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Comment by dfabulich | Hacker News Reader

(Author here.) I think the AMP brand is toxic roughly everywhere.

Many users don't know what AMP is, and don't really care—in fact, there's some evidence that users like AMP in search results, or at least they like the performance—but as far as I can see in tech communities like HN and Reddit, the vast majority of people who know what AMP is also know that they hate AMP. (Scroll up and down on this thread a bit!)

As for why it's toxic, I don't think we have to agree about that, but it's not just the UI problem. The URL problem (AMP URLs point to google.com instead of the original site) is a real, significant problem in its own right.

The URL problem is the root of the claim that "AMP is Google's attempt to take over the open web."

IMO, if it were just an iOS scrolling issue, AMP would just be controversial: love the speed, hate the scrolling, eh, it's a wash. But the URL problem is what really gets the flamethrowers running!

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>in tech communities like HN and Reddit, the vast majority of people who know what AMP is also know that they hate AMP.

which is an extremely tiny portion of people clicking links on the internet.

I've seen a lot of people in less tech savvy communities ask why a non-Google URL points to Google.

They don't know what AMP is but they've encountered the URL problem.

I'm not saying that a significant portion of the world population hates AMP. I'm saying: take the extremely tiny portion of people who have heard of AMP, and then estimate how many of them like AMP or dislike AMP.

AMP's detractors are few in number, but they overwhelm AMP's supporters, who are even fewer in number.

AMP has a mostly positive reputation in the world of digital publishers--and they definitely know what it is. I've heard from people at two different publishers that the decline in traffic due to the recent Facebook algorithm update has almost been made up by a dramatic increase in Google traffic to AMP pages. (see https://www.axios.com/google-traffic-explodes-doubling-down-...)

The main complaint I hear is that AMP pages are pain in the ass to produce, not anything about walled gardens or canonical URLs. Consider that most of the people making decisions are weighing AMP strategically against FB Instant Pages.

No. As someone who works in media/publishing I’m gonna disagree there.

I can speak for colleagues across many publishers too. Within the industry it’s hated.

There are implications for ad revenue too that I’m not going to go into here.

Don’t get me wrong, some love it but more hate it - for a variety of reasons.

Well if you believe the data from Chartbeat, a whole lot of publishers are going through the non-trivial effort of publishing in AMP even if they don't like it.

Because your google search rank depends on it

It's funny: If you ask what people think about being held at gunpoint they're not usually very keen on it.

But when I hold them at gunpoint and tell them to dance like a chicken, they all do it. Doesn't seem like they hate it after all. Sometimes they even cry tears of joy...

We work with hundreds of publishers and they all hate it. HTML is already fast. The junk added to the page is what makes to slow. A new fork of HTML is just another development resource drain for no real benefit.

Plain HTML sites are faster than having your article loaded instantly by the browser?

Is HN (the site you're on right now) somehow slow? What is this magical instant loading you're talking about? Content still has to be requested, downloaded and parsed.

AMP is a fork of HTML with a required JS framework and a strict set of rules about how other media can be added to the page. AMP sites are also cached on a free Google CDN. None of this is necessary or worth the dev effort for sites, they only do it because of search rankings.

The reason sites are slow is because they add so much stuff to the page that comes from vendors using bloated heavy frameworks and bad coding. Remove or optimize that and sites are perfectly quick.

Google downloads the content in the background before you click on it, so that is why it is fast.

I agree hacker news is super fast (and the back button works perfectly!), as long as you have a reliable internet connection. I use it as my anti-example as to why we don’t need single page apps to read the news.

So I agree: if google can determine your internet seems reliable and the page loads as fast as hacker news from the user’s location, the site should get an amp-style lightening bolt.

> they know what it is.

Well, to the extent they know it is a way of getting their site higher up on search results, they love it.

> which is an extremely tiny portion of people clicking links on the internet.

Most people don't know enough about how the Internet works to have an opinion. It's a specialized field, and only people who understand the related issues will tend to have an opinion.

Yeah, but a very high portion of the people who actually make web sites.

> which is an extremely tiny portion of people clicking links on the internet.

... But a large portion of people developing pages on the Internet.

