12 ms·

Twitter rolls back AMP support, no longer sends users to AMP pages

573 points by twapi 5y ago

xchaotic 5y ago
AMP made some technical sense to speed up page load but it’s proprietary nature and the available http3 and quic protocols mean that It’s high time to say goodbye to amp pages.
- debesyla 5y ago
  By the looks of it even the founders of AMP think that too... (Google doesn't promote AMP pages any more.)
  - tyingq 5y ago
    Google also has some legal docs with unredacted statements about AMP that went public. So, more reasons to not talk about it.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- djbeadle 5y ago
  Well maybe but also: > The speed benefits Google marketed were also at least partly a result of Google’s throttling. Google throttles the load time of non-AMP ads by giving them artificial one-second delays in order to give Google AMP a “nice comparative boost. Page 91: https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.nysd.564903/gov.uscourts.nysd.564903.152.0.pdf https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.nysd.56...
- toast0 5y ago
  The stated goals of AMP made sense. But the technical specifics made things feel much slower. Specifically the requirements around a single draw meant waiting on a white screen for everything to load before showing anything. In contrast, normal pages that render as they go lets you start using the page before everything finishes. It's not great when the page changes drastically as it loads, but you can acheive a page that doesn't jump around (or doesn't jump around much) as it loads without forcing a single render.
  - noah_buddy 5y ago
    Only tangential but the only time I really fly into a rage at tech anymore is when a (mobile) website uses the dark pattern of placing a link somewhere where 0.25 sec after load it will be moved down by an ad. When it happens I attempt to click the link, click the ad instead, hit back, and hit the ad a second time. Usually, I'll back out of whatever site this happens on and never go back.
    - toast0 5y ago
      Yeah... that's super annoying... there's maybe some exceptions, but it's usually not that hard to at least just put a height on the ad, so it's a blank rectangle until it finishes loading, and then it's an annoying rectangle, but it doesn't need to change shape. Also, on my hate list, articles with an ad under a paragraph that somehow moves to the top when it gets half-way up the screen or something, so it's really hard to scroll down while reading. Blerg.
- justapassenger 5y ago
  HTTP3 and QUIC don’t get rid of bloat on the pages, and that was one of the big benefits of AMP. But also happy to see it dying.
tarkin2 5y ago
Did AMP achieve anything? (Aside from the whole everything in hosted by google thing) Wasn't the promise to make pages more responsive and lighter? I'm personally happy I dodged that bullet along with various other front-end fads.
aelzeiny 5y ago
Honest question from someone completely oblivious to AMP. What problem was AMP trying to solve? "Make websites load faster" is a buzzword-flag to me, and it's not really explained in the wikipedia article [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerated_Mobile_Pages https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerated_Mobile_Pages
- DevKoala 5y ago
  > What problem was AMP trying to solve? Preserve Google’s control of the ad exchange monopoly; according to allegations in the latest antitrust case. https://mobile.twitter.com/PatrickMcGee_/status/1451619916994396164 https://mobile.twitter.com/PatrickMcGee_/status/145161991699...
  - dmart 5y ago
    To expand on this, Google introduced an artificial delay when loading ads on non-AMP pages: https://mobile.twitter.com/tmcw/status/1451938637982142467 https://mobile.twitter.com/tmcw/status/1451938637982142467
- nightpool 5y ago
  From a technical perspective, AMP had two, intertwined goals: 1) allow third parties to safely rehost your page, so that they could provide a seamless preloading experience—fetch & render the page in the background, and display it to the user immediately when they click a link. This massively improved the time it took to load search results on mobile web, since it moves the request out of the critical path and allows Google's CDN to serve your assets. 2) Provide a front end framework that focused on performance and UX, forcing developers to get rid of layout shifts, weird scroll effects, and other things that made mobile web browsing a nightmare. This framework allowed for a limited subset of HTML and CSS, but no custom JS, allowing it to enforce these rules for all rehosted pages.
  - Sohcahtoa82 5y ago
    > Provide a front end framework that focused on performance and UX And this is huge. Non-technical users that don't care about the shady things Google did involving AMP probably think AMP is a godsend, if they even know AMP is even a thing. AMP pages load incredibly fast, are incredibly responsive, and are far less annoying. Your typical end user will likely prefer AMP. Thing is...we don't need AMP to get those features. But somewhere along the last 10 years, web developers lost the plot and now seem to think a static blog needs to serve several megabytes of JavaScript. They think they need to implement smooth scrolling in code, when every browser already does it natively.
