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Comment by jakelazaroff | Hacker News Reader

> The logic behind AMP goes like this: web developers suck at making fast websites, let's strip out all the stuff people don't need and cache it on our super-fast servers.

Web developers don't suck at making fast websites. Publishers demand tons of ads and tracking scripts. If the person signing the paychecks wants the page to have 15MB of sketchy third-party JS, then the page will have 15MB of sketchy third-party JS. AMP succeeded because Google brandished a stick that publishers cared about more: exclusion from the Top News carousel.

I'd also note that the whole reason this ad tech explosion even happened is a race to the bottom that Google itself facilitated. Google is selling us solutions to a problem that Google had a huge hand in causing.

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Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager need to take the blame here. Web developers are doing their damnedest to build a decent site or application, until marketing/growth steps in and makes GTM a requirement, and product want to try out the 6 different analytics tools they're looking at.

You can at least push back on the product somewhat, or use something like Segment to fan-out. But once Marketing gets GTM in place, all bets are off - they're doing god knows what to the site/application, completely outside of the purview of the usual engineering process, because they can inject whatever they hell they want into the page.

GTM is essentially a backdoor but it gets a pass because marketing.

Web devs emphatically, and by definition, do not suck at developing websites.

> If the person signing the paychecks wants the page to have 15MB of sketchy third-party JS, then the page will have 15MB of sketchy third-party JS.

I was asked by management to add Google Tag Manager to the company site. When I saw that GTM included 15-20 tracking scripts I told them that unfortunately we can't include it until we have ensured that all of them act in accordance with GDPR. Legal was involved and agreed. Marketing gave up.

You're technically correct, but people who write pay checks often can be argued with. They often don't want to be on record taking decisions which can cause issues, and legal typically don't want to sign of on including 15MB unknown scripts on your site accepting credit cards.

> You're technically correct, but people who write pay checks often can be argued with.

That's true, but the proliferation of ad tech junk is strong evidence that this is the exception rather than the rule. Capital will persuade labor to do its bidding far more often than not.

What's the solution? If anything, the proliferation of ad tech junk and 15MB of various ad-related things is probably better than just that 1MB of only Google Ads scripts, no?

Or are we going to talk about how online advertising has been the economic backbone of the web? Not that I'm advocating for it, by hiding the true cost of things, publishers have brought this onto themselves really.

So no more ads? That's probably going to kill a lot of sites, whether they are contributing anything to mankind or not.

IMO, the only feasible solution is to regulate surveillance capitalism out of existence. The market is not going to solve this.

Yeah sure let's bury our head in the sand and pretend all forms of media will thrive while only selling subscriptions but so far, we've seen how it went for the older ones (newspaper, radio, tv ...)

Or we can acknowledge that advertisment is there to stay and we instead develop a proper framework to make it work sanely rather than all the duct-taping we've done so far.

The real failure is the unwillingness to confront the fact that ads were there to stay and should have been baked into a W3C standard ages ago instead but here we are.

Surveillance capitalism isn't the same as advertising. But I think your point is undercut by the fact that most of the industries you mentioned are doing… fine? TV is thriving selling ads (broadcast/cable) and also subscriptions (Netflix/etc). Radio is thriving selling ads (terrestrial) and also subscriptions (Spotify/etc). Even newspapers are figuring this thing out; NYT added a record number of subscribers last year.

Do you have strong evidence that developers think about these things and bring it up with legal? I'd not, then the only strong evidence is that developers are sloppy.

A more charitable interpretation is that most developers simply don’t want to risk their paycheck over a small battle they’d likely lose anyway.

What options or alternatives did you suggest to marketing so they could accomplish their goal?

None? I have no clues what marketings goal are and frankly I don't care. If they want to insert some junk.js into their web page they need at least to ensure it is legal.

If you work at the same company on the same product don’t you both have the same end goal?

Not really, no. There are 500 people in marketing organization and I doubt there are less than 20 conflicting end goals within that organization. Unless you're going all fluffy and talk about company goal as said by the owners.

Either way, if their process of reaching their end goal included steps which legal dismissed then they needed to go back to the drawing board and figure out a new strategy, right? It would be strange for me who doesn't work in their profession come and tell them how to solve their issues.

> It would be strange for me who doesn't work in their profession come and tell them how to solve their issues.

You're not telling them, you're helping them.

I guess I can't get past the idea of telling someone I work with that their solution won't work and then being like, "sorry you're on your own".

Although I'm sure you don't care, the disdain you show for marketing wouldn't make me super excited to work with you.

From experience its not the tracking code that is the major culprit.

Like @djtriptych I do a lot of work on a major brand sites its poor FE design and implementation.

You just have to browse the AMP pages on Google Assistant to see how easily they can be devolved into slow dumpster fires despite the rules to maintain speed.

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