[HN Gopher] Resigning from the AMP Advisory Committee
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Resigning from the AMP Advisory Committee
Author : robin_reala
Score : 51 points
Date : 2021-08-18 16:05 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (adactio.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (adactio.com)
| MrStonedOne wrote:
| I'm gonna re-post the rant I posted last time this came up:
|
| > As a mobile user, I hate it.
|
| > I hate that every fucking google search result on mobile web
| has its stupid little icon
|
| > _I hate that there is no way for me to disable it as a user_
|
| > I hate that it has muddied the waters in what the url bar means
|
| > I hate that it has trained users to not question fake url bars.
|
| > I hate that cloudflare so thoroughly jumped on its dick
|
| > I hate that we invented a way to fake the address in the url
| bar just for this stupid fucking feature.
|
| > I hate that we now have a system where somebody can share a
| page url with a friend, and that friend can view it on the same
| device model using the same browser with the same settings, and
| will get a different page because one was viewing an amp page but
| shared it's real url.
|
| > I hate that every fucking amp page is lower featured in some
| way, and almost never works in desktop mode.
|
| > And most of all, I hate that it leads to everybody offloading
| shit onto google's servers.
|
| > AMP is not fast because it's served from google's CDN. AMP is
| fast because it's incompatible with 99% of the bullshit client
| cpu heavy tracking and ad libraries, so they don't get included
| inside AMP pages.
| stefan_ wrote:
| This is a bit embarrassing. You joined the committee when AMP was
| already dead in the water and even now it seems this has not been
| made to clear you.
| skybrian wrote:
| He seems disappointed but it sounds about what I'd expect from an
| "advisory committee." I would expect giving advice to be a form
| of influence rather than power. You're only as good as your
| persuasive skills and their willingness to listen.
| josefrichter wrote:
| Btw it's Potemkin, not Potempkin
| gregable wrote:
| I won't try to address every part of this writing, but there is
| one claim that I feel is false: namely that the AMP validation
| rules are not open source.
|
| Here is the code:
| https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/tree/main/validator
|
| All of the rules are written in human-readable config language.
| Here are the rules for common HTML elements
| (https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/blob/main/validator/va...)
| and there are rules per-amp-tag (example:
| https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/blob/main/extensions/a...)
|
| You can build it, run it locally, etc. There are open-source
| implementations that run in the browser, in a vscode plugin, on
| the command line via NPM, etc. Other entities can and do use the
| same code for their validation of AMP. Pull Requests are accepted
| from anyone and those changes land in Google production and all
| of the aforementioned tooling targets within a few days. There is
| documentation on how to contribute to and edit these files (https
| ://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/blob/main/docs/compone...).
| dmitriid wrote:
| > namely that the AMP validation rules are not open source.
| Here is the code
|
| Yes. That's the trick big corps play on you. They develop some
| code, and push it to GitHub.
|
| - all of the decisions where the code is going belong to the
| corp
|
| - all (or at the absolute vast majority) of contributions come
| from the corp's developers
|
| - there's little to no insight into why things are the way the
| are. Sometimes you can be big enough to gain acces, or
| important enough. Before "open governance" it was some
| publisher group set up by Google that was supposedly there to
| monitor
|
| But sure, it's open source.
|
| > Pull Requests are accepted from anyone and those changes land
| in Google production
|
| 1. What's the ratio of PRs from Google employees to those from
| "anyone"?
|
| 2. Indeed. They land in _Google_ production. The company with
| $183 billion in yearly revenue thanks you for your unpaid
| contributions (if they ever make it)
|
| ---
|
| BTW, there are 1 500 open issues in that repo. Quite a lot for
| some validation rules.
| gregable wrote:
| I did some hacky analysis and roughly half of the PRs
| originated in GitHub and the majority of those are not google
| employees.
|
| Most changes have a github issue attached with discussion,
| all of the changes have descriptive commit messages
| regardless of who authored them and there is significant
| effort to document the decisions and decision process
| throughout.
|
| I can't speak for the release frequency for other
| organizations' production that consumes this code. That
| includes many publishers, as well as other AMP caches such as
| Bing and webmail clients like Yahoo.
|
| The repo is for all of AMP, not just the validator. The
| validator related issues are handled by the "caching" working
| group (since caches are the consumer of the validator) and
| you can search for them with this query: https://github.com/a
| mpproject/amphtml/issues?q=is%3Aissue+is...
| jsnell wrote:
| You're simultaneously complaining about how all the commits
| are coming from the company and that they're exploiting
| anyone making commits. You can't have it both ways, pick one.
|
| The repository has 1k contributors over 20k commits. That
| seems like an exceptionally diverse contributor base.
| ohazi wrote:
| > So it's best for everyone if I step away now instead of
| descending into outright sabotage.
|
| It's best for other members of the committee, and perhaps for the
| sanity of the author, but I think you could make the argument
| that _effective_ sabotage of the AMP project could actually be
| best for the public at large.
