797 karma · joined May 29, 2010
- Gutenberg and block editing are clearly the future, and ad hoc blocks are a great abstraction. However...
- Gutenberg as a place to write is miles behind e.g. Notion in terms of UX.
- Gutenberg as a page builder has a long way to go to catch up to the page builders.
- Full site editing in Gutenberg is coming, and early demos are out, but who knows how that will shake out.
- The WP ecosystem's culture is still race-to-the-bottom dreck. Interesting contrast with Webflow there.
- Therefore Gutenberg is in a weird transitional state where right now it's overloaded for writing, underpowered for building, and in transition. I'm keen to see what it's like in 2023, but it's hard to go all in on it now.
- The WP as a "forever" project seems to create weird incentives -- the lack of commercial pressure (until site builder SaaSs caught on) seems to have let it drift and drift. It's an interesting case study in open source effectively winning in terms of the network effects of free, and then suffocating and stagnating due to those same network effects. I know they're trying to self-disrupt with Gutenberg [0], but whether they can execute and overcome the UX trap they've identified remains to be seen. Modern SaaS UX (Webflow, Squarespace, Notion et al) just seems beyond their reach.
“Typically, $200K is a good starting point, though we’ll also work with a lot more. If you’re a startup with an idea we absolutely have to get behind, we can get creative with equity.“
https://developers.googleblog.com/2018/02/amp-stories-bringi...
[0] https://www.amazon.com/Jobs-Be-Done-Playbook-Organization-eb...
Now the government is pursuing a policy that, in its rejection of the rule of law and its arbitrary market intervention at the expense of investors and corporations, is the perfect embodiment of the idea of sovereign risk. And exactly no one is pointing it out — because Australia’s media companies are the beneficiaries of it, and the targets of it are two of the most hated companies in the world.
The government’s proposed News Media and Digital Platforms Mandatory Bargaining Code would be a draconian regulation to force two explicitly identified companies, Google and Facebook, to hand an unlimited amount of revenue over to Australian media companies, justified by a fiction that those companies steal news content.[...]
The code is justified by a News Corp lie, that Google steals news content and makes billions of dollars from it. The ACCC forensically compiled evidence that this was false. Knowing that the News Corp claim was wrong didn’t prevent Treasurer Josh Frydenberg from spreading it himself. But the only theft here is what is proposed for Google and Facebook.
Apologies to HN/YC for introducing risk by quoting from and linking to an Australian news article :)
[0] https://www.crikey.com.au/2020/08/28/google-facebook-accc-ch...
Once again: demand for a product increases when the price of its complements decreases. In general, a company’s strategic interest is going to be to get the price of their complements as low as possible. The lowest theoretically sustainable price would be the “commodity price” — the price that arises when you have a bunch of competitors offering indistinguishable goods.
Thus: $0.99 apps.
If you're feeling resentment, it's because you've been thoroughly commoditized to increase the perceived value of Apple's hardware.
(Of course it's somewhat false "value" - infinite shovelware is worth about what it costs.)
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v/
It's interesting seeing where teams hit the limits of the tool & wish for (or move to) something else though. I wonder if "The Notion Way" will emerge at some point, which would be useful for quickly qualifying yourself in or out.
[0] https://www.notion.so/How-Notion-Uses-Notion-616f41d2f5124f3...
This article answers two seemingly paradoxical questions. First, how did Japan control COVID-19 for so long while defying WHO protocols? Second, given that success, why have they recently lost control of the virus?
And concludes:
The early implementation of moderate social distancing — combined with a culture of mask wearing and a strong sense of personal space around the hands slowed the spread of COVID-19 in Japan. Unfortunately, those same policies and cultures also allowed the government to get away with a pandemic strategy that was based on bad data, poor logic, and worse implementation. Under-testing, a deliberate part of that strategy, prevented the government from being accountable, meaning that just as COVID-19 was taking root in the country, people began abandoning the very social distancing which protected them in the first place. One hopes that Japan has managed to retain plenty of medical supplies with their conservative approach to fighting COVID-19, because soon, they might need them.
