History of AMP and Why Everybody Is Against It? | Hacker News Reader

History of AMP and Why Everybody Is Against It?

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37 pointsthrowaway184964 comments

This title makes more sense if the question mark is removed? Otherwise it seems like a request for information rather than an offer to provide information?

I’m Ron Burgundy?

EDIT: the blog post title has now been edited to remove the question mark; it would be good if someone could edit the HN title to match.

I think there's some kind of automatic title re-writing happening on HN, which sticks a question mark on the end of titles that contain the word "why" and "is". I think the goal is to make titles less clickbaity. In practice, it mangles them such that they look like the author has a weak understanding of English punctuation and/or grammar :(

In this case, the original blog post title ended in a question mark (now removed).

I now just hear valley girl when I see question marks.

There are some people who don't know the difference between "!" and "?"? I'm serious?

Yeah, I think that was a mistake?

Probably, because the article's title doesn't have one?

It doesn’t anymore. It did when I posted my comment (I checked first).

As a user (not publisher / developer):

* Based on occasional Hacker News coverage, and first principles, I was ready to dislike AMP

* After reading this article, I am wondering if I should explore it more and embrace it, because as a user, literally every single one of their defined "problems & issues" is a net benefit to me.

Harder for publishers to embed ads? Great.

Harder for publishers to run own code and track you and run more analytics? Awesome.

Harder for publishers to "present their brand value"? Brilliant.

After thinking about it, it works great for me.

When I want a specific website I go to a specific website.

When I randomly peruse news and articles, I want minimum ads, minimum differentiation and "brand value", minimum code. I don't care about who what where how they are. When I watch Google News Carousel, I'm OK to be in walled garden. Google News Carousel is not "The Internet" for me, it's the equivalent of facebook or twitter or instagram.

Basically, the author just managed to completely sell me on AMP!

If AMP were just a high-performance subset spec of JS/HTML that Google gave a pagerank boost to I think it would be viewed pretty favorably.

The main issues seem to be around the caching features, which to allow even simple hit-count analytics requires sending analytics calls through some third party (usually Google). As a site owner you can’t do no-js analytics because you can’t even check server logs for page hit counts.

There are also still some weird details where the interaction on those pages (like scrolling) does not always feel native (it isn’t) and sharing the URL sends you to the hosted cache not the author’s site.

I’d be all in favor of something inspired by AMP that is just a test of “This page is a simple, fast-loading, no-hijacking web document”

Speaking only, solely, and specifically as a user... why do I care if the content is in an integrity-checked hosted cache or if the site owner has analytics? Neither is important to the experience of accessing the content.

The problem with simple, fast-loading, no-hijacking web documents is that history shows quite clearly that they don't stay that way for long. Every single website owner could adopt that standard today. Every single website owner has had that same chance every day for the past two decades. We're still not there.

Speaking solely as as a user, because I don’t want to use Google’s fucking cache just to read a damn web page. And the scrolling sucks.

And why the fuck is it so hard to just get the canonical URL for the page? Seriously, if google had been just a little less aggressive about preventing users from leaving their little AMP ecosystem, it might have taken off.

> The problem with simple, fast-loading, no-hijacking web documents is that history shows quite clearly that they don't stay that way for long. Every single website owner could adopt that standard today. Every single website owner has had that same chance every day for the past two decades. We're still not there.

They wouldn't be adopting AMP either except Google put their market weight behind it and said you should adopt AMP if you don't want to be punished in search results.

Users don't always know what's good for them.

To achieve all the speed possible from AMP, requires the ability to safely pre-render the content on the device before the user clicks.

I think modern phone processors, as limited as they are, could be pretty fast at rendering classic HTML and CSS. I know we want more from our webpages now, but the rendering as a static image is part of what makes AMP feel so weird and not like a normal webpage.

It’s not a static image. It gets rendered into an iframe they swap in, which is only possible because they control the html rendered given the constraints of the amp format.

But is that really necessary?

HN for example loads quite fast on mobile. I don’t think there is anything about client-rendered HTML and CSS that can’t be adequately fast even on fairly restricted clients.

Of course you can slow things down with advanced features, my point was that a google-led test for certified “Fast Webpages” that get promoted in search results could have most of the positive impacts of AMP without the strange complexities.

All it did was shift who got to collect everything. The amount of surveillance done by ad tech is not good. Google being the central and sole entity doing the same surveillance is probably even less good.

And as a user, I hated using AMP pages for UX reasons as well.

You love it now. If it gains acceptance the results of the increasing centralization and control being given to google and cloudflare will bite you in the medium term. A few megacorps in control will go bad much faster and more completely than tens of thousands of independent human and corporate persons.

Yes, "publishers" (corporations) do want to do things that are bad for human persons. But guess what? So do the mega-publishers like google and cloudflare.

You can also just use an RSS reader, to solve many of these problems for you.

In addition:

> Harder for publishers to run own code and track you and run more analytics? Awesome.

