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Comment by random5634 | Hacker News Reader

Same - despite all the hate I liked AMP.

Hackers / developers seem to insist on the non-AMP sites to bloat sites to absolute trash and back. If I saw the amp logo, I knew that was the one to click.

Abusing users with bloat is supposedly some great freedom worth fighting for, but AMP forcing these developers into a much smaller box that they can't screw with users as much on I just loved AMP.

I think a lot of the HN hate comes because AMP I think prohibits random third party javascript ad libraries. So obviously it hits folks where it hurts, but the web is much nicer to browse without all the junk.

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This is true. AMP is a punch in the gut for someone who advocates for the open web. It says: the roadmap you implemented wasn't right for users. It let publishers abuse the user experience. We are taking a step backward, hiding many things that are too powerful, and making it more restrictive.

I completely understand why open web advocates would not greet AMP with a warm welcome. That doesn't mean it wasn't necessary to fix the problems. The problems were and are real.

I'm still confused what problem AMP was fixing.

Google could just make page speed more important in their rankings. They probably don't because page speed isn't as important as content quality in regards to what people are looking for in search.

I still struggle to see how AMP has anything to do with improving the search experience and everything to do with Google abusing their market dominance.

Focus was on a "user first" - NOT developer or hacker first approach.

So a ton of the stuff that HN folks demand (being able to do dynamic third party javacript ads and tracker loads, DOM modification after render - gone - you just are totally blocked.

If you try targeting AMP (or just consuming AMP) you'll pretty quickly get what they are going for.

For example - AMP websites really do not reflow that often (or at all). I've never I don't think had something move when I was going to click it even early in page load.

I've found a lot of complaints about AMP are developed / hacker focused complaints. If you switch your mindset to users, including non-tech types, the value becomes more obvious.

That doesn't address my point: Couldn't Google just have increased the rank of pages with minimal Javascript and faster load times?

I think you might be strawmanning why some HN folks don't like AMP. To me, at least, it looks like someone abusing their position as the dominant search engine.

AMP lightning icons didn't get attached to pages with just one tracker and fast renders. They were attached to pages served by Google that only supported Google tracking.

Faster load times is really only part of the AMP story. If you do a diff of whats possible between an AMP page and a plain HTML5 page load, you will quickly realize there is a large functional difference. Especially in the early days of AMP. It wasn't trying to steer the user towards Google tracking. A huge effort was put into bootstrapping the AMP ecosystem with 3rd party ad trackers, from day 1. There were some issues with cross-domain user tracking, but that wasn't something Google desired, it was a reality of how the web worked. There was no easy workaround, without turning the AMP cache off completely.

It really makes me realize HN is not user focused. You can have tiny code and fly a popover ad into a users face with a 20 second cooldown before the x to close appears. Users HATE this. Pages are ALREADY scored on speed etc. AMP was a subset of HTML that simply removed entire classes of features that hackers and developers abused to shove crap at folks. Honestly, the size difference, request count differences also were FAR higher than I expected on the AMP side as well - which also illustrated that developers left to their own devices will push whatever garbage they can - go to the media sites pushing the anti-google messaging - you are SLAMMED with trackers and crap on their regular sites. Privacy they yell as they track everything with MULTIPLE trackers.

There was a win with the AMP user experience. The fact that it had to come from google is embarrassing.

> There was a win with the AMP user experience.

You can tell people don't use AMP in the real world with mainstream websites when they say this.

Can you point to a bad site as an example?

I’m also interested- I consumed primarily on IOS via google news carousal - that icon meant fast and clean

> hacker focused complaints

Most people I've seen who I would consider hackers have web sites that don't do all the things you're complaining about.

I hate the "throw on another library, and stack some ads" attitude as much as anyone else, but AMP isn't the way. I would be less offended if Google had just down-ranked pages with heavy JS load, and boosted pages that didn't move content around.

How is “does not allow a bunch of useful functionality” “user first”?

