Cake or death: AMP and the worrying power dynamics of the web
trib.tv
trib.tv
If we want to keep it open, we can simply keep building great websites. Real websites. Without "amp" and "portals".
Example: HN itself. No amp, much joy!
Or take a hint from Google themselves. They don't offer an amp version of their search results. And will never allow anybody to embed their site.
Every startup founder defected and surrendered to Facebook in favor of more pageviews.
It's like the prisoners dilemma only with startups and instead of going to prison you have to use Facebook.
Some of us did.
What matters a lot right now is something else: the direct timeline accurate and somewhat algorithm free, communication channels companies have with their customers (and you have with your friends.) That is email and messaging.
We should be paying a lot closer attention and giving greater caution to Gmail, Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp. Particularly Gmail.
I agree. And I voted with my feet on those as well.
Instead we often use outline.com, which as far as the news publisher is concerned is worse than what Google is doing because they lose all control. (If adopted at scale.)
That's nonsensical. The whole point of AMP is to be able to safely prerender third party content. The search results page is first party.
What if reddit wants to pre-render some google search result page when people submit a link to one?
Wouldn’t reddit then be the first party, and google the third party?
Why should google be considered to have the right to be prior to reddit?
(Reddit here is just an example. My point isn’t about reddit.)
Google search results pages are personalized, so they cannot safely be prerendered.
Even if Google had some reason to prerender unpersonalized results, Reddit would first need to implement an AMP cache before it would make sense for Google to optimize for it.
On a normal webpage:
- I scroll down -> address bar is hidden.
- I scroll up a bit and then down again -> address bar is shown
On any AMP page:
- I scroll down a bit -> address bar is hidden
- and then I can scroll in any direction I want and the address bar never appears unless I scroll to the very top
For me that feels like Google wants to keep me inside the AMP page and makes it harder to navigate to a normal page.
Example: https://photos.app.goo.gl/a8A3WukpMiFPMBaNA
(Disclosure: I work for Google)
- go to https://news.google.com and scroll down until the address bar is hidden
- click on any of the AMP links
- the AMP links loads and the address bar is still hidden
- scroll around the page. The address bar only re-appears if I scroll to the very top, otherwise it stays hidden
I use Chrome 74.0.3729.157 on Android 7
* If you click on an AMP link without scrolling down enough to hide the URL bar, the URL bar remains even as you scroll through the AMP article.
* If you click on an AMP link after scrolling down enough to hide the URL bar (the case you saw), the URL bar stays hidden even if you scroll back up (unless you scroll all the way to the top, at which point you're scrolling the outer page).
I agree this is bad UX, and it happens because the Google News site is loading AMP pages in an iframe. Web Packaging fixes this: https://blog.cloudflare.com/announcing-amp-real-url/
(Disclosure: I work at Google on unrelated things, speaking for myself and not the company)
1) Link snippets. In the old days, there was syndicated news: org A could pay org B for the right to print bits of B's coverage. From this point of view, Google search looks like a syndication that they've not opted into and isn't paying. Of course, when they tried fighting back (some organisations in Spain and Germany, I think), they got removed from search results and ended up worse off. This is the view driving the "link tax" proposals in the EU.
2) "Snippets" that are in fact the whole article: both AMP and the proposed "web packages". In this case, Google end up publishing the whole article from their domain. The paper gets .. what exactly?
3) The bad recommendation problem: "This equates a responsible, expensively produced, extensively researched, professional newsgatherer with some guy who thinks the earth is flat for no reason other than that it ‘kinda feels right’." See also Youtube's role in promoting flat earth, anti-vax, neo-nazi, etc viewpoints.
4) AMP etc. vs paywalls: "In AMP, the support for paywalls is based on a recommendation that the premium content be included in the source of the page regardless of the user’s authorisation state."
On the other side I feel like there are far too many Googlers that have drank the vile tautology Kool-Aid that because the unofficial motto is still supposed to be "Do No Evil" that what Google is doing cannot be evil, because it is Google doing it. They haven't even reached Step 1 yet.
Probably just legacy though...
But I don't quite understand the author's concern about Google's push for AMP being a "monopolistic land grab" at the same time as the author's disgust that Google doesn't censor disreputable websites.
AMP is a technical solution to require technically-not-terrible sites; a reputability service is also a technical solution, but for a non-technical problem of terrible sites. Why is "cake or death" terrible for the former but not the latter? Especially since it seems like it'd be really hard to have a neutral reliability check that everyone could trust.
I feel there's a tension between "decentralised and open", and "centralised and curated". (You could have a walled garden as part of a larger decentralised web without needing control over others, though).
AMP is a technical solution to a non-technical problem. And, in my opinion, that technical solution is worse than the non-technical problem.
In what way is safely prerendering third party pages not a technical problem?