirect happens before the page renders / any tracking has a chance to kick in.
HOWEVER It's not perfect---2 of the 4 first examples I tried failed and required manual intervention. I opened an issue https://github.com/da2x/amp2html/issues/23
I'm removing AMP from my websites now... it is terrible.
It seems like inside google(and outside of it as well) people tend to have forgotten that web performance is all about intelligent work with web standards. And throughout years people-who-care-about-perf introduced and advocated various techniques and changes to engines, standards and languages used across web development to improve end user experience. Prefetching, preloading, multiplexing, minifying, lazy loading, PWA, CDN, et al.
Instead of teaching how to build web properly google puts its enormous resources to what serves as a search result preview for end users, and the only beneficiary of the AMP is google itself.
Care about your users, their experience and performance of your website? Ditch https://amp.dev/
Discover https://web.dev/
At least this user doesn't prefer apps, it's just that websites downright refuse to make their mobile pages useful, and keep throwing popups for you to get the app, and Chrome on mobile doesn't support extensions to block said popups. Most mobile websites also suck at supporting common navigation modes like swiping between tabs. They entirely could, but they refuse to spend resources developing it.
That kind of says it all, doesn't it?
It seems that people want to say: 'it's useless to try', and 'I don't know what to do' ... sometimes they say they will quixotically continue (to drag out the despair, I suppose).
Perhaps it's a consequence of the pandemic, which creates depressing environments for much of the world. Perhaps it's a the reactionary concept of the 'SJW' (a negative term, which mocked their supposed uselessness) seeping into broader society.
Whatever, despair is a pretty f*g stupid trend. Really? Despair? That's cool now? You sound smart now? I promise you that you will never accomplish anything you don't believe in. Remember the American Dream - anyone can accomplish anything they believe in and work hard for. A friend of mine (now hip to despair) once said, 'the biggest obstacle most people face is that they don't believe' - my friend was right. Who would even choose despair, given the options - what an unhappy life.
I believe. I believe we can do it. I believe that the biggest obstacle is all these people standing around talking about despair, and that we outnumber the actual bad people 100 to 1. I believe democracy and freedom and believing in people has an incredible history of success and we can solve these problems too. I believe we can make the open web work on mobile. I believe we can solve disinformation - it's just a matter of engagement, of finding out what engages them and where; they reading that crap for the content. I believe in the city - the land of opportunities, on every block, at every corner, in every cafe and bar. I love the city, I love people.
Let's do this! LET'S GOOOOOO!
(And I'm not being ironic. I am dead serious. Why are you standing there talking about irony? Is it so rare that someone could be earnest and enthusiastic these days? I'm going to leave you behind; I'm going to make the future while you despair. Let's go!!!!)
I'm not sure how to interpret that. Does it mean that Google has given up on PWAs and the likes, and shifted their attention to native? Or is it the converse, that Google is continuing their work in making web apps more "native"-like?
Speaking of which: the Texas suit itself, on the other hand, just might make that difference. (Discussed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25448718)
From NPR this morning... https://www.npr.org/2020/12/18/947918291/google-researcher-d...
Sadly, the only meaningful way to kill the Google beast is to break it up. If they're fined, even if it's a significant sum, it will just be a rounding error on their balance sheet and another cost of doing (sleazy) business.
But the EU wants to punish Google by taxing a percentage of the profit.
Let's slay the monopolistic beast. I think we're finally headed in the right direction.
Same goes for Facebook et al.
The tech sector is one of the most influential sectors, the incoming administration leans even more pro Silicon Valley than the previous (which didn't do much to oppose the tech sector apart from a sternly worded five minute interview with Tucker).
The republicans also just pretend their opposition to make sure they keep their followers outraged over the "elite liberals in California". Most likely they just want a bigger piece of the "influence pie" and when they float ideas like breaking them up, it's just a negotiation tactic to get a bigger slice from that "pie".
I also don't see the EU seriously challenge the American tech sector, as the US would not tolerate such an attack on their companies. The US has thousand ways to fight back, increasing tariffs, decreasing military presence, persecuting shady characters from the EU and more (im sure they can get more creative than I just did).
What's the point? You think the US will really threaten EU with the war?
I only know that anytime the US reduces (or Russia increases) the military presence in some area, it's in the news for weeks (as examples, Turkey, Syria, Estonia, Germany come to mind).
Also, the "theatre" can also work, as politicians want to be re-elected and if enough people believe that their country is in risk because the US troop numbers are reduced, then it becomes a way to pressure the EU even if the real military threat is not that great.
