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.
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.
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.
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.
There was a win with the AMP user experience. The fact that it had to come from google is embarrassing.
You can tell people don't use AMP in the real world with mainstream websites when they say this.
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.
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.
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.
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.