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Yeah, while I basically loathed AMP for all the control and monopolization issues, I do see what Google was trying to accomplish, at least at first. Any front
by hn_throwaway_99 2y ago
Yeah, while I basically loathed AMP for all the control and monopolization issues, I do see what Google was trying to accomplish, at least at first.
Any front end dev has had to deal with the onslaught of asks from various marketing and sales teams: "Can you add this tag library?", "We need to integrate this affiliate broker!", etc. etc. And lots of devs would push back with stuff like "At this point we load 247 3rd party tags and JS libraries and it takes 53 seconds for our page to load, we have to stop this madness!" but the problem was that for any individual marketing team ask, the impact was small and of course that team had some KPIs to hit this quarter. It was basically a sort of Tragedy of the Commons situation.
So AMP came along and essentially gave front-end devs a technical reason why they couldn't add some shitty, slow, buggy affiliate broker JS library to the code base, so when marketing came with an ask, they could simply say "Sorry, not supported in AMP, and without AMP we get downranked in Google". AMP essentially became a technical hack to align short term incentives ("We need to add some marketing feature X!") with longer term goals of faster, lighter-weight pages.
- thehappypm 2y agoYep. I totally see why they did it. It’s a user focus, not developer focus. Users just want faster webpages. The end.
- charcircuit 2y ago>without AMP we get downranked in Google Whether a site used AMP did not affect ranking in Google.
- wombatpm 2y agoRanking is a closely held secret. Non AMP COULD have a negative impact. Let marketing try and get confirmation from Google that it does not.
- hn_throwaway_99 2y agoYou're either uninformed or splitting hairs about what "downranked" means. Google required AMP in order to be featured in the "Top Stories" carousel that was (unsurprisingly) at the top of the results page. Google ended this requirement in mid 2021, https://www.theregister.com/2021/06/28/google_amp_core_web_vitals/ https://www.theregister.com/2021/06/28/google_amp_core_web_v...
- charcircuit 2y agoI'm talking about search rankings and not what appears in the OneBox.
- lozenge 2y agoDoesn't really matter. Google directed clicks to the AMP sites in various ways, including the OneBox. Most sites which need ad revenue had no choice but to adopt AMP.
- immibis 2y agoWhy couldn't they just directly downrank pages based on their size or load time?