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Google once was a force for good by indexing pages and rewarding good content with SEO. I deeply hate AMP. It's a monopolistic move to bully companies into han

Google once was a force for good by indexing pages and rewarding good content with SEO. I deeply hate AMP. It's a monopolistic move to bully companies into handing over Google their content.

lern_too_spel 7y ago
> It's a monopolistic move to bully companies into handing over Google their content. That's nonsensical. Google already has their content. If anything, AMP is a democratizing technology. If you want your articles in Apple News, you have to integrate with Apple. Same with Facebook Instant Articles. With AMP, you don't have to integrate directly with anybody. Just publish AMP pages from using standard HTTP, and every link aggregator that implements an AMP cache (including Bing, Baidu, Yandex, Yahoo Japan, etc.) will be able to instantly load your pages for users. If I start my own link aggregator, I don't need to have the clout of a Facebook, Apple, or Google to get publishers to enable instant loading from my site — I can cache the AMP pages they have already published. It's the same as publishing bus routes according to Google Maps's standard feed format (https://developers.google.com/transit/gtfs/ https://developers.google.com/transit/gtfs/) . I publish once in that format, and not only do my bus routes show up better in Google, but they also show up in all other mapping applications that ingest that format, without me having to do any integration with them.
- thepangolino 7y ago
  AMP is a complicated answer to an easy one. AMP was presented as an answer to webpages not being lightweight anymore. Instead of just pushing for more lightweight webpages, Google cane up with the monstrosity that is AMP.
  - lern_too_spel 7y ago
    > AMP was presented as an answer to webpages not being lightweight anymore. Wrong. AMP is a solution to web pages not loading instantly, not a solution to web pages not being lightweight. If you want to prerender links above the fold without deanonymizing them to the publisher, you will come up with AMP pretty much exactly.
  - robin_reala 7y ago
    And worse, there’s already a lightweight alternative format for news stories called RSS.
    - lern_too_spel 7y ago
      Which takes away even more control from the publisher (no analytics, A/B testing support, monetization options, etc.) and doesn't support prerendering above the fold. I can't imagine the backlash RSS would get if Google came up with that.
      - chipotle_coyote 7y ago
        Multiple blogs I read sell RSS sponsorships, and given that RSS feeds are, you know, ultimately web pages, analytics are relatively trivial.
        lern_too_spel 7y ago
        > Multiple blogs I read sell RSS sponsorships Sponsorship is a poor substitute for subscriptions and ads. > RSS feeds are, you know, ultimately web pages, analytics are relatively trivial. No, the aggregator that shows the RSS results has no standard way of reporting to the publisher who viewed which RSS entries.
        chipotle_coyote 7y ago
        The publisher can absolutely get by with measuring how many people viewed which RSS entries, which this can absolutely deliver. Combined with other web metrics of the sort that non-privacy-invading analytics systems like GoAccess and OWA can deliver, there's more than enough information to determine the size of the audience, where they're located, when the most popular browsing times are, what devices they're using, and which articles are more successful than others. It seems to me that you're arguing that publishers -- or in practice, ad networks -- are entitled to track the browsing habits of specific individuals, even if (theoretically) anonymized. If so, I rather strongly disagree.
- lubujackson 7y ago
  What a bullshit, PR-speak comment. Let's compare this to digital piracy. Let's say I make a game and host it on my website. I am giving the game for free. Now maybe I have some ads in the game, maybe not. I want to get some exposure, so I ask a gaming site to link to my game (Google). At this point, everything is cool. I have a cool game, the gaming site has something to show people. Well, the gaming site is big business and I'm a little fish. So in the interest in serving their customers they decide to host the game themselves (AMP). Hey, I'm hosting it online for free anyway, right? And because they love their customers sooo much, they did a cool thing where they dig through my game's code and strip out any ads I might have. It turns out their customers love this feature! Ads are annoying after all. Of course, if I don't like this hosting feature I can opt out of it. But if I do, they will take my game and tuck it waaaay at the bottom of their list (or just remove it completely). The reality is way worse than this, though. Because I no longer know