Totally get the "champagne tastes on a beer budget" thing too. Partly that's why I wonder about innovations that promise (or at least suggest) that you don't really need e.g. sample sizes that are as big as you may have thought. If (if!) that's true, that's amazing! That's a saving that everyone in business-driven online optimisation (for example) could benefit from... which also makes it seem unlikely. But as a non-expert it's impossible to sift the smart-but-wrong from the smart-and-correct takes, which makes the debates fascinating but frustrating!
However, as someone more on the creative, A/B testing-adjacent side of things, it's always boggled my mind that this isn't a settled issue.
Given the amount of money poured into testing these days, can anyone on the data science side give their 2c on why there are still novel approaches across tools and the industry with regards to samples sizes and significance?
How come there isn't a settled best practice?
(I came across this following @pinboard's tweets - not sure if it was linked directly though.)
On the same day Googlers protest retaliation by their own management, a Googler posts about how AMP, the astroturfed, Google-developed and mandated format is the cuddly "open" choice for those who want the "web" (i.e. Google) to win.
Give the web to Google? What could go wrong?
===
And for context, here's what the AMP dev rel says in TFA:
"The second reason is that many compare AMP to RSS, and the media positioned it as competitor to certain other big companies’ walled garden media formats. That narrative certainly didn’t help, and for what it’s worth, we, the AMP team, have never told the story that way..."
And here's the origin story from one of the AMP Project's cofounders and former technical lead, Malte Ubl [0]:
"We were worried about the web not existing anymore due to native apps and walled gardens killing it off. We wanted to make the web competitive. We saw a sense of urgency and thus we decided to build on the extensible web to build AMP instead of waiting for standard and browsers and websites to catch up. I stand behind this process. I'm a practical guy."
Honestly...
[0] https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/issues/13597#issuecomm...
Copywriting. Don't DIY. Hire me instead.
Need help with your landing pages, positioning, email sequences, or onboarding? Let's chat. I'm a friendly guy. :)
I'll talk to your customers (if you have them), analyze your competitors (if you don't), and come up with compelling copy that speaks to your prospects' pain points, motivations, hesitations and concerns.
I'll A/B test the heck out of your copy (and design) if you have the traffic. Not quite there? Let's work on your search strategy instead.
Hit me up: https://measuredcopy.com, or luke at that domain.
Very open to offers!
Copywriting. Don't DIY. Hire me instead.
Need help with your landing pages, positioning, email sequences, or onboarding? Let's chat. I'm a friendly guy. :)
I'll talk to your customers (if you have them), analyze your competitors (if you don't), and come up with compelling copy that speaks to your prospects' pain points, motivations, hesitations and concerns.
I'll A/B test the heck out of your copy (and design) if you have the traffic. Not quite there? Let's work on your search strategy instead.
Hit me up: https://measuredcopy.com, or luke at that domain.
Very open to offers!
Copywriting. Don't DIY. Hire me instead.
Need help with your landing pages, email sequences, or onboarding? Let's chat. I'm a friendly guy. :)
I'll talk to your customers (if you have them), analyze your competitors (if you don't), and come up with compelling copy that speaks to your prospects' pain points, motivations, hesitations and concerns.
I'll A/B test the heck out of your copy (and design) if you have the traffic. Not quite there? Let's work on your search strategy instead.
Hit me up: https://measuredcopy.com, or luke at that domain. Very open to offers!
Copywriting. Don't DIY. Hire me instead.
Need help with your landing pages, email sequences, or onboarding? Let's chat. I'm a friendly guy. :)
I'll talk to your customers (if you have them), analyze your competitors (if you don't), and come up with compelling copy that speaks to your prospects' pain points, motivations, hesitations and concerns.
I'll A/B test the heck out of your copy (and design) if you have the traffic. Not quite there? Let's work on your search strategy instead.
Hit me up: https://measuredcopy.com, or luke at that domain. Very open to offers!
