Serious question: what else those websites are supposed to do (that AMP does not provide) with all those megabytes of scripts?
Newspapers display a text and an image and very rarely an interactive content(Election day maps and charts, mostly).
Is there a reason FROM USERS PERSPECTIVE to have different website codebase for each publisher?
For years the Web community kept creating new JavaScript libraries every day and all these web libraries were about providing a different way to do the same thing. No one ever created anything for the users, in fact, AMP is the first web technology that improves the user experience. It's loading fast and not too much stuff happens to display a text and an image.
Web people are mad at Google and I think they should be but all this happens because the web publishers refuse to compete on User Experience. They all optimize for the clickbitiest title or controversial topic and Google came and steamrolled their publishing tech.
I can't really blame Google for this one, you can check it out - I am critical of Google but I am more critical of the news business or the web tech community that optimized for very bad KPI that destroyed democracy, made web unpleasant and are now crying because of someone demolished their low-quality business.
From USERS PERSPECTIVE, AMP is a godsend. You can quickly view and skim low-quality content. The alternative is slowly viewing and skimming low-quality content.
It seems like the web technologists are unaware that they are dealing with real human beings, optimizing blindly for page views and CPMs.
AMP is Youtube for written content. A strealined conent delivery platform prioritizing UX that the publishers failed to create themselves all these years.
I’m just annoyed at my links being hijacked. When I click a link, my intention is to visit someone’s page, not to view it through some sort of creepy iframe. When I go to share a link, why is it a google link instead of the newspaper? Why do I have to spend a minute or two hunting for the real one in the ugly ui?
I agree with this, I don’t want to share AMP links because it feels wrong for some reason. Still, on the right top corner there’s a share button that would give you the link to the original source.
Doing a thing and then offering a service or agreement to undo the thing is not the same as never doing a thing and is usually a pretty clear signal of some underhanded doingness.
This is bannable behavior on HN. I'm not going to ban you because not only have you posted good comments to HN recently, one of them was an Aleksander Blok translation. That's first rate. But please don't do anything like the above in the future.
It's important for HN that people be able to discuss their work, or their employers, without being harangued. Should they disclose it? Sure, in principle and when appropriate, but that doesn't mean every comment has to include it like boilerplate. The range of appropriateness has some elasticity. Neither gregable nor joshuamorton was out of line (anyone can just check their profiles). Your attacks on them were out of line though.
Using people's employment information to attack them just disincentivizes them to participate in threads that they probably know a lot about, since most of us are experts in what we work on. That's a really bad tradeoff for HN, so users need to pull their punches.
The fact that these users work for Google and/or on the AMP team is stated in their profiles. However, as is almost universally the case, they never disclose it in the AMP discussions. And how many people go and check other users' profiles?
This is important info considering the moral and technical gray area of AMP. We've seen members of the AMP team discuss AMP "in good faith" here while shutting down any questions and discussions on all AMP-controlled venues (GitHub issues, mailing list etc.).
Plenty of users check other users' profiles, just as you did.
I don't know about AMP discussions elsewhere, but HN is certainly not shutting them down. We've had two huge threads in the last two days (this one and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21703345), and half a dozen other ones this year alone. That makes it an extremely well-covered topic here. In fact, HN moderators usually downweight threads that relitigate already-well-covered topics, and we do that less in this case. Most likely there are many HN users who are tired of these AMP debates, since they're not used to seeing so much repetition here.
Debate is fine, attacking other users breaks the site guidelines, we ban accounts that do that, please don't.
The first time I found myself on an AMP page, I thought "Holy crap, this page is fast and responsive!"
It was a couple months later I started seeing hate for AMP on HN and was kind of surprised. I understand the dislike of Google basically taking over, but I feel like Google is telling publishers "Since you guys can't figure out how to make fast web pages, we're gonna basically do it for you".
> AMP is Youtube for written content.
A few commenters have taking issue with this, but I interpreted it to mean early YouTube. Before YouTube became a thing, sharing videos online was difficult for a non-technical person. Just like YouTube made it easy to share videos, AMP has made it easy to make responsive pages.
Though a key difference is that it isn't hard to make responsive mobile web pages. Site owners have just decided that tracking, metrics, and advertising is more important than UX.
from USERS PERSPECTIVE, amp is meh. yes it's faster, does it really matter if you re getting an article in 1 second when you -obviously- plan to spend 2 minutes reading it? i dont know anyone who thinks so, perhaps your USERS do
> A strealined conent delivery platform prioritizing UX that the publishers failed to create
what you re implying is, Google failed to improve their algorithms to bypass obvious SEOs, so they are forcing everyone to use a dumbed down platform that is harder to SEO - for now!
Actually, it's a pretty well-known fact that users leave websites if they are not loading fast.
People don't go with reading plans to websites, the titles are optimized to bring you there and you don't know what's in the article. More often than not, the text on the website is not what the title made you believe it is. You can't plan ahead, you want to quickly find out what is this all about.
The article themselves are usually garbage optimized for SEO, long paragraphs of sentences that say the same thing but with different keywords. If that's not enough, they try to sway attention with ads and popups. Even if you had a plan about reading an article, the publisher's plan about you is different(tip: it's not about letting you read in peace).