when anyone downloads my game from the gaming site or plays my game. Should I make another game like the last one? How would I even know? The gaming site says not to worry, they have some convenient code I can add to my game to keep track of this for me. Ok, you say - well if you don't like this wonderful service of having your game taken and stripped down and its usage hidden from you, just opt-out of the gaming site. But it's the ONLY gaming site 95%+ people ever visit. And although there are some minor benefits of stability and speed to users, users ALSO can't opt out of this - they can't even get to my site to download the game anymore even if they want to. So what started as a partnership between content and distribution, where everyone is happy, has degraded into the distribution channel completely owning the audience and taking every bit of control from the creators of the content. Which leads us to: > It's a monopolistic move to bully companies into handing over Google their content. So please, tell me again how AMP is "democratizing technology".
  - lern_too_spel 7y ago
    > So please, tell me again how AMP is "democratizing technology". Your whole rant ignored the fact that people other than Google get to use AMP pages. That's how. > So what started as a partnership between content and distribution, where everyone is happy, has degraded into the distribution channel completely owning the audience and taking every bit of control from the creators of the content. This was always the case. AMP doesn't change the fact that the search engine's ranking determines how well the publishers do. > users ALSO can't opt out of this - they can't even get to my site to download the game anymore even if they want to. That's a problem with the search engine's ranker, not with AMP. If a publisher publishes separate mobile and desktop pages but cripples the mobile page in a way that makes it useless, a good search engine should prefer to show the desktop page even to mobile users. The same should happen with AMP. If the search engine doesn't rank properly, users will choose a different search engine. For example, there is a broad range of queries where I prefer AMP results because they load instantly, and I want them to appear first. If there is some feature in a web page that I want that I know won't appear in an AMP page, I will skip the AMP results, and the search engine should update its ranking model accordingly.
- MrStonedOne 7y ago
  There is no way for a user to disable it on their phone. It causes news stories and blog spam to pop up before product pages or other non-"article" style pages. It basically shoe horns the internet into 1 type of page because if you don't have "article" style pages you don't have amp and don't have the higher ranking. Your getting downmodded because you completely missed the point here. People don't merely hate AMP. They also (and sometimes more stongly) hate what google is doing with AMP and what that's doing to the internet.
  - lern_too_spel 7y ago
    > It causes news stories and blog spam to pop up before product pages or other non-"article" style pages. Your whole issue with AMP seems to be not understanding that Google ranking pages badly has nothing to do with with AMP. Google, Baidu, Bing, and other link aggregators that implement AMP caches are free to rank pages however they like and still load AMP pages instantly. > Your getting downmodded because you completely missed the point here. I'm getting downmodded because people don't understand technology. That doesn't bother me. I'll still correct them.
    - MrStonedOne 7y ago
      No, you still ignored the point. Google's behavior is what everybody from the linked article to the commenters here hates.
      - lern_too_spel 7y ago
        > Google's behavior And what behavior is that? Providing a publishing standard that anybody can (and do) take advantage of, including their competitors, instead of requiring direct integration like Apple News?
        JohnFen 7y ago
        It's an unnecessary publishing standard, intended to replace the one that is already widely used: normal HTML.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
lightswitch05 7y ago
I also hate AMP and its getting harder and harder to avoid. I created a hosts file that blocks as many AMP domains as I can find. Personally, I would rather not read an article then to visit an AMP site. If you are interested, here is the AMP hosts file: https://www.github.developerdan.com/hosts/lists/amp-hosts-extended.txt https://www.github.developerdan.com/hosts/lists/amp-hosts-ex... The hosts file is easily added to something like PiHole, uBlock Origin, or Steven Black's hosts project. Many other tools also accept host formatted block lists. I'll be the first to admit that the list is lacking, but I would love to accept pull requests if anyone else has an interest in contributing their list of known AMP domains

