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Comment by meowfly | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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

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.

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