Though I still think my point stands, as the US must have ways to pressure the EU to not take a strong stand against tech giants.
https://greenwald.substack.com/p/with-news-of-hunter-bidens-...
https://twitchy.com/dougp-3137/2020/12/12/there-it-is-politi...
Ah, that word “significant”. Significant for whom? Perhaps a 100 billion dollars fine would be significant.
I'm looking forward to when criminal charges against corporations and "corporate executions" (i.e. revoking corporate charters and dissolving the firm) enters the Overton window.
I.e. utility legislation
- should put the ISP utility in charge of running the physical infra
- require that all the "software used for interoperable protocols"
I.e. we are completely separating "google the data center farmer" from "google the software writer", and then shooting one of them.
> The stated goal of the AMP AC is to “make AMP a great web citizen.”
> I am concerned that – despite the hard work of the AC – Google has limited interest in that goal.
A "search engine" is completely affecting the culture, technology usage and (directly and indirectly) lives of the people. This is yet another reminder that we need to get rid of the AMP plague.
How many of you use Chrome, BTW?
As far as chrome why bother? My computer grinds to a halt using chrome, been using firefox for years now
I was using "new edge" before which is no better. And firefox before that.
They are one of the few companies actually trying to change the spyware model of the web into something much more in line with its original principals (p2p ethos)
This problem should be solved more in direction of regulating data collection and usage. Even though the GDPR is implemented, it is obvious that it is not enough. There is simply no "cost" of using the user data and to the end users, the claimed personalization benefits are almost always very very small, if there are even any benefits. Majority of the world is using an Android-based smartphone, almost everybody can be uniquely fingerprintable (https://amiunique.org/). So, Google simply has 7/24 access to what you are doing, what you are buying, watching, listening to, who are your friends, what are your interests, what are your "secret" interests when you use incognito/secret mode in your browser and many more. This sounds like a doomsday scenario or a fancy story but it is simply the objective truth.
Even though the discussion started with AMP and controlling the internet completely, Google -or any from FAANG- is the culprit here.
And to answer your question, I am using Firefox.
I've observed this on FB in comments against news articles about the anti trust case. Common theme is "there are plenty of search engines to choose between, and Google's is free so what's the problem".
I am not sure, if this is your opinion about Google's view on AMP or is exactly the Google view on AMP, but, Whatever it be, I almost died laughing - what's wrong with these people(Google)?
Either Google is assuming,
- people would only need 1-2 digit numbers of app in their device and rest all of the websites/platform are just hawkers on the street.
OR,
- world is going to be exploded with extreme scalable storage system on mobile/user's devices where people would be able to store hundreds of apps.
The only reason PEOPLE PREFER TO USE APPS in most of the case is the ability of OFFLINE USE CASE for FREQUENTLY used apps, and we know FREQUENT uses are for limited numbers of apps.
Such thesis that people "prefer to use apps" requires citation and contradicts Google's own "search engine" which helps people to explore the world for data. Is that a reason? google prefers to steal the data from various website and show the results in their search engine result page?
It is a great subset of HTML and JS and Web Stories do look like the next best (open source) solution to compete with Instagram, Snapchat and Tik Tok. There is basically NO OTHER CONTENDER in this space...
Why is everybody always hating on the effin' AMP Viewer on Google, if you do not like it, just don't use it.
AMP is great micdrop
AMP Forces publishers to put their content on googles servers giving google more data about users (that it doesn't share with the publisher) and its the equivalent of a yellow pages phone book provider making the text of all companies smaller unless the company gives yellow pages exclusive access to their front door security camera. Don't defend it.
When yelp started replacing the phone number of restaurants with their yelp delivery service partner's phone number to intercept the sales and use their own provider, everybody on hackernews rightly called it out as shit, but when google does the same shit its "not everybody's cup of tea".
No, you can't divorce AMP from how Google uses AMP. Google made AMP and Google shaped the core foundations of AMP that lets them do this. You can't just hand wave that away.
But you don't need Government to clean up a neighborhood block, and you don't need Corporations to define standards. You need Community. But to have Community, it needs to be normal for random people to work together towards common goals and self-organize. I don't think that's normal yet, but it could be.
What I meant by "random" was that they aren't accountable to anyone but themselves, come from all walks of life, don't require anyone to allow them to engage and contribute, and completely self-organize. Most groups of people do not do all those things. And it really doesn't apply to government.
EDIT: I just looked at the blog post again. It's linked to another one where he says it will be a MSc Digital and Technology Specialist, so maybe it won't be very mathematics heavy.