Now it's just Google who tracks you.

> Harder for publishers to embed ads? Great.

Not for Google.

They would also automatically log you in if you visit an AMP page.

Make no mistake, this was just an attempt of control. The much more reasonable alternative to incentivize higher performance and less bloat, but let publishers decide how to achieve that. Lighthouse helps to some degree.

>You can also just use an RSS reader, to solve many of these problems for you.

You're inserting the typical "you can just ..." tone in your advice as if it's a simple solution but you're overlooking the full context of the parent's post:

(1) RSS works better for a known set of urls to pull from. When the parent states that he's randomly clicking on news stories (some being AMP cached pages) from Google search results, that's not really something that RSS can solve because one can't predict the unknown future urls to include in a feeds list.

(2) Many publishers (e.g. news sites like NYTimes) that offer RSS do not put the full text and only offer the headline and/or a partial extract.

You're right on both accounts. Should have said it solves some problems. We still want incentives for performant, lightweight websites as I said further down. (Not to say that there aren't any great websites that are not lightweight, but the value they provide outweighs the cost, from the users perspective.) Point being, AMP isn't needed for any of this.

In practice, amp breaks the web page and makes it hard to move to other parts of the site. You can blame the site owners but at the end of the day the experience of disabling amp and running an ad blocker is dramatically better

And the trope about it being slower is false. Yes, if you serve an amp page to someone who happens to come to your site, it’s slower, but if it’s displayed from Google search result page, Google pre-renders the page, making it instant.

The Apple News comparison is interesting from the article. Why doesn’t Apple get the hate given Apple News doesn’t just link to mobile web pages instead of articles of their own format?

Apple News is a choice for both the publisher and the user. Also its an App, it sending you to a website would not be a great user experience.

APM was strong-armed onto publishers and users never had a choice, even though google has long been asked to have an option to enable APM from the user side. Google used their search control to get APM used.

Users and publishers opt in and out for apple news.

Google makes it hard as hell to opt out of it for customers. They also show up higher in google so it not really an option to not support it as a publisher.

There are tens of millions who use Apple News since it’s the default news reading experience everywhere on iOS, so not participating would hurt publishers.

>Why doesn’t Apple get the hate

Because Apple News isn't an effective defacto monopoly in huge spaces like "web search" and "browsers". AMP content gets forced on, for example, Android owners, and it's difficult to avoid. And it was forced on publishers when the net effect of not using it was reduced organic traffic...that's how you got shite stuff like Reddit AMP pages.

Apple News has a monopoly on built in news reader on iOS, plus various promotion vehicles within it, so I think the analogy is close.

Apple does get hate for areas that are large, like the app store.

Long term it's most definitely _NOT_ better for you. The reasons why are just too nuanced to satisfy a public debate.

Thankfully people that understand the very, very real danger to not just the internet, but security, freedom of speech, and host of other very core concepts all human hold dear are at stake if things _like_ AMP replace an open and free internet.

Yep, users love it. People on HN hate it because we're weirdos and many of us interact with it on the publisher side rather than the user side. It's like asking cashiers what they think of self checkout.

Nah, we hate it because it does weird stuff like slowing down adblocker users. I don’t care about AMP work-wise, we never considered using it. But I hate it as a user, and back when it briefly became a thing, I used extensions to route me to the actual link instead of the google hosted page.

Users don't know what AMP is. If it suddenly went away most users would never say a thing.

To say that "users love it" implies they know it exists in the first place. The internet was just fine before AMP was a thing.

If it went away users would vaguely wonder why the search results links they follow are now slow loading and more ad blighted than they were recently. They love the outcome without knowing what is achieving it.

I highly doubt any user would make that connection. At best they will think that some sites put out a UI change (which is normal) at worst they will think that their internet is a bit slow for a bit and in a few days won't think about it again.

You are assuming that the normal user would assume that different websites behaving slightly differently would somehow be connected. That is assuming way too much technical knowledge on the case of an average consumer.

You are also parroting a supposed benefit when not only has cellular gotten faster, home internet, wifi, general internet infrastructure has also gotten faster and the idea that we need AMP for something to load fast is... frankly a lie.

As far as ads go... maybe? But in my experience anywhere that AMP would actually be used, I don't see this issue (and I also don't want google having more power over ads). I have an app on my phone to always redirect AMP and I don't experience any issues because of it.

Users will not care. Or notice, or think about it for more than a minute of "Oh hey, this site changed something" and move on with their day.

Edit:

The fact that google had to strong-arm publishes into this (when if it did what it claimed, publishes should love it!). Has continued to refuse to give users the ability to disable it. Shows that users don't care. Google knows that if they gave the option, people would disable it because someone told them they should. But the unfortunate truth is we don't know for 100% certainty how users feel because no choice was given.

Why would publishers love it? They're the ones who created the problem of bloated slow loading pages in the first place. The whole thing is a workaround for their inability to make decent webpages...