al_ak 5y ago
What happened to all the AMP defenders that used to flood the comment section?
- joconde 5y ago
  Maybe Google fired them?
- a254613e 5y ago
  It's pretty pointless to argue for it on HN, because arguments always turn to technical things like that the website owner can indeed make the website faster and slimmer if they wanted to - and they don't need AMP. When in reality what I, as someone who supports AMP, is saying is that I don't care about the technical aspects about it - the truth is that with AMP the pages load faster, and are slimmer - with no exceptions. And that's literally all I care about when I need to look up some information on a shitty connection.
  - joconde 5y ago
    The UX sucks on iPhone though. The page fits on my screen, but can still somehow scroll horizontally into blank space, so I have to go out of my way to keep it well-placed. The address bar doesn't disappear when scrolling because of some Javascript UI weirdness. I'd rather have a slightly slower page.
  - al_ak 5y ago
    > the truth is that with AMP the pages load faster, and are slimmer - with no exceptions I'm not sure this is as universally true as you think it is
- sneeeeeed 5y ago
  Retasked obviously.
prvc 5y ago
Maybe Twitter can stop obfuscating URLs as its next step.
tyingq 5y ago
Hopefully other sites that normally have a logged in experience will follow. The Reddit AMP experience is, uh...lousy. The end-user experience on news sites is fine for end users, but not great for the publishers. I suspect, though, they will take longer to move away...not a lot of capital around for them to spend on that. I thought AMP was a trojan horse from the beginning. Happy to see it dying off.
- joconde 5y ago
  AMP reddit's only useful feature is the button that links to the non-AMP page. It's so useless, you can't read more than the first two comments on it, you get sent to the normal version if you expand. Why does it even exist?
  - red_trumpet 5y ago
    I'd guess for the SEO?
  - 0x00000000 5y ago
    On my phone, the stupid dialogue with the button that is supposed to slide up gets stuck like a quarter of the way so I can’t even click it until I refresh.
  - garfieldnate 5y ago
    The complaint for me is even worse: I regularly read on a kind of old iPad (Safari) and those links don't even work for me. This renders the sight unusable, as basically all conversation is hidden.
- toomuchtodo 5y ago
  If you’re on iOS, I highly recommend the Apollo client [1] as well as the Safari extension [2] that redirect all Reddit links into Apollo. [1] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/apollo-for-reddit/id979274575 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/apollo-for-reddit/id979274575 [2] https://old.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/pryy44/megathread_apple_releases_iosipados_15/hdmf049/?context=1 https://old.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/pryy44/megathread_ap...
pupppet 5y ago
Let's keep this trend going!
framecowbird 5y ago
I'm happy to see AMP fade into irrelevance... What was the main driver of its decline? Why did Google stop aggressively pushing it?
- user3939382 5y ago
  I would speculate that the potential legal costs were determined to outweigh the benefits to them https://wptavern.com/amp-under-fire-in-new-antitrust-lawsuit-against-google https://wptavern.com/amp-under-fire-in-new-antitrust-lawsuit...
  - ilamont 5y ago
    Thanks for sharing that. This comment below the article stood out: Imagine all those budgets that were spent on implementing AMP on major websites. Yikes. Reminds me of the bogus "Facebook feed will be all video in 5 years" baloney that Zuck et al started promoting in 2016, which resulted in publishers firing journalists and retooling newsrooms for video ... and getting massively burned later when the farce was revealed. https://mashable.com/article/facebook-video-five-years#IOpNsX_A5sqE https://mashable.com/article/facebook-video-five-years#IOpNs... https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2018/10/was-the-medias-big-pivot-to-video-all-based-on-a-lie https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2018/10/was-the-medias-big-p... https://washingtonmonthly.com/2021/03/13/facebook-is-killing-journalism-and-democracy-we-should-do-something-about-it/ https://washingtonmonthly.com/2021/03/13/facebook-is-killing...
    - underwater 5y ago
      Well he was kinda right, except the product was TikTok, and not Facebook.
- afavour 5y ago
  Google changed their SEO tack, allowing non-AMP pages to benefit in the same way AMP pages do. It’s all their push around “Core Web Vitals” that track page performance no matter what the page is made with. As to what fuelled the change, those of us outside will never know. Quite plausible this was always the plan and page metric functionality needed to catch up first. Equally plausible that Google backed off once they sensed regulatory action would be coming their way if they didn’t.
cphoover 5y ago