The Web is horrible, it's even more horrible on mobile. AMP is an improvement.
I too am skeptical- except in extreme cases. Maybe if it's some sort of mindless bullshit site that I'm not really interested in I would leave it if it didn't load in, say, 5 seconds. But I don't really give a shit about the bullshit web. Life would be better without that anyway (except, of course, for companies who make a living selling ads on such sites).
But if somebody's leaving a page that has content they need because it doesn't load in 1 second, then I'd say they're a dumbass.
> users leave websites if they are not loading fast
then google is doing a bad job of presenting these sites to users, since obviously these sites should lose their rank, since users leave them. Google surely thinks bounce rates are important, no?
> The article themselves are usually garbage optimized for SEO, long paragraphs of sentences
and how is AMP fixing this? and who is responsible for SEO having these incentives? SEO literally means they optimize for what google wants
It's sometimes a little faster but also considerably less functional. The Guardian and Reddit both have AMP pages that are much worse than the actual pages.
> if you re getting an article in 1 second when you -obviously- plan to spend 2 minutes reading it?
In my experience, 99.9 percentile is more like 2~30 seconds in NorCal with a potentially sub-optimal ISP. I expect this to be even worse in developing countries like south/southeast asia.
Google AMP mostly just reduces the latency by pre-loading the pages from Google Search results. That has the side-effect of increasing the traffic on networks using Google Search when Google AMP results come up on the Google Search results, which they probably will given that using Google AMP will improve the site's Google Search ranking.
I haven't benchmarked it, so I can't actually speak from anything but wild speculation, but Google AMP might actually be making this problem worse.
I gave it a try. So I searched for "Trump" in Safari mobile, the result page loaded 2.5mb. It loaded a bit more when I clicked on an AMP article and kept loading more as I jump from article to article. It did not load any data without me switching to the next article.
After 10 articles, the transferred data was 28MB. I visited the Guardian's own website and it fetched 3MB.
So, It looks like Google does not preload a huge amount of data.
How are you able to look at how much data was transferred on Safari mobile? As far as I know you can't access dev tools on mobile. Did you just change the User Agent on your computer to simulate?
You can! You can use the desktop Safari to connect to your iPhone's Safari and access full developer tools.
Just connect your iPhone to a Mac, open Safari desktop and in the Develop menu, you will see your mobile phone. When you open a page on mobile Safari, you will be able to see it from the Develop menu and when you click on it, the full Safari developer tools will open in a new window. Works just like the regular developer tools.
I know it's not kosher to complain about downvotes but I said nothing about AMP, just argued against the statement that users don't care about speed. Anything that could possibly be interpreted in Google's favor gets downvoted immediately. It's carpet bombing with collateral damage.
slow users everywhere are better served with the simple amphtml page without any of google's scripts
The major problem is the download size anyway, and most of it is google-served ads and trackers. Amp is making this asynchronous, but afaik it doesn’t get rid of the ads
AMP is Youtube for written content. A strealined conent delivery platform prioritizing UX that the publishers failed to create themselves all these years.
Do you pay for youtube? Because the vanilla youtube experience is an ad-ridden UX nightmare.
I use adblocking on Safari(mobile and desktop), so the web experience for me is very good. On the iPhone App, the ads are annoying but I do understand that this is how the content is paid for, so I am O.K. with it.
The main difference is that with many websites things jump around when on Youtube the design is clearly defined. There's no cognitive load in trying to find the content between those "subscribe" popups and menus etc.
They clearly designed their experience with the understanding that you are there to watch a video.
Actually, YouTube's website is so good that the first thing that appears on the page is the video and it starts playing when the rest of the page(like, subscribe buttons suggested videos etc.) is still loading and not rendered.
Most websites on the other hand act as if the content was the bite to lure you there and try to make you subscribe/create an account/ allow notifications/show you ads and it's their failure if you actually happen to consume the content that was promised to you from the link you clicked.
I'm blocking ads on all the websites, my content blocker is not youtube-only. Still, other websites suck and Youtube is great because UX is not just about ads.
Newspapers display a text and an image and very rarely an interactive content(Election day maps and charts, mostly).
Is there a reason FROM USERS PERSPECTIVE to have different website codebase for each publisher?
For years the Web community kept creating new JavaScript libraries every day and all these web libraries were about providing a different way to do the same thing. No one ever created anything for the users, in fact, AMP is the first web technology that improves the user experience. It's loading fast and not too much stuff happens to display a text and an image.
Web people are mad at Google and I think they should be but all this happens because the web publishers refuse to compete on User Experience. They all optimize for the clickbitiest title or controversial topic and Google came and steamrolled their publishing tech.
I can't really blame Google for this one, you can check it out - I am critical of Google but I am more critical of the news business or the web tech community that optimized for very bad KPI that destroyed democracy, made web unpleasant and are now crying because of someone demolished their low-quality business.
From USERS PERSPECTIVE, AMP is a godsend. You can quickly view and skim low-quality content. The alternative is slowly viewing and skimming low-quality content.
It seems like the web technologists are unaware that they are dealing with real human beings, optimizing blindly for page views and CPMs.
AMP is Youtube for written content. A strealined conent delivery platform prioritizing UX that the publishers failed to create themselves all these years.