We don't need AMP for web pages to load quickly. But people weren't (aren't) making web pages that load quickly, and people prefer web pages that load quickly, so there was an opening for AMP to fill. It would be better if there were no opening for it to begin with, but publishers predominantly chose (choose) to make crappy bloated webpages.

It would also be (far) better for a similar but open solution not controlled by a single company to gain mindshare, but I don't see what would incentivize such a thing.

So all in all I conclude that AMP is better than the prior status quo, and I prefer to click on AMP links when I have a choice (especially on mobile).

> If it went away users would vaguely wonder why the search results links they follow are now slow loading and more ad blighted than they were recently. They love the outcome without knowing what is achieving it.

They'd be pretty happy that the webpages then landed on y'know, worked.

I recommend AMPlosion for iOS: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/amplosion-redirect-amp-links/i...

Best $2 I ever spent.

Second this.

One of the few times I have had zero hesitation (well outside of... does it work?) in spending money on the App Store.

I have recommended this to everyone I know, and even offered to give them $2 if they don't understand why but trust me enough to do it. Just to help APM have as quick of a death as possible.

These have been changed, but at different times...

- It was required to show up in the carousel

- It injected a banner at the top of your content that pushed your content down. The banner featured an "[X]" button that seemed like it might dismiss it, but it sent you back to Google instead

- The real url was deliberately hidden, and initially not even an actual link, but just text.

- It hijacked swipe events to navigate to competitor pages, and hijacked the back button in certain cases also

And, the AMP spec still requires loading a piece of google controlled javascript onto your page...that does whatever it wants.

What's not to hate? At one time, it was basically a protection racket. "Use this objectionable thing, or your organic traffic will drop".

Plus in practice, adverse selection involving the sort of websites that actually bothered with AMP; basically everyone who created pages purely for Google juice to drive their profits rushed to create AMP pages whereas much-loved evergreen content generally wasn't available in that format (unless spitting out AMP pages was baked into updates to their CMS platform) and was of course pushed further down the page with the organic search results as a result.

Has AMP been around long enough that we need to know the history of it? Just kill it and be done.

It's effectively dead now that "not having it" doesn't kill your organic traffic.

It lingers only because poorly funded media websites have to pay someone to help them migrate off of it.

Isn't it over five years old now?

AMP is a transparent attempt by Google to evolve the web toward a Google-controlled walled garden platform. It was one of those things that I said "I hope this fails" as soon as I read a synopsis of it.

Google is now working on a new "web bundles" technology, similar to signed exchanges.

I think this approach will fare better.

Unlike AMP, that requires browser support, and several browser vendors have signalled they won't support it.

The weirdest thing about AMP is that it requires google JS on your website.

If they got rid of that, I would be totally for it

Google AMP also implied having your site copied and hosted on Google's servers. This was one of the most contentions points, because it wasn't merely a markup standard, but takeover of traffic.

Eh, I don’t really care about that, as long as the cache is invalidated reasonably often.

But it seems the (obfuscated and minified) JS is still required.

It seems like another “standard” that puts an immense burden on everyone else so the big players can save .01% on their bandwidth/power costs.

It puts a burden on developers at companies that publish content, but users really like its fast pages with less bloat.

Maybe it’s just my bubble, but even my friends who don’t work in tech dislike amp pages for pretty much the same reason as those who work in tech. That being that greater than half the time when we click a link we didn’t want the AMP site, we wanted the actual website. The “less bloat” often times means less functional website.

It might come down to most people I know having high quality internet connections though, such that the load times aren’t as big a concern.

Definitely a bubble thing if your friends are aware of what AMP is.

This part is really misleading: "AMP is a new markdown language which can be compared to HTML." AMP according to amp.dev: "AMP is a web component framework to easily create user-first experiences for the web." ... which is also misleading. To say "easily" is presumptuous or optimistic. You can do a lot with AMP but to have AMP pages that validate & adhere to rules around CSS inlining and file size limits, for example, isn't trivial. I think that's really why developers aren't fans. Pragmatically can you know the effort is worth it? For any significantly large news or media site AMP is a big investment & I think that's why product owners and stakeholders waffle over whether or not to provide AMP experiences. And then finally, what if it actually works? Then the focus becomes for how long? Can't know that either ...

They screwed up scrolling on iOS (Google loves to do this—gmail is also terrible), they screwed up sharing links, and a lot of sites (notably Reddit) had joke-tier implementations that seemed designed to annoy the user.

And that's before we get into the obvious power grab that it was.

I know it is not real question, but because I get limited page instead of a real one when google provides AMP.

The main reason I don’t like AMP is that it’s apparently broken. This is a daily experience of mine:

1. Open Google Chrome (iPhone)

2. Open Google News

3. Open a Google AMP page

4. Fails to load

5. Follow link to publishers site

Seems like somebody just googled "reasons why amp is bad" and copy-pasted them into a blog post without any further context.

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