To share the original link, to read more posts by the author, to visit the publication's home page to see what else they publish, to use their comments section which is not yet supported by AMP...
Do you share links before visiting the article? With this change, it seems like sharing the link will be the same amount of clicks.
Same goes for reading more about the author. How often do you do that, and do you do it before you even read the article?
For visiting the homepage, almost every AMP page I go to these days as a big logo at the top linking to their (real) homepage, so there's 0 difference for the user.
The only valid one is comment section. I just tried a few articles, and they seem to have a button which redirects to the real website. I think that's a fair compromise. Honestly most article sites do this anyway, load the comments after a click.
> Do you share links before visiting the article? With this change, it seems like sharing the link will be the same amount of clicks.
Before today, here's what it looked like:
Real web:
1. Click on Google search result
2. Read article
3. Click share and get real URL
AMP:
1. Click on Google search result
2. Read article
3. Click share and realize that you're on an AMP page which is broken for anything other than mobile web browsers
4. Either go back to the search results to find the non-AMP URL or navigate to the publisher's site and use site search find the real URL
5. Share the real URL
As of today, Google has made this a little faster but it's still an extra step:
4. Click on the small link icon in the header to display the real URL
5. Share the real URL
That's still considerably worse than the standard web experience. The only reason anyone is defending this is because it's associated with Google.
Absolutely, for example if I've read the story before and I'm just googling it now to reference it.
Furthermore, I care not that it is the same number of clicks, I care that users can access my website in a way that conforms to their expectations for the rest of the web. That's the crux of my problem with AMP. If it was everything except the page cache it would a lot better.
