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The most frustrating is that AMP version of app/pages/websites are very incomplete, e.g. the AMP version of a reddit post has only 3 comments (and the "load mor

The most frustrating is that AMP version of app/pages/websites are very incomplete, e.g. the AMP version of a reddit post has only 3 comments (and the "load more comments" button is buggy). Would have been much better to use Lighthouse / PageSpeed as a basis for showing optimized pages.

napsterbr 8y ago
Ugh, Reddit. Their amp version is terrible for the exact reason you mention. I know every time I see a Reddit page on Google results that I'll make two page loads instead of one (this does make a difference on my country, where everything is slow). Then, when accessing their pages on mobile browser, there's a huge banner telling me to download their app. In this same banner there is a dark UX pattern, where the call to action, giant button is to download the app, and the tiny footer text is "continue to mobile site". And apparently it doesn't matter I clicked through the banner before, it always displays the same annoying banner. Sorry for the rant. I'm just genuinely disappointed in what the web has become.
- mort96 8y ago
  My favorite is that they've recently started animating their "Get the app" button in the header. That's both immediately on page load, _and_ on an interval as you're reading, meaning it's impossible to read for more than a minute or so without an animation distracting you. Is it just me or has the mobile web taken a nosedive in recent years? Imgur won't even let you upload images from mobile anymore without their app, reddit is getting progressively more annoying, "Get the app" buttons and modals and banners are getting progressively more prominent and dark-pattern-y, and the default for all web pages now seems to be to include <meta name="viewport" conent="width=device-width, initial-scale=1"> regardless of whether the developers actually tested that their web page works on small screens, meaning web pages which would've just fallen back to desktop emulation mode in the past just simply don't work at all.
  - nyolfen 8y ago
    all reader mode everything
    - mort96 8y ago
      Yeah, no, my experience is that reader modes usually remove blocks of code or images or paragraphs at random. I will rather have a bad reading experience than one where I always worry in the back of my mind that some cruicial part of the content is missing. A few too many times, I have read an article, finding it a bit vague and honestly not that good, only to find that all the code blocks or some of the images were gone.
      - nyolfen 8y ago
        this happens to me maybe 1 or 2% of the time
        grenadier21 8y ago
        But how do you know which 1 or 2% of the time it's happening?
        adrianN 8y ago
        If you don't notice that the article is missing some paragraphs, then the article has had a bad editor.
        mort96 8y ago
        I mostly read random people's programming related blog posts. Knowing whether the article just is kind of bad at explaining what it's trying to say, or if important parts of it is missing, is really not obvious. If paragraphs of text go missing, maybe you notice it instantly, but if it's images or code blocks which aren't explicitly mentioned in the body text of the article and just let exist to contextualize or demonstrate what the author is talking about, how will you know that something is missing? More importantly, is it even possible to develop a heuristic which catches almost all cases where parts are missing, without lots of false positives for cases which are just inexperienced authors writing bad articles?
- aboutruby 8y ago
  reddit user: > 2) Can you stop the "Download the app" popups showing up so frequently on mobile? spez (Steve Huffman): > 2) They've been gone a while, but we are chasing down an issue with incognito users seeing it more often. Please let me know if that's the case, or if you are having a different experience.* Also talking about dark patterns: https://old.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/9ld746/you_have_thousands_of_questions_i_have_dozens_of/e75rinf/ https://old.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/9ld746/you_h...
  - ehnto 8y ago
    Imgur is full of coercive patterns too. On mobile it has a permenant "get app" button hovering over the content and you can't see user profiles or other social interaction stuff. It says you need to install the app to use them, even though they work fine on the desktop website.
  - taneq 8y ago
    Just went there and there's a pulsing 'use app' button on the top banner and an 'open in the official app' non-scrolling pop-in taking up the bottom 1/5 or so of the screen. So they're, uh, not gone at all.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
- lphnull 8y ago
  Why in the world would anybody browse reddit on anything other than the unofficial apps? Their website is awful too. Unofficial apps make browsing 100x faster and less annoying.
  - Bahamut 8y ago
    I only visit reddit when friends link off to it - I rather not be giving reddit any traffic at all if I could help it, so downloading an app just doesn't make sense for me.
- Steko 8y ago
  This issue is compounded by the fact that you need a search engine to find old reddit posts and AMP-free DDG doesn’t have the last year and custom date filters Google does.
shash7 8y ago
Not only that but tapping the top bar on iOS devices doesn't scroll the page to the top.
pkamb 8y ago
The multiple "Open in the Reddit App" banners that load for every AMP result, and do not remember that you've closed them in the past. Awful.
justAnotherNET 8y ago
AMP is an anti-open-web disaster, and just another example of Google abusing their dominant position.
gregable 8y ago
The open question is would it be better or worse without AMP? It's likely that reddit (for example) would have just deployed an equally frustrating "mobile" page that loads even slower. I just tried fetching http://www.reddit.com/ http://www.reddit.com/ in an incognito window (no personalization) on a fast connection and it took 1.2s to get the first byte on the connection. I can't say if this is typical, but the AMP Cache has much faster delivery (~30ms) even before considering the preloading.
- dingaling 8y ago
  > The open question is would it be better or worse without AMP? https://i.reddit.com https://i.reddit.com loads instantly, no JS required for 'performance'.
jayd16 8y ago
Is bringing up reddit fair? The their new design is awful and only getting worse, AMP or not.

