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Comment by mrtksn | Hacker News Reader

I think it's very important to address the reason why AMP is possible in the first place: Websites are so extremely slow these days.

From users perspective, when I see the lightning icon on my search results I feel happy because it means that the page will show me it's contents as soon as I click it.

It means that the website is not going to show me white page for 15 seconds then start jumping around, changing shape and position for another 30 seconds until everything is downloaded.

I hear all the ethical/economical/strategic concerns but the tech community resembles the taxi industry a bit, that is, claiming that a tech that improves users experience significantly is bad for the user and must be stopped politically instead of addressing the UX issue that allows this tech to exist in first place.

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The tragedy of it is that web browsers have never been faster - it's just that websites insist on bloating, and bloating, and bloating. It's not unusual for modern websites to have literally megabytes of pointless JavaScript. (Reminder: Super Mario 64 weighs in at 8MB. The whole game.)

AMP strikes me as a clever technical solution to a problem that doesn't need a technical solution. It just needs restraint and better web development with existing standard technologies, and ideally a strong taboo on bloated web-sites.

See also two other technologies, the existences of which damn the web: Opera Mini (cloud rendering! and it's useful!), which can only exist for as long as the web is laughably inefficient, and Reader Mode, which improves modern web-design by removing it entirely.

What people do when a website that goes popular on HN or Reddit is too slow or can't respond at all? Someone on the comments links to Google Cache and more often than not this js-less basic HTML snapshot is good enough.

AMP is just a way to do this properly and automatically. The Webdev community chooses to ignore the speed of the content delivery and Google seized the opportunity.

What can a modern webpage do for the user that 2008 webpage can't? For most of the web, the answer is nothing, all the improvements are about better tooling for the management(measure and monetize) of the webpage.

"AMP is just a way to do this properly and automatically." I don't automatically dispute the second part of that statement, but the "properly" bit requires more than a handwave to prove its point.

Properly means properly for the user, that is, without the aesthetically breaking the page or losing content(as it happens with google cache sometimes).

Nobody cares about the business that runs the website, businesses don't have god given rights to get users and make money. If some other business serves the users better(i.e. Google with AMP) they can get all the users. Who felt sorry for MySpace when getting killed by Facebook or who advocated the right of having users for Digg when everyone moved to Reddit?

Another thing is being a monopoly and exploiting that position, which is always a concern with giants like Google but at this moment with AMP doesn't seem to be the case.

If nobody cares about the businesses at the other end then one day you'll wake up to find that the only business left on the other side is Google, and then where will you turn?

  Roper: So now you'd give the Devil benefit of law!
  More: Yes. What would you do? Cut a great road through
  the law to get after the Devil?
  Roper: I'd cut down every law in England to do that!
  More: Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil
  turned round on you — where would you hide, Roper, the
  laws all being flat? This country's planted thick with
  laws from coast to coast — man's laws, not God's — and
  if you cut them down — and you're just the man to do
  it — d'you really think you could stand upright in the
  winds that would blow then? Yes, I'd give the Devil
  benefit of law, for my own safety's sake.[0]

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NUqytjlHNIM

How this changes the fact that nobody cares?

Uber is probably also a threat to the public(apparently the people who run Uber are not very nice, remember all the scandals?) but people are so fed up with the taxi industry that they welcoming Uber to "slaughter" their local cabbies.

It's just business and that's why we don't live in a libertarian world and we have government bodies that regulate businesses.

> It just needs restraint and better web development with existing standard technologies, and ideally a strong taboo on bloated web-sites.

Restraint can't appear out of nowhere, especially when bloating the website frequently works - more ad revenue, more information about existing visitors and potential new customers.

These needs won't just disappear, so yes, the problem needs a technical solution.

Restraint can't appear out of nowhere, especially when bloating the website frequently works - more ad revenue, more information about existing visitors and potential new customers.

Rather than pushing for AMP, Google, Bing, etc. could just penalize websites (more heavily) for size in search rankings.

How this solves anything for the user? The better way is to provide the tech(AMP) so that content that is good for the user can be delivered properly instead of not delivered due to performance.

Remember, it's about providing a good experience to the users, it's not about choosing the losers and winners in the industry.

The taxi companies are making the same mistake against Uber, they assume that the users are an exploitable resource and want a solution that distributes this resource more "fairly to the businesses". From Uber's perspective, the users are the clientele and the resources are the cars and the drivers.

The web tech community is acting like the taxi drivers, angry that their user resource is being taken away.

> How this solves anything for the user?

Is it not obvious? It would motivate major websites to clean up their act and sort out the bloat problem, with no need for yet another web technology.

That's a hypothesis that assumes that the major websites will get motivated until the users get frustrated by the low quality of search results.

With AMP it's cheap and quick to implement, how long will it take for the websites to re-implement their codebase and all the tooling to match the performance criteria?

Anyway, you're missing the point that I'm trying to make here: It's about the user's experience, it's not about the user's distribution to businesses.

It's not your god given right to have users and make money.

> assumes that the major websites will get motivated until the users get frustrated by the low quality of search results.

Fair point - changes to Google's rankings apply more pressure to small websites than to established ones.

> it's not about the user's distribution to businesses. It's not your god given right to have users and make money.

What?

>What?

What?

Well, what are you trying to say? Why are you telling me "It's not your god given right to have users and make money"?

Why do you think this has any connection to our conversation?

Why do you think that web businesses are complaining about AMP but not the users? I'm yet to see a user that's not happy with AMP.