And frankly, if the argument is that news websites should be text only, then maybe Google shouldn’t have killed off Google Reader, because that was a much faster way of loading news articles.

This debate comes up repeatedly on HN - HN is really not a good spot for it I don't think.

HIGHLY predictable behavior - some users like that. The apple walled garden, the apple billing flow, the AMP subset of HTML etc - all hated here.

Too many users have been burned by developers flying interstitial ads over the content (still happens) with a tiny unhittable x in a corner that comes in 10 seconds later. It's not the size of the content (that was already ranked), it's the absolute crap that hackers and developers shove down users throats.

I get it, you don't see or chose not to see the value in this. But there is value, at least for me and I'm sure many others started learning that the AMP icons meant less crap.

> Focus was on a "user first" - NOT developer or hacker first approach.

The number one user first request was "let users turn off receiving AMP pages." It was never implemented. The AMP advisory board item on it just... disappeared, without explanation or resolution.

AMP was not user first in any way.

> If you try targeting AMP (or just consuming AMP) you'll pretty quickly get what they are going for.

So if I go to Reddit, then the AMP site is basically unusable and pollutes search results. The AMP site removes all the useful comment information in place of application ads. Multiple clicks are required to restore the content.

The Guardian also strips comment content from it's AMP pages.

> Abusing users with bloat is supposedly some great freedom worth fighting for

The thing people were offended by wasn't the lack of bloat, it was the fact that it was ceding even more control to Google.

But yet these users never deploy a non-google debloated world.

Billing on line is the same thing. Unless you are on a trusted site (Amazon / Apple) you can just get hosed trying to cancel subscriptions with jack up pricing etc.

Same thing with spam - at some point users stopped trusting the hackers and developers and migrated to more controlled worlds (ie, gmail etc) which blocks HUGE quantities of the junk.

I just wish hackers spent some time trying to make users experience and lives better rather than the constant push to spam them (EFF wanted to pass laws banning anti-spam measures), now AMP (which was amazing) is being attacked endlessly and the list goes on.

Google has a commercial reason for pushing this stuff - the web was turning into a trash bit (flyover ads with audio etc etc).

Which users? What a sweeping generalization. Your disdain for some mythical group of people is very odd.

Besides, does blocking ads and trackers not at least partially alleviate the issue? Works well for me and, in combination with a reader view, is a significantly better experience than AMP. I'd argue that those "hackers" you very much hate are the exact ones fighting against corporate bloat on the web.

"blocking ads and trackers" on the phone means that there's basically only one choice which is firefox, no? not saying firefox is not good but it's at least not for everyone.

I'm using Opera on Android, it has ad-blocker built-in. I think Vivaldi has it too.

I know those browsers exist, but how much percentage of mobile web browser traffic are coming from browsers with the ability to block ads?

So because Google's browser is hostile to making the Web useful except for the stuff under Google's control, we should cede control to Google?

> "blocking ads and trackers" on the phone means that there's basically only one choice which is firefox, no? not saying firefox is not good but it's at least not for everyone.

I'm blocking a good percentage of ads in Safari on my iPhone via third-party apps Hush[0] and Magic Lasso[1]. I typically read articles in Reader mode. Because of this, I can't give a great accounting of how many ads actually get through. Certainly, the number is small enough that I don't think about it.

[0] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/hush-nag-blocker/id1544743900 [1] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/ad-blocker-by-magic-lasso/id12...

Apple is a complete walled garden, and plenty of folks have migrated to their phones for example - they actually want an experience that is very predictable and can be trusted. Apple charges HIGH amounts of money as a result of this level of user trust. I also think users are more likely to spend money inside this garden - I know I do because it's much harder to get screwed there. I'll subscribe to an apple app long before I'd do the same on a random website.

Reddit's AMP pages have lots of design bloat and much less information than the non-AMP pages.

That's not uncommon.

I mostly consumed news stories via google news - so my exposure was relatively narrow

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