It's a confronting look at the human side of severe ME, and a call for greater recognition. If you've had people around you struggle to understand what you're dealing with, showing them Unrest could help a lot. Check it out.
I still find the whole project dispiriting for several reasons:
1. Forking HTML: They’re now forming a defacto standards body on top of the W3C and WHATWG. (HTML is now forked 3 ways, for those keeping score.) We now are supposed to implement either (a) HTML + AMP, or (b) AMP alone (which is what the project has advocated for). Either way, that sucks as a developer and for the web. AMP team talks about AMP both being the future for everything always, and a mere stop gap that will enable better, native web tech. Which is it? It’s a mess.
2. Engineering-is-always-the-answer ideology: Ideologically, I dislike the “What the web needs is more corporate-driven engineering”. The whole reason the project exists is to fend off Facebook and native apps like Apple News. (It’d be better named FoF-HTML.) That’s the corporate side. And the way to do that was to massively overengineer solutions to problems that could have been addressed largely through SEO incentives (treat it as a spam problem) and left things like URLs (!) intact. Instead we’ll be left with years of AMP detritus that’s going to pollute the web for who knows how long. It’s all corporation-driven engineering and no spirit or science. No one is actually studying if these overengineered micro-solutions actually matter. All we need is more engineering!
3. Picking winners: Google used its own market dominance to bless AMP as the web framework of the future. It could have worked on common standards; it could have created other incentives, but it chose not too. Imagine if Microsoft actually succeeded in creating some kind of MS-HTML in the 90s or 00s. Thus there’s no market-driven competition for Google’s over-engineered solutions.
4. The cognitive dissonance inherent in the project: It’s an “open source” project that was born out of Google’s corporate interests. It has a public tech lead, but the actual Google exec above him responsible for the project doesn’t respond to anyone or answer anything. They cherry pick contributor stats to mislead the actual amount of Google-driven involvement. They desperately want it to be this thing of pure intentions for the benefit of the web and have us all singing kumbaya, but fundamentally it’s the product of a corporation acting in its short term competitive interests and using whatever engineering it has as its disposal to achieve those ends.
5. I still hate the UX. Reader mode support has improved but can be hit-or-miss, URLs are still broken and will be for years, and frankly I want to go to the actual web site and use Reader mode if necessary, rather than read the web through Google’s faux news reader. While developers have to maintain multiple versions of their code base (AMP & responsive HTML) things are going to break.
And all this for what? Slightly faster page loading and Google Web Reader experience, so Google can stick it to Facebook somehow? Is there any data on people using the web more instead of apps en masse now AMP is a thing? What %? And does that make forking the web worth it? I guess we’ll never know.
It’s such a shame.
[1] https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/issues/13597 [2] https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/issues/13623
FTA:
Here’s what I did:
1. User lands on my page (referrer: google)
2. When they hit “back” button in Chrome, JS sends them to my copy of SERP
3. Click on any competitor takes them to my mirror of competitor’s site (noindex)
4. Now I generate heatmaps, scrollmaps, records screen interactions and typing.
”Yet Dr. Holick also has extensive financial ties to the pharmaceutical industry. He received nearly $163,000 from 2013 to 2017 from pharmaceutical companies for consulting and other services, according to Medicare’s Open Payments database, which tracks payments from drug and device manufacturers. The companies paying him included Sanofi-Aventis, which markets vitamin D supplements; Shire, which makes drugs for hormonal disorders that are given with vitamin D; Amgen, which makes an osteoporosis treatment; and Roche Diagnostics and Quidel Corporation, which both make vitamin D tests.”
and
”Dr. Holick’s ties to the tanning industry also have drawn scrutiny. Although Dr. Holick said he doesn’t advocate tanning, he has described tanning beds as a “recommended source” of vitamin D “when used in moderation.” Dr. Holick has acknowledged accepting research money from the UV Foundation — a nonprofit arm of the now-defunct Indoor Tanning Association — which gave $150,000 to Boston University from 2004 to 2006, earmarked for Dr. Holick’s research. The International Agency for Research on Cancer classified tanning beds as carcinogenic in 2009.”