Google once was a force for good by indexing pages and rewarding good content with SEO. I deeply hate AMP. It's a monopolistic move to bully companies into handing over Google their content.

lern_too_spel 7y ago

> It's a monopolistic move to bully companies into handing over Google their content. That's nonsensical. Google already has their content. If anything, AMP is a democratizing technology. If you want your articles in Apple News, you have to integrate with Apple. Same with Facebook Instant Articles. With AMP, you don't have to integrate directly with anybody. Just publish AMP pages from using standard HTTP, and every link aggregator that implements an AMP cache (including Bing, Baidu, Yandex, Yahoo Japan, etc.) will be able to instantly load your pages for users. If I start my own link aggregator, I don't need to have the clout of a Facebook, Apple, or Google to get publishers to enable instant loading from my site — I can cache the AMP pages they have already published. It's the same as publishing bus routes according to Google Maps's standard feed format (https://developers.google.com/transit/gtfs/ https://developers.google.com/transit/gtfs/) . I publish once in that format, and not only do my bus routes show up better in Google, but they also show up in all other mapping applications that ingest that format, without me having to do any integration with them.

thepangolino 7y ago
AMP is a complicated answer to an easy one. AMP was presented as an answer to webpages not being lightweight anymore. Instead of just pushing for more lightweight webpages, Google cane up with the monstrosity that is AMP.
- lern_too_spel 7y ago
  > AMP was presented as an answer to webpages not being lightweight anymore. Wrong. AMP is a solution to web pages not loading instantly, not a solution to web pages not being lightweight. If you want to prerender links above the fold without deanonymizing them to the publisher, you will come up with AMP pretty much exactly.
- robin_reala 7y ago
  And worse, there’s already a lightweight alternative format for news stories called RSS.
  - lern_too_spel 7y ago
    Which takes away even more control from the publisher (no analytics, A/B testing support, monetization options, etc.) and doesn't support prerendering above the fold. I can't imagine the backlash RSS would get if Google came up with that.
    - chipotle_coyote 7y ago
      Multiple blogs I read sell RSS sponsorships, and given that RSS feeds are, you know, ultimately web pages, analytics are relatively trivial.
      - lern_too_spel 7y ago
        > Multiple blogs I read sell RSS sponsorships Sponsorship is a poor substitute for subscriptions and ads. > RSS feeds are, you know, ultimately web pages, analytics are relatively trivial. No, the aggregator that shows the RSS results has no standard way of reporting to the publisher who viewed which RSS entries.
        chipotle_coyote 7y ago
        The publisher can absolutely get by with measuring how many people viewed which RSS entries, which this can absolutely deliver. Combined with other web metrics of the sort that non-privacy-invading analytics systems like GoAccess and OWA can deliver, there's more than enough information to determine the size of the audience, where they're located, when the most popular browsing times are, what devices they're using, and which articles are more successful than others. It seems to me that you're arguing that publishers -- or in practice, ad networks -- are entitled to track the browsing habits of specific individuals, even if (theoretically) anonymized. If so, I rather strongly disagree.
lubujackson 7y ago
What a bullshit, PR-speak comment. Let's compare this to digital piracy. Let's say I make a game and host it on my website. I am giving the game for free. Now maybe I have some ads in the game, maybe not. I want to get some exposure, so I ask a gaming site to link to my game (Google). At this point, everything is cool. I have a cool game, the gaming site has something to show people. Well, the gaming site is big business and I'm a little fish. So in the interest in serving their customers they decide to host the game themselves (AMP). Hey, I'm hosting it online for free anyway, right? And because they love their customers sooo much, they did a cool thing where they dig through my game's code and strip out any ads I might have. It turns out their customers love this feature! Ads are annoying after all. Of course, if I don't like this hosting feature I can opt out of it. But if I do, they will take my game and tuck it waaaay at the bottom of their list (or just remove it completely). The reality is way worse than this, though. Because I no longer know when anyone downloads my game from the gaming site or plays my game. Should I make another game like the