5 ms·

Tribune Publishing's websites are hot garbage and a perfect example of why we need AMP in the first place.

by s17n 4y ago

jacquesm 4y ago
No, that's not why we need AMP. They should just fix the garbage.
- callahad 4y ago
  "Just fix the garbage" doesn't work; it's there because someone in favor of the garbage wanted it there, and the folks opposed to the garbage didn't have the authority or influence to stop it. ...and that's the one thing AMP did right: it empowered developers to push back against the garbage by giving them a big ol' "Google says no" sign to wave around. Which is all kinds of problematic in terms of existential threats to the Open Web, but it did clean up that specific type of garbage. How do we give anti-garbage folks that same power in a post-AMP world, without resorting to centralized authority?
  - refulgentis 4y ago
    Everyone microfocused on Google and forgot AMP exists because Apple and Facebook created closed "AMPs" that were completely private. No one won here except some people with an axe to grind and actual web users. Hopefully web vitals can be a similar forcing function for dev teams with managers, leading to better quality for users.
  - kadoban 4y ago
    Google fucked it because they wanted the control. They could have easily made the spec just "here's the subset of crap you can use, and here's the extra rules" and left it at that, but they just had to add all of the other nonsense to give themselves control. Without that it would have been fine. They could have still added in the part where they give pagerank bonuses to sites that comply, so there'd be an enforcement mechanism too.
- chiefalchemist 4y ago
  If sites were "just fixing the garbage" Google wouldn't have had a reasonable reason for rolling out AMP. I presume to some extent AMP was intended to be like Google Fiber. That is a kick in the pants to get others to up their game. It didn't work out that way. The truth is too many sites are done with an all-about-the-brand mindest. And users are a distant second in the priority list. I'm not sure what the answer is. Sure, obviously, it's not AMP. But we still need something. Users - which is all of us - are being abused.
  - jacquesm 4y ago
    They didn't have a good reason. They could have achieved everything and more that they said they wanted to get out of AMP by simply penalizing slow sites. It was just another power grab, and publishers went with it because AMP sites were given priority in the SERPs. Anyway, this has been talked about in many threads over 100's of comments.
    - chiefalchemist 4y ago
      > They could have achieved everything and more that they said they wanted to get out of AMP by simply penalizing slow sites. It's not that simple. If the slow sites have better content and/or Google's customers (i.e., the people searching) expect those sites then Google has to deliver, or at least try. Keep in mind, it's also possible those slow site were spending ad money. Like it or not, Google can't intentionally piss them off. I'm not saying AMP was an ideal solution. Only that it was smarter than nothing. Nothing wasn't an option.
karamanolev 4y ago
Be that as it may, we need to get rid of AMP altogether. It's a much bigger evil than a bad website here or there. After AMP is gone, we can worry about one (or N) bad websites instead of a corp controlling all of them.
- aliqot 4y ago
  Yep, perfection it isn't, but this is a step in the right direction. Hopefully, the initiative that brought this forward also slowly rectifies the other issues with the site.
khatkhati 4y ago
I don't know what you're talking about, they are nice, clean and snappy with JavaScript turned off :)))))
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
gerdesj 4y ago
Whatevs with respect to Tribune (whom I've never heard of). You may not like their message but AMP is the messenger here and it is Minerva's kid brother that flunked school and took up delivering class A drugs on their BMX. This article is about dumping AMP - discuss! I found the medium article extremely well written with loads of stats to back up assertions. It is also mercifully short. That is exactly what I want to see. For me AMP is an example of "insidious" - it looks shiny ("my precious") but it will suck the life out of you eventually. AMP, fundamentally puts your content distribution in the hands of a third party (G) that can change it at will and that breaks the promise of the web and ensures that you will have your testes tickled at first and then twisted off. AMP is not simply a CDN - it doesn't simply regurgitate your stuff faster. It changes it and does things to it and also gathers as much data as it wishes, from your customers. My Precious ... Oh look: I've managed to conflate some fictional seriously damaged goods from Star Wars and the Lord of the Rings with what Google will do to you. Silly me.
karaterobot 4y ago
Did AMP improve the experience of Tribune Publishing websites? If it's hot garbage with AMP, removing it shouldn't hurt. But it will give them the ability to improve their sites rather than being locked into Google's choices.
- nightpool 4y ago
  Yes, AMP does (or at least did) generally improve the UX and the load time of most pages that integrated it. No giant blobs of third party ad scripts, no huge interstitials that took over the entire page... Whatever else you might say about AMP, it did a good job at handcuffing publishers into not ruining their site with garbage
  - acdha 4y ago
    Except that it made most of them slower for mobile users because it blocked page display until over a megabyte of JavaScript had finished executing, at which point media files were unblocked. My local newspaper loaded noticeably faster without it but more importantly it was reliable: I could click on a link and read it while I was on the subway, but AMP pages frequently just burned my data plan for a blank page. They also broke scrolling for years and since the desktop experience was poor you had to deal with a hokey non-standard sharing widget.
- standyro 4y ago
  When I worked for Tribune (before the LA Times got sold off) it was a hot mess of adtech garbage like Taboola that nobody had the guts to get rid of.
  - earthboundkid 4y ago
    Tronc 4 lyfe.
tomcam 4y ago
Funny, I was going to post something snarky b/c TFA was attractive and easy to read. Since the author works for Chicago Tribune I went to the site and... not at all bad, considering the commercial constraints legacy media is stuck with.
- s17n 4y ago
  I agree, considering the constraints, it's not bad. The problem is the constraints, and whatever you think about AMP, at least it was an attempt to tackle this problem head on.