Thank God AMP is dying... If you are looking to develop a specification for preloading go through the browser standards process, instead of unloading this proprietary crap on the rest of us.
- skybrian 5y ago
  Why should it be a browser standard? It’s a web framework. Browsers already support it. Google did promote some improvements to web standards but they were never tied to AMP, even though they were things AMP would use.
  - cphoover 5y ago
    Because without going through the standards process it is a unilateral de-facto standard that has been pushed on the web without community involvement.
    - skybrian 5y ago
      Should React be a web standard? How about Typescript? AMP being built into browsers wouldn't be an improvement. These technologies are built on top of web standards. It's a different level of the stack.
- foolfoolz 5y ago
  amp wasn’t a problem. amp prioritized results in search was a problem and i just saw here they slowed down ads on non-amp pages, that’s not good for business
  - uncomputation 5y ago
    No, AMP was a problem. It was a proprietary, ham-fisted subset of the open web entirely forced by Google’s insane search engine dominance. It actively discouraged the creativity, freedom, and self-determination of the web that makes it so special. The AMP boost in search ranking was just the cherry on top.
rezonant 5y ago
Good riddance. AMP is terrible.
kristianc 5y ago
AMP used to completely break the cookied login flow to paywalled sites. Thank god I’ll no longer now have to click to ‘Open in Safari’ to read content I actually pay for.
joegahona 5y ago
I'm guessing this is related to Twitter's acquisition of Scroll, and the new Twitter Blue feature of sending Blue users to publisher sites with ads disabled. That was probably a nightmare to throw AMP into the mix with everything else that needs to be done.
nightpool 5y ago
I really liked AMP as a client side framework, and I think it had a lot going for it in terms of guiding you into a performant experience with good UX for mobile devices. Plus, the restrictions on floating elements and third party JavaScript have done a ton to improve ad quality on mobile web. I don't think we get there without Google or another similarly-powerful browser/aggregator coalition really working together to provide the right incentives to publishers.
- uncomputation 5y ago
  I used to work in a newspaper’s digital department. From the outside, I can see why AMP might look good. “Faster loading times, higher engagement from ads, and an SEO boost? What’s not to love?” From the inside though, this adds a lot of overhead to sites that are usually old, patchwork, and very complicated. Essentially, the dev team has to have two entirely separate tracks now, one for regular ads and one for AMP. If you have an advertising department, this gets even more annoying since AMP does not allow as much customization of ads as papers are used to (header vs side vs footer vs text-only vs sponsored posts vs in-article, etc.). Not to mention, the main “incentive” problem in the journalism industry right now is not invasive ads, it’s ads and clickbait in general, which AMP doesn’t help with. Most papers don’t want to have to tailor headlines for Twitter, Facebook, and a million other sites and venues. They don’t want to have to deal with ads, but something needs to pay to run the site and no one likes paying for news. Only extremely large players like NYT or financial papers can pull that. So I don’t like when Google says this “helps publishers.” That’s not their goal, that’s just marketing speak. Their goal is to make browsing Google a better experience, going so far to define a Google-Approved HTML Spec and cache your content on their servers. Just my 2 cents. Maybe some newer players in the game do like AMP.
  - nightpool 5y ago
    As someone who has maintained an AMP implementation for a big (albeit non-news) site for years, I think "AMP does not allow as much customization of ads as papers are used to" is a feature, not a bug. There are constant demands from sales and advertising partners to add more and more disruptive and broken web experiences, and having a bedrock of "Google will penalize us if we do this" to fall back on is really, really important. I don't care whether AMP "helps publishers"—I think AMP holds publishers accountable for their (accidental or careless) UX disasters, and prevents them from happening in the first place.
poopooracoocoo 5y ago
I love how one of the top things Google pushes with AMP is its performance when Google sites are quite slow. YouTube flunks Google's own Lighthouse benchmark and it's not like it has sorting, filtering and searching features or a very complicated interface, especialy when the old site had the same features at half the memory cost. How hypocritical. As a user I've always disliked AMP and how it was never the original page. Websites always have a separate AMP page and a separate real page.
flerovium 5y ago
Has it be definitively proven that the sole purpose of AMP was to lock in advertising revenue? The DOJ filing accused Google of this; that's not the same as it being true / there being damning evidence.

