Hacker News Reader

Comment by MaxBarraclough | Hacker News Reader

Perhaps I'm just being dense, but I really don't see the point of AMP. If you want to build a non-bloated website, you don't need special branding from Google to do so, you just need to care about the quality of your work. Websites like HackerNews, SourceHut, and Pinboard, are living proof.

The Wikipedia article does a very poor job, in my opinion, of explaining what AMP even is. [0] It emphasises use of CDN caching to improve performance, but this can be done for any static website. What does AMP contribute? Where's the innovation?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerated_Mobile_Pages

View on HN

It wasn't innovative or intended to be, it was a solution to a collective action problem. It's easy to make the case for "we have to do it this way to avoid being penalized in search rankings".

Doesn't Google already penalise websites for poor performance though? Why not just intensify that penalty, rather than develop and promote a new framework intended to forcibly prohibit bloat?

Sure but people won't always respond to incentives. It's like asking why AA exists when the cops will already throw you in jail for being drunk in public.

Google will rank results partially based on page performance and behavior. It is possible to improve your ranking by improving page experience. AMP is the complement: a tech stack that makes it impossible to not do those things.

When nearly every site has horrible performance IDK if it would make a difference to intensify those penalties, as they'd apply about equally for instance to every news site, every blog, every e-commerce site, etc.

But that's the same with AMP. If every site doesn't have AMP, penalizing them for not having AMP changes nothing.

In both cases it's an unstable equilibrium. The first site to be fast will get all the clicks. Or the first site to use AMP.

That was the replacement mechanism after AMP, yes

With AMP, Google could preload and pre-render sites, so things like swiping through a carousel between search results was instant.

That’s not possible without building an AMP page since it requires being able to safely serve off of google’s domain.

Thanks, that sounds like a neat feature. Regrettable than neither the Wikipedia summary, nor the Google Search AI overview, nor Google's own official summary page for AMP, [0] make this clear.

[0] https://developers.google.com/amp

AMP is a set of rules for people who are unable to stop themselves from making bad decisions. It has nothing to do with technical superiority. AMP is a deal under which, if an adopter stops acting like a jackass, they receive better search ranking. There is nothing that stops you from creating an AMP-like experience if you are naturally not a jackass.

> AMP is a deal under which, if an adopter stops acting like a jackass, they receive better search ranking.

You mean, jackassery like, not running ads from Google's ad platform(s)?

AMP has no relationship to Google Ads, does not require Google Ads, and does not require using Google's CDN. There are dozens of ad networks that support(ed) AMP.

Google Ads has integrations for AMP. AMP does not require Google Ads.

Perhaps not directly, but from the article:

> AMP required allowing any AMP CDN to cache your pages. Visitors might be served your page from a Google domain instead of your own, or the ad tech and other scripts on your site might be incapable of running on your AMP site (handily, it seemed, for Google, who might prefer you to use their ad tech instead).

Part of that statement is correct, part of it is misleading.

> AMP required allowing any AMP CDN to cache your pages.

Sort of correct: this is true if and only if you wanted the rank boost for Google search. If you just wanted to serve AMP and have snappy page, not entirely correct.

> other scripts on your site might be incapable of running on your AMP site

Correct, because that's the entire point of AMP. It is a straightjacket intended to make it technically impossible for your "other scripts" to run, because actual users hate your "other scripts" and they make users' phones overheat etc.

Exactly this. AMP was not a technological concern so much as a "contract": I won't act like a jackass and do anti-user things on my site and you will convey that to your readers/searchers.

Doesn't seem to prevent AMP sites promoted on Android/Google/Gemini assistant from using dick moves like hijacking the back button to prevent you from leaving. I can't fathom why Google doesn't drop the hammer on that behavior.

The innovation is that the page can be prerendered from cache without any privacy or analytics concerns. AMP is an open standard replacement for Facebook Instant Articles and Apple News Format.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook_Instant_Articles

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/applenewsformat

Prerendering was old-school back then, too.

Edge caching might not have been as prevalent but was hardly new technology.

> without any privacy or analytics concerns

Uhm, yeah, no. Less bloated JS usually means less concerns but privacy violations and tracking of visitors can very much happen on AMP. Some of that risk isn't removed, just shifted.

> Uhm, yeah, no. Less bloated JS usually means less concerns but privacy violations and tracking of visitors can very much happen on AMP. Some of that risk isn't removed, just shifted.

Um, yeah, yes. The whole point of AMP (and competing proprietary formats like FBIA and ANF) is that the preloading happens from a cache owned by the link aggregator, so the publisher doesn't get your details just because its page was prerendered in the background. The link aggregator obviously already knows that you're browsing over the article link, so there is zero privacy loss.

With AMP, you basically get guard-rails to prevent your team of junior engineers from making your mobile pages too slow in exchange for increasing The Google's monopoly power. :D If I remember correctly, with AMP, you have to use their web components, and you have to pass their validator or pages won't be listed or cached at all. AMP is not really innovative in the slightest. One can easily serve pages faster than an average AMP page if they wanted to. The businesses that see engineering as a necessary evil are not properly incentivized to care about page performance, and are sometimes only prodded into doing so if a giant like The Google tells them to. Management tells their programmers that they read an article about AMP and that it makes pages load faster and reaches a wider search audience by caching and cutting out unnecessary crap; the more seasoned programmers think "Yeah, no shit – I've been trying to tell you... but I'll spend time rebuilding pages for AMP because I get paid the same either way."

> One can easily serve pages faster than an average AMP page if they wanted to

This is incorrect. You cannot beat prerendered. It does not make sense to implement AMP for people visiting your website directly. AMP is for link aggregators like search engines, news aggregators, and social media websites.

The point of AMP was to force publishers to build non-bloated websites, because they weren't doing it of their own free will.

AMP is dead

Reply on news.ycombinator.com