napsterbr 8y ago

Ugh, Reddit. Their amp version is terrible for the exact reason you mention. I know every time I see a Reddit page on Google results that I'll make two page loads instead of one (this does make a difference on my country, where everything is slow). Then, when accessing their pages on mobile browser, there's a huge banner telling me to download their app. In this same banner there is a dark UX pattern, where the call to action, giant button is to download the app, and the tiny footer text is "continue to mobile site". And apparently it doesn't matter I clicked through the banner before, it always displays the same annoying banner. Sorry for the rant. I'm just genuinely disappointed in what the web has become.

mort96 8y ago
My favorite is that they've recently started animating their "Get the app" button in the header. That's both immediately on page load, _and_ on an interval as you're reading, meaning it's impossible to read for more than a minute or so without an animation distracting you. Is it just me or has the mobile web taken a nosedive in recent years? Imgur won't even let you upload images from mobile anymore without their app, reddit is getting progressively more annoying, "Get the app" buttons and modals and banners are getting progressively more prominent and dark-pattern-y, and the default for all web pages now seems to be to include <meta name="viewport" conent="width=device-width, initial-scale=1"> regardless of whether the developers actually tested that their web page works on small screens, meaning web pages which would've just fallen back to desktop emulation mode in the past just simply don't work at all.
- nyolfen 8y ago
  all reader mode everything
  - mort96 8y ago
    Yeah, no, my experience is that reader modes usually remove blocks of code or images or paragraphs at random. I will rather have a bad reading experience than one where I always worry in the back of my mind that some cruicial part of the content is missing. A few too many times, I have read an article, finding it a bit vague and honestly not that good, only to find that all the code blocks or some of the images were gone.
    - nyolfen 8y ago
      this happens to me maybe 1 or 2% of the time
      - grenadier21 8y ago
        But how do you know which 1 or 2% of the time it's happening?
        adrianN 8y ago
        If you don't notice that the article is missing some paragraphs, then the article has had a bad editor.
        mort96 8y ago
        I mostly read random people's programming related blog posts. Knowing whether the article just is kind of bad at explaining what it's trying to say, or if important parts of it is missing, is really not obvious. If paragraphs of text go missing, maybe you notice it instantly, but if it's images or code blocks which aren't explicitly mentioned in the body text of the article and just let exist to contextualize or demonstrate what the author is talking about, how will you know that something is missing? More importantly, is it even possible to develop a heuristic which catches almost all cases where parts are missing, without lots of false positives for cases which are just inexperienced authors writing bad articles?
aboutruby 8y ago
reddit user: > 2) Can you stop the "Download the app" popups showing up so frequently on mobile? spez (Steve Huffman): > 2) They've been gone a while, but we are chasing down an issue with incognito users seeing it more often. Please let me know if that's the case, or if you are having a different experience.* Also talking about dark patterns: https://old.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/9ld746/you_have_thousands_of_questions_i_have_dozens_of/e75rinf/ https://old.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/9ld746/you_h...
- ehnto 8y ago
  Imgur is full of coercive patterns too. On mobile it has a permenant "get app" button hovering over the content and you can't see user profiles or other social interaction stuff. It says you need to install the app to use them, even though they work fine on the desktop website.
- taneq 8y ago
  Just went there and there's a pulsing 'use app' button on the top banner and an 'open in the official app' non-scrolling pop-in taking up the bottom 1/5 or so of the screen. So they're, uh, not gone at all.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
lphnull 8y ago
Why in the world would anybody browse reddit on anything other than the unofficial apps? Their website is awful too. Unofficial apps make browsing 100x faster and less annoying.
- Bahamut 8y ago
  I only visit reddit when friends link off to it - I rather not be giving reddit any traffic at all if I could help it, so downloading an app just doesn't make sense for me.
Steko 8y ago
This issue is compounded by the fact that you need a search engine to find old reddit posts and AMP-free DDG doesn’t have the last year and custom date filters Google does.

shash7 8y ago

Not only that but tapping the top bar on iOS devices doesn't scroll the page to the top.

pkamb 8y ago

The multiple "Open in the Reddit App" banners that load for every AMP result, and do not remember that you've closed them in the past. Awful.

justAnotherNET 8y ago

AMP is an anti-open-web disaster, and just another example of Google abusing their dominant position.

gregable 8y ago

The open question is would it be better or worse without AMP? It's likely that reddit (for example) would have just deployed an equally frustrating "mobile" page that loads even slower. I just tried fetching http://www.reddit.com/ http://www.reddit.com/ in an incognito window (no personalization) on a fast connection and it took 1.2s to get the first byte on the connection. I can't say if this is typical, but the AMP Cache has much faster delivery (~30ms) even before considering the preloading.

dingaling 8y ago
> The open question is would it be better or worse without AMP? https://i.reddit.com https://i.reddit.com loads instantly, no JS required for 'performance'.

jayd16 8y ago

Is bringing up reddit fair? The their new design is awful and only getting worse, AMP or not.