4 ms·

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

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.
joshuamorton 7y ago
But amp sites support analytics and ads. Literally every complaint you're making isn't based in reality.
- Engineering-MD 7y ago
  I think the point is that it removes the locus on control about these things from the user to the dominate AMP provider. I often find the issue with many things is a change in the locus of control. People feel less comfortable when it falls in another’s domain, and often these large players then take advantage of this. The great thing about the old web which I think people miss is that it was (supposed to be at least, and initially was) decentralised. Every year the web becomes more centralised and in the control of large organisations.

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.

joshuamorton 7y ago

But amp sites support analytics and ads. Literally every complaint you're making isn't based in reality.

Engineering-MD 7y ago
I think the point is that it removes the locus on control about these things from the user to the dominate AMP provider. I often find the issue with many things is a change in the locus of control. People feel less comfortable when it falls in another’s domain, and often these large players then take advantage of this. The great thing about the old web which I think people miss is that it was (supposed to be at least, and initially was) decentralised. Every year the web becomes more centralised and in the control of large organisations.