last one? How would I even know? The gaming site says not to worry, they have some convenient code I can add to my game to keep track of this for me. Ok, you say - well if you don't like this wonderful service of having your game taken and stripped down and its usage hidden from you, just opt-out of the gaming site. But it's the ONLY gaming site 95%+ people ever visit. And although there are some minor benefits of stability and speed to users, users ALSO can't opt out of this - they can't even get to my site to download the game anymore even if they want to. So what started as a partnership between content and distribution, where everyone is happy, has degraded into the distribution channel completely owning the audience and taking every bit of control from the creators of the content. Which leads us to: > It's a monopolistic move to bully companies into handing over Google their content. So please, tell me again how AMP is "democratizing technology".
- lern_too_spel 7y ago
  > So please, tell me again how AMP is "democratizing technology". Your whole rant ignored the fact that people other than Google get to use AMP pages. That's how. > So what started as a partnership between content and distribution, where everyone is happy, has degraded into the distribution channel completely owning the audience and taking every bit of control from the creators of the content. This was always the case. AMP doesn't change the fact that the search engine's ranking determines how well the publishers do. > users ALSO can't opt out of this - they can't even get to my site to download the game anymore even if they want to. That's a problem with the search engine's ranker, not with AMP. If a publisher publishes separate mobile and desktop pages but cripples the mobile page in a way that makes it useless, a good search engine should prefer to show the desktop page even to mobile users. The same should happen with AMP. If the search engine doesn't rank properly, users will choose a different search engine. For example, there is a broad range of queries where I prefer AMP results because they load instantly, and I want them to appear first. If there is some feature in a web page that I want that I know won't appear in an AMP page, I will skip the AMP results, and the search engine should update its ranking model accordingly.
MrStonedOne 7y ago
There is no way for a user to disable it on their phone. It causes news stories and blog spam to pop up before product pages or other non-"article" style pages. It basically shoe horns the internet into 1 type of page because if you don't have "article" style pages you don't have amp and don't have the higher ranking. Your getting downmodded because you completely missed the point here. People don't merely hate AMP. They also (and sometimes more stongly) hate what google is doing with AMP and what that's doing to the internet.
- lern_too_spel 7y ago
  > It causes news stories and blog spam to pop up before product pages or other non-"article" style pages. Your whole issue with AMP seems to be not understanding that Google ranking pages badly has nothing to do with with AMP. Google, Baidu, Bing, and other link aggregators that implement AMP caches are free to rank pages however they like and still load AMP pages instantly. > Your getting downmodded because you completely missed the point here. I'm getting downmodded because people don't understand technology. That doesn't bother me. I'll still correct them.
  - MrStonedOne 7y ago
    No, you still ignored the point. Google's behavior is what everybody from the linked article to the commenters here hates.
    - lern_too_spel 7y ago
      > Google's behavior And what behavior is that? Providing a publishing standard that anybody can (and do) take advantage of, including their competitors, instead of requiring direct integration like Apple News?
      - JohnFen 7y ago
        It's an unnecessary publishing standard, intended to replace the one that is already widely used: normal HTML.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

lightswitch05 7y ago

I also hate AMP and its getting harder and harder to avoid. I created a hosts file that blocks as many AMP domains as I can find. Personally, I would rather not read an article then to visit an AMP site. If you are interested, here is the AMP hosts file: https://www.github.developerdan.com/hosts/lists/amp-hosts-extended.txt https://www.github.developerdan.com/hosts/lists/amp-hosts-ex... The hosts file is easily added to something like PiHole, uBlock Origin, or Steven Black's hosts project. Many other tools also accept host formatted block lists. I'll be the first to admit that the list is lacking, but I would love to accept pull requests if anyone else has an interest in contributing their list of known AMP domains