... and a very, very, large portion of the people who are supposed to be developing pages on the Internet but haven't gotten their caffeine levels high enough yet ;)

They're actually going to fix the URL problem once and for all using [Cross-Origin Server Push][1] in the upcoming Signed HTTP Exchanges standard. Here's their blogpost on that: https://amphtml.wordpress.com/2018/01/09/improving-urls-for-...

[1]: https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-yasskin-http-origin-signed...

The standard authored by J. Yasskin from Google? Self-serving their own interests much?

And every other site that links off.

(Author here.) The "Signed HTTP Exchanges standard" is part of the Web Packaging standard, which is, indeed, the whole point of the article. https://github.com/WICG/webpackage

Saying that the URL problem is Google's attempt at taking over the open web is nonsensical. Google's main competitors in large markets, like Microsoft, Yahoo Japan, and Baidu, also implement AMP caches. How does that help any of them fend off any of the others? Each one of them gets to prerender the same provably prerender-friendly pages.

I am not an AMP publisher or an AMP developer, but I vastly prefer AMP results, and I suspect my preference lines up with the majority outside of HN, or why else would all these search engines do this?

> Saying that the URL problem is Google's attempt at taking over the open web is nonsensical.

The point isn't that only Google can use AMP. (I agree that many people incorrectly think that AMP is Google-only.) The point is that with AMP, you've lost control of your web site.

The fact that you've lost control not only to Google, but also to Microsoft, Yahoo Japan, and Baidu doesn't help at all!

> The point is that with AMP, you've lost control of your web site.

Did I miss the news article "Armed googlers rampaging wildly and threatening all website owners with violence for noncompliance with AMP guidelines"? Who forces you to use amp?

We are forced by the prominent AMP carousel that shows up in search results that drives meaningful revenue to publishers (but cannibalizes our traffic to the regular page where on a CPM level ads are worth more).

If they removed that then AMP would die quickly.

> The point is that with AMP, you've lost control of your web site.

How does Google, etc., caching content and delivering it to users mean that you've lost control of your website?

"Caching your content," on a google.com URL, makes it their web site, not yours.

I disagree. Using cloud flare doesn’t make your site belong to cloudflare.

Cloudflare doesn't shove a header at the top of your page and JavaScript with unwanted behavior.

I mentioned the carousel problem in another comment. But the default behavior is suboptimal too. That injected header has an [x] button. Users expect it to dismiss the header. Instead, it navigates away from YOUR page, back to Google.

Does cloudflare change all your urls to theirs?

They control the reddest part of your page's heatmap. They inject JavaScript that does whatever they want. If you show up on a carousel result, for example, they inject JavaScript onto YOUR page that makes a left/right swipe navigate to a competitor. There's more, but yes...you've lost control.

The main bit of this is that Bing and Baidu HAVE to support AMP, because as Google's competitors, they can't allow Google to have any advantage, even if the solution poisons the Internet. And because Google has 87% of all search traffic, if a site is going to support a solution, it's going to be AMP.

Google's playing with nukes here. It's not just people under their domain who are affected, but anyone who wants to stay in the same game as them. Why do other countries look to build nukes? Because the US has them, and if you want to not be taken out by the US, you need them too.

AMP is like Amazon's listing of 3rd party merchants' products.

It's great for consumers in the short-term but commodifies businesses into an informational API for Google's UX.

> why else would all these search engines do this?

because lower latency increases user activity and search volume

The question you aren't asking is: "What are the long term implications to the ecosystem when Google controls the UX for all 3rd party data?"

> because lower latency increases user activity and search volume

more importantly, it reduces bounce and helps conversion. neither of which matter much to users...

They each get to put a giant back button on the top of your site that takes you back to the search results instead of deeper into your site. If Google is going to steamroll over independent websites, then the others want in on the action too. If they don't jump in, links to "your website" will all point to google.com rather than the other companies' domains.

> why else would all these search engines do this?

if it expands the business in a positive way who cares what users think, right?

Tech person here, I think AMP is the bee's knees and it should be shoved down media creators' throats. Media property owners have shoved garbage down our throats, complained when we installed ad-blockers to keep from being damaged, and this is sweet revenge.

I'm more than happy to admit that some icon in search results (not the AMP icon as that's already in use) should highlight performant websites but it should be held to as high of a standard (if not higher) than what AMP expects and revoked swiftly when the offending site strays from the expected standards.

What's not to like about giving up control of the most important part of your page to a third party?

Digg tried it, worked well for them.

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