573 points by twapi 5y ago

AMP made some technical sense to speed up page load but it’s proprietary nature and the available http3 and quic protocols mean that It’s high time to say goodbye to amp pages.

debesyla 5y ago
By the looks of it even the founders of AMP think that too... (Google doesn't promote AMP pages any more.)
- tyingq 5y ago
  Google also has some legal docs with unredacted statements about AMP that went public. So, more reasons to not talk about it.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
djbeadle 5y ago
Well maybe but also: > The speed benefits Google marketed were also at least partly a result of Google’s throttling. Google throttles the load time of non-AMP ads by giving them artificial one-second delays in order to give Google AMP a “nice comparative boost. Page 91: https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.nysd.564903/gov.uscourts.nysd.564903.152.0.pdf https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.nysd.56...
toast0 5y ago
The stated goals of AMP made sense. But the technical specifics made things feel much slower. Specifically the requirements around a single draw meant waiting on a white screen for everything to load before showing anything. In contrast, normal pages that render as they go lets you start using the page before everything finishes. It's not great when the page changes drastically as it loads, but you can acheive a page that doesn't jump around (or doesn't jump around much) as it loads without forcing a single render.
- noah_buddy 5y ago
  Only tangential but the only time I really fly into a rage at tech anymore is when a (mobile) website uses the dark pattern of placing a link somewhere where 0.25 sec after load it will be moved down by an ad. When it happens I attempt to click the link, click the ad instead, hit back, and hit the ad a second time. Usually, I'll back out of whatever site this happens on and never go back.
  - toast0 5y ago
    Yeah... that's super annoying... there's maybe some exceptions, but it's usually not that hard to at least just put a height on the ad, so it's a blank rectangle until it finishes loading, and then it's an annoying rectangle, but it doesn't need to change shape. Also, on my hate list, articles with an ad under a paragraph that somehow moves to the top when it gets half-way up the screen or something, so it's really hard to scroll down while reading. Blerg.
justapassenger 5y ago
HTTP3 and QUIC don’t get rid of bloat on the pages, and that was one of the big benefits of AMP. But also happy to see it dying.

tarkin2 5y ago

Did AMP achieve anything? (Aside from the whole everything in hosted by google thing) Wasn't the promise to make pages more responsive and lighter? I'm personally happy I dodged that bullet along with various other front-end fads.

aelzeiny 5y ago

Honest question from someone completely oblivious to AMP. What problem was AMP trying to solve? "Make websites load faster" is a buzzword-flag to me, and it's not really explained in the wikipedia article [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerated_Mobile_Pages https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerated_Mobile_Pages

DevKoala 5y ago
> What problem was AMP trying to solve? Preserve Google’s control of the ad exchange monopoly; according to allegations in the latest antitrust case. https://mobile.twitter.com/PatrickMcGee_/status/1451619916994396164 https://mobile.twitter.com/PatrickMcGee_/status/145161991699...
- dmart 5y ago
  To expand on this, Google introduced an artificial delay when loading ads on non-AMP pages: https://mobile.twitter.com/tmcw/status/1451938637982142467 https://mobile.twitter.com/tmcw/status/1451938637982142467
nightpool 5y ago
From a technical perspective, AMP had two, intertwined goals: 1) allow third parties to safely rehost your page, so that they could provide a seamless preloading experience—fetch & render the page in the background, and display it to the user immediately when they click a link. This massively improved the time it took to load search results on mobile web, since it moves the request out of the critical path and allows Google's CDN to serve your assets. 2) Provide a front end framework that focused on performance and UX, forcing developers to get rid of layout shifts, weird scroll effects, and other things that made mobile web browsing a nightmare. This framework allowed for a limited subset of HTML and CSS, but no custom JS, allowing it to enforce these rules for all rehosted pages.
- Sohcahtoa82 5y ago
  > Provide a front end framework that focused on performance and UX And this is huge. Non-technical users that don't care about the shady things Google did involving AMP probably think AMP is a godsend, if they even know AMP is even a thing. AMP pages load incredibly fast, are incredibly responsive, and are far less annoying. Your typical end user will likely prefer AMP. Thing is...we don't need AMP to get those features. But somewhere along the last 10 years, web developers lost the plot and now seem to think a static blog needs to serve several megabytes of JavaScript. They think they need to implement smooth scrolling in code, when every browser already does it natively.

