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Comment by dylan604 | Hacker News Reader

That's not the take I got from reading the write up. There was logic in the decision to increase the size that was not difficult to understand. I'm not familiar with what Lighthouse is/does/why/etc, but they described the situation enough for this to make total sense on why it worked. Maybe they are lucky to have people working for them that can work the problem?? That's me stretching to accept lucky in the least as the reasoning.

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It only worked because Google Maps loads images in 250px tiles. If Google Maps decided to update tile size tomorrow, the fix regresses. Arguably the entire map as a whole is one content, and that should be measured as the LCP, but more importantly it shows the measure is just very brittle and easily gamed, as other comments in this thread already attest to.

Does setting the size inline with width="250" in the embed affect the LCP even if G decides to default to 512px? I'm actually surprised there's not a ?width=250 value in the G embed url

> There was logic in the decision to increase the size that was not difficult to understand.

I agree, but the logic doesn’t make sense if your goal is ‘optimizing the user experience’ as opposed to ‘optimizing our lighthouse score’.

Apologies, I wasn't specific enough in expressing what I meant.

You understood it to mean "they didn't know what they were doing and got lucky", which is a valid interpretation but not what I was going for. They definitely do know what they're doing.

What I meant was more along the lines of "the metric to optimize for was no longer strongly correlated to the original goal of improving the user experience. They were lucky that in this scenario optimizing for the metric aligned with an improved user experience."

Now here's me doing some back bending playing devil's advocate. If the image being optimized for UX resulted in the wacky scoring situation that lowered their ranking in search, would that also not be considered a bad UX if it's harder for users to find you? The team noticed the lower rankings, then investigated. They then realized why the ranking was lower due to the bad LCP. The investigation found that their image optimization was causing the bad LCP, so a quick change on that fixed the bad LCP. So it's not like they were chasing a metric for metric's sake. They did the correct optimization first. So again, I think calling it lucky is a bit harsh in this case. However, I totaly get where you are coming from and know that a lot of places will luck there way into things without ever knowing the why.

> If the image being optimized for UX resulted in the wacky scoring situation that lowered their ranking in search, would that also not be considered a bad UX if it's harder for users to find you?

If you insist, but even then that is fixing the symptom instead of the cause.

Don't hate the player, hate the game? These people obviously tried to keep their UI/UX in mind by originally using the optimized image. That wound up screwing them in a way not normally thought about in UX optimizations. They published their findings so that others that don't normally think in this manner can be aware of their findings.

They are the player.

The game is the bullshit G does, and all of the other vendors that latch onto the bullshit G does that provide hoops for devs to jump through.

That's the game.

Who's really needing the ire of internet readers?

It's not that I'm disagreeing with you, it's that I can not agree with you because we're not even arguing about the same thing here. I don't know what else I can say to clarify that.

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