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Comment by random5634 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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

> 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.

> 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.

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