al_ak 5y ago

What happened to all the AMP defenders that used to flood the comment section?

joconde 5y ago
Maybe Google fired them?
a254613e 5y ago
It's pretty pointless to argue for it on HN, because arguments always turn to technical things like that the website owner can indeed make the website faster and slimmer if they wanted to - and they don't need AMP. When in reality what I, as someone who supports AMP, is saying is that I don't care about the technical aspects about it - the truth is that with AMP the pages load faster, and are slimmer - with no exceptions. And that's literally all I care about when I need to look up some information on a shitty connection.
- joconde 5y ago
  The UX sucks on iPhone though. The page fits on my screen, but can still somehow scroll horizontally into blank space, so I have to go out of my way to keep it well-placed. The address bar doesn't disappear when scrolling because of some Javascript UI weirdness. I'd rather have a slightly slower page.
- al_ak 5y ago
  > the truth is that with AMP the pages load faster, and are slimmer - with no exceptions I'm not sure this is as universally true as you think it is
sneeeeeed 5y ago
Retasked obviously.

prvc 5y ago

Maybe Twitter can stop obfuscating URLs as its next step.

tyingq 5y ago

Hopefully other sites that normally have a logged in experience will follow. The Reddit AMP experience is, uh...lousy. The end-user experience on news sites is fine for end users, but not great for the publishers. I suspect, though, they will take longer to move away...not a lot of capital around for them to spend on that. I thought AMP was a trojan horse from the beginning. Happy to see it dying off.

joconde 5y ago
AMP reddit's only useful feature is the button that links to the non-AMP page. It's so useless, you can't read more than the first two comments on it, you get sent to the normal version if you expand. Why does it even exist?
- red_trumpet 5y ago
  I'd guess for the SEO?
- 0x00000000 5y ago
  On my phone, the stupid dialogue with the button that is supposed to slide up gets stuck like a quarter of the way so I can’t even click it until I refresh.
- garfieldnate 5y ago
  The complaint for me is even worse: I regularly read on a kind of old iPad (Safari) and those links don't even work for me. This renders the sight unusable, as basically all conversation is hidden.
toomuchtodo 5y ago
If you’re on iOS, I highly recommend the Apollo client [1] as well as the Safari extension [2] that redirect all Reddit links into Apollo. [1] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/apollo-for-reddit/id979274575 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/apollo-for-reddit/id979274575 [2] https://old.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/pryy44/megathread_apple_releases_iosipados_15/hdmf049/?context=1 https://old.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/pryy44/megathread_ap...

pupppet 5y ago

Let's keep this trend going!

framecowbird 5y ago

I'm happy to see AMP fade into irrelevance... What was the main driver of its decline? Why did Google stop aggressively pushing it?

user3939382 5y ago
I would speculate that the potential legal costs were determined to outweigh the benefits to them https://wptavern.com/amp-under-fire-in-new-antitrust-lawsuit-against-google https://wptavern.com/amp-under-fire-in-new-antitrust-lawsuit...
- ilamont 5y ago
  Thanks for sharing that. This comment below the article stood out: Imagine all those budgets that were spent on implementing AMP on major websites. Yikes. Reminds me of the bogus "Facebook feed will be all video in 5 years" baloney that Zuck et al started promoting in 2016, which resulted in publishers firing journalists and retooling newsrooms for video ... and getting massively burned later when the farce was revealed. https://mashable.com/article/facebook-video-five-years#IOpNsX_A5sqE https://mashable.com/article/facebook-video-five-years#IOpNs... https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2018/10/was-the-medias-big-pivot-to-video-all-based-on-a-lie https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2018/10/was-the-medias-big-p... https://washingtonmonthly.com/2021/03/13/facebook-is-killing-journalism-and-democracy-we-should-do-something-about-it/ https://washingtonmonthly.com/2021/03/13/facebook-is-killing...
  - underwater 5y ago
    Well he was kinda right, except the product was TikTok, and not Facebook.
afavour 5y ago
Google changed their SEO tack, allowing non-AMP pages to benefit in the same way AMP pages do. It’s all their push around “Core Web Vitals” that track page performance no matter what the page is made with. As to what fuelled the change, those of us outside will never know. Quite plausible this was always the plan and page metric functionality needed to catch up first. Equally plausible that Google backed off once they sensed regulatory action would be coming their way if they didn’t.