The web community acts as if the users are a commodity like oil and Google just made a change in its flow and now begging Google to make it flow like before to accommodate their business setup and promising that from now on they will be nicer to the commodity and store it in golden barrels.

I just don't buy it.

> I'm yet to see a user that's not happy with AMP.

But you're talking to one.

> begging Google to make it flow like before

My understanding is that AMP doesn't necessarily impact ad revenues ( https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Accelerated_Mobil... ). If it did, it wouldn't see adoption, no?

I don't see your argument for not being happy with AMP as a user, so I can't tell.

You've not responded to my point.

I dislike AMP for essentially the same reasons listed in the article.

Additionally, I value parsimony, which isn't mentioned in the article. I disdain anything that further bloats the web stack. Unless there's a very good reason for a new web technology - and here, there isn't - then we shouldn't further complicate the standards or our browsers.

Your dislike is political. You dislike AMP the same way a Vegan doesn't like kebab, the problem is not that the kebab isn't delicious but that animals are harmed in making it.

As for your ad revenue argument, not all the benefit from users is the direct ad revenue.

> Your dislike is political.

Bloat is a technical concern, but my other concerns are largely political, yes.

You seem to want to imply that this invalidates my opinion. Not so.

> not all the benefit from users is the direct ad revenue

Sure - such as readership - but which of them are impacted by AMP?

> I'm yet to see a user that's not happy with AMP.

I am a user; I do not develop for the the web or operate a business that has a web presence. I hate AMP. It gets in the way of my search workflow on mobile; it fucks up links that I want to save or share; I suspect that Google intends to further reduce my ability to avoid it over time.

AMP sucks. I actively avoid it due to the inferior usability. Now never use that excuse ever again. Its not even a little honest.

It's more than a little cynical to assume that most of us only care because we want to make money or grow our business.

The way I see it, as people who have more knowledge about this domain than the average user, it's actively our responsibility to act in the best interest of the user (our parents, friends, etc.), even if said user might not appreciate or understand the effort.

In the same way that I appreciate, say, doctors actively working against stupid/pointless stuff (homeopathy, avoid vaccination), I appreciate IT people trying to think beyond the immediate convenience of AMP.

Good point, i’m also not THAT cynical but I don’t think that the web developers community as general has any integrity that resembles let’s say the medical community.

Maybe the developers themselves are more idealistic but the web based businesses themselves more often than not are quite exploitative towards the users and that’s we have this sorry state of the web in general.

Measuring site speed and using that as an indicator does not preclude also providing tech (AMP) as a guidance for sites that need help with it, while rewarding those that already have fast and lean sites without it/giving them the freedom to not use AMP without negative impact.

I work for a publisher that zero ads. We have fast pages with minimal JS. We rolled out AMP purely for the SEO win and saw a huge uptick in traffic.

If Google really cared about performance they’d reward publishers doing the right thing on their regular pages (which would benefit the web as a whole), not just those using AMP.

Yes, this is my exact same take on AMP.

I understand their problem, I understand their solution. I have nothing against their solution.

But I'm freaking out that there's absolutely no way for me to compete with websites that are trafficking everything through Google, even if I create a product that's speed-wise compatible with AMP pages.

Google should be penalising the actual problem - page weight, not building their walled garden.

So encouraging speed is ok to a point. Do they stop there and create AMP because Google is so invested in their ad ecosystem? Serious question, as it's hard not to feel cynical when the solution appears to avoid the actual problem. AMP seems a way of actively avoiding the issue.

It's so far beyond ridiculous that a website downloads from 30 domains, and pulls down so much JS that you have more code than an entire 16 bit OS, GUI and game, just to see one text only page.

If they did that, then all websites with ads will be deprioritized, and it would be obvious (if it weren't already) that ads create a shitty experience. Google probably doesn't want to highlight that.

Slow web sites shoot themselves in the foot. They need not be slow. My company develops high performance web sites. We can beat any AMP site you can find and we do it without CDNs or Google-like networks.

Like-minded thoughts: https://www.quirksmode.org/blog/archives/2018/02/linkbait_37...

It's not a technical problem at all, and it's not the developers being bad.

If the top 1000ish sites can make millions a year from tacking on Outbrain, Taboola, etc. and the analytics to support those revenue streams, why do they care if the page speed is 3 seconds vs 500ms?

The faster the site, the longer a visitor stays and the more likely they are to purchase. Even Google acknowledges that as well as many other sites that study such things. Sites don't gain income by just displaying an ad in many cases. You have to have visitors click on them and, often, make an actual purchase.

I don't blame Google for AMP. The industry could have come together to offer a better experience and speedier page load, but of course they didn't and preferred having countless scripts and poorly optimized ads and that translated into a poor experience for users.

This created an opportunity for Google to come in and offer this solution and now we're stuck.

To the contrary, one of the most frustrating things for me about AMP is Google's contributions to "the slow web".

They're not in any way the cause, not even a majority contributor, but look at Google's influence on frontend web development, from providing drop-in-with-zero-thought script CDN links, popularising the @font-face standard through their Web Fonts service to the point of its use being expected and non-optional in many web design teams, Google's terrible Page Speed tool favouring large complex pages over small simple ones, and the general cavalier "hey just paste this snippet of JS into your HTML, don't worry about what it does" attitude that things like GA have helped to make the norm.

> Websites are so extremely slow these days.

I must have extremely low standards, but I simply don't find this to be the case. A few, yes. The vast majority work fine.

I have JS disabled and websites are not that slow for me.

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