His response is perhaps the most direct explanation of the motivations behind the AMP I've seen to date. You can read the thread, or read his post here:
===
I first want to acknowledge that we are learning how to run such a big open source project and so many things are being figured out. E.g. we are currently rewriting our Governance guidelines to answer many of your questions more directly.
Having said that, I think amp-stories is a great example of our process. The Intent to implement (ITI) was send here in September and it has since been worked on with a set of publishers producing content to test out what the team working on code was producing. In that feedback loop between publishers and devs the product evolved. You can find the traces in dozens of issues in this project. It was "announced" last week. But only to people who weren't paying attention to this project.
In AMP for email we took a different path (post ITI only on public announcement) but we are working with a product team (GMail) that is building a product they way they want to and we respect that. The ITI was posted last week and has not yet been approved (so is in active discussion). The scope of the ITI is not whether GMail launches the product, just whether the AMP project accepts the responsibility of maintaining the E-mail specific fork of AMP.
For your (4) and (5) questions: The discussion is happening here with the scope of AMP. We cannot and will not extend the scope of this GitHub project to proprietary integrations of AMP. That may be frustrating but it is the way it works and a very common setup for open source projects. Similar with (6): You can argue here that AMP for email is a bad idea. The outcome would be if you convince us that we would deny the ITI and the main AMP repo would not accommodate the project. I can't answer the questions for the various integrations of AMP since (by design) AMP doesn't mandate how partners like Baidu, Twitter, Microsoft and Google use AMP.
I'd like to avoid taking email out of the equation for the other points. Both because I'm not an email expert and the answers aren't the same as for the web in any case.
First I'd like to acknowledge that we are learning how to communicate about AMP. I don't think answering individual posts at this time makes sense. Although I have engaged in plenty of debate about them on the orange website and Twitter.
We were worried about the web not existing anymore due to native apps and walled gardens killing it off. We wanted to make the web competitive. We saw a sense of urgency and thus we decided to build on the extensible web to build AMP instead of waiting for standard and browsers and websites to catch up. I stand behind this process. I'm a practical guy.
Now, and this should answer your question (7) we are increasingly pivoting towards taking the learnings of AMP and bringing them into web standards. The Feature Policy work is the primary focus of this effort and you will see significant increases in velocity in that over the coming months.
I said above and in my talk at AMP Conf that we aren't idiomatic about AMP's implementation. With JS in AMP the "thingness" of AMP. But that is just the first step. Our goal was always to create a well lit path towards a web that can compete with native apps. We are hoping and working on making that path broader and not requiring people to use AMP. As said above: Work is under way and will accelerate.
To (10): As said above: We are working on revising the project governance to make it clearer how decisions are made beyond me being BDFL.
I will moderate this thread according to our code of conduct. In general, my statement from above remains that there is an open invitation to join our weekly design reviews (but put your topic on the agenda; and adhere to the COC).
I don't think that the discussion here will lead to everybody being happy, but I think my post give a good perspective as to the future plans. We are in this to make the web win. We might disagree on the means, but we can agree on the outcome we are all aiming for.
The discussion, if nothing else, sheds some degree of light on how the AMP tech lead sees the situation.
"Open source" is just a useful fiction in this case: what would a fork of AMP even do? It does however make the project corporately palatable to others that might want to implement it (i.e. Microsoft/Bing), plus it attracts unpaid contributions to fix the work of Google's highly paid engineers ("Building the future web, together."). The former might be necessary but the latter is extremely problematic IMO.
Google could have set up AMP as an independent W3C group (for e.g.) at arms length from its competitive interests, but it didn't, and recent AMP product announcements show us why.
My irritation with AMP is also driven by the fact it's not usable for me. Reader mode is often broken in iOS which is a particularly egregious regression. URLs are obviously broken. And sometimes sites can't even get text-on-a-page right with their AMP versions: https://twitter.com/lukestevens/status/963910460796936192