cphoover 5y ago

Thank God AMP is dying... If you are looking to develop a specification for preloading go through the browser standards process, instead of unloading this proprietary crap on the rest of us.

skybrian 5y ago
Why should it be a browser standard? It’s a web framework. Browsers already support it. Google did promote some improvements to web standards but they were never tied to AMP, even though they were things AMP would use.
- cphoover 5y ago
  Because without going through the standards process it is a unilateral de-facto standard that has been pushed on the web without community involvement.
  - skybrian 5y ago
    Should React be a web standard? How about Typescript? AMP being built into browsers wouldn't be an improvement. These technologies are built on top of web standards. It's a different level of the stack.
foolfoolz 5y ago
amp wasn’t a problem. amp prioritized results in search was a problem and i just saw here they slowed down ads on non-amp pages, that’s not good for business
- uncomputation 5y ago
  No, AMP was a problem. It was a proprietary, ham-fisted subset of the open web entirely forced by Google’s insane search engine dominance. It actively discouraged the creativity, freedom, and self-determination of the web that makes it so special. The AMP boost in search ranking was just the cherry on top.

rezonant 5y ago

Good riddance. AMP is terrible.

kristianc 5y ago

AMP used to completely break the cookied login flow to paywalled sites. Thank god I’ll no longer now have to click to ‘Open in Safari’ to read content I actually pay for.

joegahona 5y ago

I'm guessing this is related to Twitter's acquisition of Scroll, and the new Twitter Blue feature of sending Blue users to publisher sites with ads disabled. That was probably a nightmare to throw AMP into the mix with everything else that needs to be done.

nightpool 5y ago

I really liked AMP as a client side framework, and I think it had a lot going for it in terms of guiding you into a performant experience with good UX for mobile devices. Plus, the restrictions on floating elements and third party JavaScript have done a ton to improve ad quality on mobile web. I don't think we get there without Google or another similarly-powerful browser/aggregator coalition really working together to provide the right incentives to publishers.

uncomputation 5y ago
I used to work in a newspaper’s digital department. From the outside, I can see why AMP might look good. “Faster loading times, higher engagement from ads, and an SEO boost? What’s not to love?” From the inside though, this adds a lot of overhead to sites that are usually old, patchwork, and very complicated. Essentially, the dev team has to have two entirely separate tracks now, one for regular ads and one for AMP. If you have an advertising department, this gets even more annoying since AMP does not allow as much customization of ads as papers are used to (header vs side vs footer vs text-only vs sponsored posts vs in-article, etc.). Not to mention, the main “incentive” problem in the journalism industry right now is not invasive ads, it’s ads and clickbait in general, which AMP doesn’t help with. Most papers don’t want to have to tailor headlines for Twitter, Facebook, and a million other sites and venues. They don’t want to have to deal with ads, but something needs to pay to run the site and no one likes paying for news. Only extremely large players like NYT or financial papers can pull that. So I don’t like when Google says this “helps publishers.” That’s not their goal, that’s just marketing speak. Their goal is to make browsing Google a better experience, going so far to define a Google-Approved HTML Spec and cache your content on their servers. Just my 2 cents. Maybe some newer players in the game do like AMP.
- nightpool 5y ago
  As someone who has maintained an AMP implementation for a big (albeit non-news) site for years, I think "AMP does not allow as much customization of ads as papers are used to" is a feature, not a bug. There are constant demands from sales and advertising partners to add more and more disruptive and broken web experiences, and having a bedrock of "Google will penalize us if we do this" to fall back on is really, really important. I don't care whether AMP "helps publishers"—I think AMP holds publishers accountable for their (accidental or careless) UX disasters, and prevents them from happening in the first place.

poopooracoocoo 5y ago

I love how one of the top things Google pushes with AMP is its performance when Google sites are quite slow. YouTube flunks Google's own Lighthouse benchmark and it's not like it has sorting, filtering and searching features or a very complicated interface, especialy when the old site had the same features at half the memory cost. How hypocritical. As a user I've always disliked AMP and how it was never the original page. Websites always have a separate AMP page and a separate real page.

flerovium 5y ago

Has it be definitively proven that the sole purpose of AMP was to lock in advertising revenue? The DOJ filing accused Google of this; that's not the same as it being true / there being damning evidence.