Tribune Publishing's websites are hot garbage and a perfect example of why we need AMP in the first place.

by s17n 4y ago

Tribune Publishing's websites are hot garbage and a perfect example of why we need AMP in the first place.

jacquesm 4y ago

No, that's not why we need AMP. They should just fix the garbage.

callahad 4y ago
"Just fix the garbage" doesn't work; it's there because someone in favor of the garbage wanted it there, and the folks opposed to the garbage didn't have the authority or influence to stop it. ...and that's the one thing AMP did right: it empowered developers to push back against the garbage by giving them a big ol' "Google says no" sign to wave around. Which is all kinds of problematic in terms of existential threats to the Open Web, but it did clean up that specific type of garbage. How do we give anti-garbage folks that same power in a post-AMP world, without resorting to centralized authority?
- refulgentis 4y ago
  Everyone microfocused on Google and forgot AMP exists because Apple and Facebook created closed "AMPs" that were completely private. No one won here except some people with an axe to grind and actual web users. Hopefully web vitals can be a similar forcing function for dev teams with managers, leading to better quality for users.
- kadoban 4y ago
  Google fucked it because they wanted the control. They could have easily made the spec just "here's the subset of crap you can use, and here's the extra rules" and left it at that, but they just had to add all of the other nonsense to give themselves control. Without that it would have been fine. They could have still added in the part where they give pagerank bonuses to sites that comply, so there'd be an enforcement mechanism too.
chiefalchemist 4y ago
If sites were "just fixing the garbage" Google wouldn't have had a reasonable reason for rolling out AMP. I presume to some extent AMP was intended to be like Google Fiber. That is a kick in the pants to get others to up their game. It didn't work out that way. The truth is too many sites are done with an all-about-the-brand mindest. And users are a distant second in the priority list. I'm not sure what the answer is. Sure, obviously, it's not AMP. But we still need something. Users - which is all of us - are being abused.
- jacquesm 4y ago
  They didn't have a good reason. They could have achieved everything and more that they said they wanted to get out of AMP by simply penalizing slow sites. It was just another power grab, and publishers went with it because AMP sites were given priority in the SERPs. Anyway, this has been talked about in many threads over 100's of comments.
  - chiefalchemist 4y ago
    > They could have achieved everything and more that they said they wanted to get out of AMP by simply penalizing slow sites. It's not that simple. If the slow sites have better content and/or Google's customers (i.e., the people searching) expect those sites then Google has to deliver, or at least try. Keep in mind, it's also possible those slow site were spending ad money. Like it or not, Google can't intentionally piss them off. I'm not saying AMP was an ideal solution. Only that it was smarter than nothing. Nothing wasn't an option.

karamanolev 4y ago

Be that as it may, we need to get rid of AMP altogether. It's a much bigger evil than a bad website here or there. After AMP is gone, we can worry about one (or N) bad websites instead of a corp controlling all of them.

aliqot 4y ago
Yep, perfection it isn't, but this is a step in the right direction. Hopefully, the initiative that brought this forward also slowly rectifies the other issues with the site.

khatkhati 4y ago

I don't know what you're talking about, they are nice, clean and snappy with JavaScript turned off :)))))

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

gerdesj 4y ago

Whatevs with respect to Tribune (whom I've never heard of). You may not like their message but AMP is the messenger here and it is Minerva's kid brother that flunked school and took up delivering class A drugs on their BMX. This article is about dumping AMP - discuss! I found the medium article extremely well written with loads of stats to back up assertions. It is also mercifully short. That is exactly what I want to see. For me AMP is an example of "insidious" - it looks shiny ("my precious") but it will suck the life out of you eventually. AMP, fundamentally puts your content distribution in the hands of a third party (G) that can change it at will and that breaks the promise of the web and ensures that you will have your testes tickled at first and then twisted off. AMP is not simply a CDN - it doesn't simply regurgitate your stuff faster. It changes it and does things to it and also gathers as much data as it wishes, from your customers. My Precious ... Oh look: I've managed to conflate some fictional seriously damaged goods from Star Wars and the Lord of the Rings with what Google will do to you. Silly me.

karaterobot 4y ago

Did AMP improve the experience of Tribune Publishing websites? If it's hot garbage with AMP, removing it shouldn't hurt. But it will give them the ability to improve their sites rather than being locked into Google's choices.

nightpool 4y ago
Yes, AMP does (or at least did) generally improve the UX and the load time of most pages that integrated it. No giant blobs of third party ad scripts, no huge interstitials that took over the entire page... Whatever else you might say about AMP, it did a good job at handcuffing publishers into not ruining their site with garbage
- acdha 4y ago
  Except that it made most of them slower for mobile users because it blocked page display until over a megabyte of JavaScript had finished executing, at which point media files were unblocked. My local newspaper loaded noticeably faster without it but more importantly it was reliable: I could click on a link and read it while I was on the subway, but AMP pages frequently just burned my data plan for a blank page. They also broke scrolling for years and since the desktop experience was poor you had to deal with a hokey non-standard sharing widget.
standyro 4y ago
When I worked for Tribune (before the LA Times got sold off) it was a hot mess of adtech garbage like Taboola that nobody had the guts to get rid of.
- earthboundkid 4y ago
  Tronc 4 lyfe.

tomcam 4y ago

Funny, I was going to post something snarky b/c TFA was attractive and easy to read. Since the author works for Chicago Tribune I went to the site and... not at all bad, considering the commercial constraints legacy media is stuck with.

s17n 4y ago
I agree, considering the constraints, it's not bad. The problem is the constraints, and whatever you think about AMP, at least it was an attempt to tackle this problem head on.