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I work at media company, we have a lot of traffic from both search engines and social media. We have implemented both AMP and Instant articles from day 1 they w

by samat 10y ago

I work at media company, we have a lot of traffic from both search engines and social media. We have implemented both AMP and Instant articles from day 1 they were introduced. I love Facebook instant articles because it solves the real problem in very efficient manner - no markup on publishers side, semantics only. And it delivers really great user experience - zero loading time for all articles with a "bolt" sign in my Facebook Feed. I don't see real value in AMP for two reasons: 1. The top banner plague from google makes my experience reading articles much worse. It consumes a large part of my phones really small screen. Is there single reason why do we need it. I doubt people engineering AMP implementation in Google use it daily. 2. You still can make AMP pages which will consume tons of bandwidth, drain my battery and make me hate web developers (see ability to include external fonts). And for developers who care for their users it's not helping much, even making it harder (see other thread in this HN page). Okay, preferching might help, but what else? I hoped Google makes things better, instead all I see is just defensive rhetorics about open web. I don't care much about how open or free software is. User experience matters. And I see that Facebook cares about it much more than Google. So sad.

cdata 10y ago
> I hoped Google makes things better, instead all I see is just defensive rhetorics about open web. My personal opinion is that publishers have a choice: step up and build these types of distribution channels for themselves - to deliver the content in a format they prefer - or else the distribution channels will be built by others and the format of the content will be dictated to publishers by others. The real danger for everyone is moving away from standard formats that can be rendered easily in a web browser towards something completely proprietary. For my money, AMP is better than Instant Articles in that regard. > I don't care much about how open or free software is. User experience matters. I agree that UX is important (if not most important), but I challenge you to consider the long term implications of investing in proprietary solutions just because they make hard problems appear to have been "solved" easily. Free and open source software has compounding benefits over time that proprietary software often fails to provide. Even Apple - a company (in)famous for its proprietary technical solutions - laid most of the foundation for its renaissance with free and open source software, and continues to benefit from (and contribute to) free and open source software development today. > And I see that Facebook cares about it much more than Google. Make no mistake: big tech companies care most about money. There is a trap that you can fall into, especially as a technical person, where you believe that a company cares about your success in particular. No company really does. They mostly just care about money. Plan accordingly.

by samat 10y ago

cdata 10y ago

> I hoped Google makes things better, instead all I see is just defensive rhetorics about open web. My personal opinion is that publishers have a choice: step up and build these types of distribution channels for themselves - to deliver the content in a format they prefer - or else the distribution channels will be built by others and the format of the content will be dictated to publishers by others. The real danger for everyone is moving away from standard formats that can be rendered easily in a web browser towards something completely proprietary. For my money, AMP is better than Instant Articles in that regard. > I don't care much about how open or free software is. User experience matters. I agree that UX is important (if not most important), but I challenge you to consider the long term implications of investing in proprietary solutions just because they make hard problems appear to have been "solved" easily. Free and open source software has compounding benefits over time that proprietary software often fails to provide. Even Apple - a company (in)famous for its proprietary technical solutions - laid most of the foundation for its renaissance with free and open source software, and continues to benefit from (and contribute to) free and open source software development today. > And I see that Facebook cares about it much more than Google. Make no mistake: big tech companies care most about money. There is a trap that you can fall into, especially as a technical person, where you believe that a company cares about your success in particular. No company really does. They mostly just care about money. Plan accordingly.