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| Why would Google take advice from non-employees? Committees
| like this only serve to shield Google from criticism. They
| aren't meant to accomplish anything.
| throw_m239339 wrote:
| I don't like AMP. However, if I wouldn't use a mobile browser
| which didn't basically do the same (MITM websites), my DATA plan
| would be over by the forth day of the month.
|
| The mobile web, after all these years, is still so heavy.
|
| No, devs don't need all images to be for retina display, they
| don't need to bundle 50 MB of JS on ever pages, they don't need
| to load custom fonts for text, auto start videos, ... then why
| are webpages still so big on mobile? What happened to mobile
| first? Seems to me like it's just native app first on mobile then
| some amount of responsiveness for desktop websites...
|
| what happened? I'm not willing to visit or spend money on a
| website that drains all my data plan while I'm browsing for
| products...
|
| For all the SEO tricks websites use to drive traffic, it doesn't
| seem like mobile page speed is relevant in anyway when it comes
| to SEO or we would have a very different web...
| ohazi wrote:
| Firefox mobile allows you to use uBlock origin, which improves
| things tremendously.
|
| Every time I accidentally end up in mobile Chrome, it's like
| being transported back in time 15 years with popups and
| overlays and modals that are deliberately designed to lag just
| enough for you to accidentally click on the ad rather than the
| tiny X button.
|
| What happened? Google happened.
|
| The mobile web is essentially the desktop web before ad
| blockers, and Google won't allow mobile Chrome to support
| extensions because "oh no, extensions are hard" -- they're
| lying. They know that a mobile ad blocker is the easiest and
| fastest way for us to hide their toxic cesspool of mobile ads.
| albertgoeswoof wrote:
| That's only a problem in countries with poor network
| infrastructure, most developed countries have unlimited data
| plans at reasonable costs
| forcemajeure wrote:
| Not true in Australia
| 8ytecoder wrote:
| Again as the OP said, " That's only a problem in countries
| with poor network infrastructure".
|
| Australia is a victim of its geography. (Plus last I heard
| the National fiber backbone didn't go as planned either).
| I'm would expect a high bandwidth wired backbone is
| required to support scaling up mobile data throughput.
| SquareWheel wrote:
| I'd be curious if there has been any effort made towards
| encouraging wider use of the Amp Cache. After CloudFlare dropped
| theirs, now only Google and Microsoft maintain an Amp Cache.
|
| Large search engines are probably the primary audience for that
| technology, so would there be interest from Baidu or Yandex?
| thepangolino wrote:
| I really never got the point of AMP being anything else than a
| set of recommendations for lighter mobile pages. A sort of
| remnant of the time where you got redirected to another version
| of the website you were visiting if you were doing so from a
| mobile device.
| vasachi wrote:
| The point is to prevent user from leaving google.com.
| SevenSigs wrote:
| The main problem with AMP is that everything loads from
| Google's servers... so it is not worth using even if sometimes
| it can be faster (Google itself should probably use it instead
| of their javascript mess that slows down everything for no
| reason).
| rakshazi wrote:
| The ironic part of AMP is that it's heavely relies on js.
| External js.
|
| For example, you have a lightweight website with size of 140kb
| for everything (html, CSS, js, images) without AMP. It works
| blazing fast and you get 100/100 scores on any website speed
| meter.
|
| But it was not enough for google, because you don't use their
| super-duper AMP tech.
|
| You known what? Your website doubles in size when you implement
| AMP, because you must load several additional scripts to make
| AMP work, and not only size increases, load time (from click on
| your website link till full render) will increase too, because
| additional js processing to make AMP work.
|
| The only benefit was preloading and heavely caching by Google,
| so user feels like website shows instantly.
|
| I "optimized" several lightweight websites with AMP and every
| time I had exactly one thought in mind - that's useless stuff
| adds more problems than benefits, except mobile search ranking.
|
| Thanks God now AMP is not mandatory to be in google mobile
| search top
| esprehn wrote:
| Do you have some examples of sites where the regular site is
| faster than the AMP one?
| dbbk wrote:
| Literally anything that doesn't use JS and is CDN cached?
| [deleted]
| dmitriid wrote:
| AMP was first and foremost an answer to Facebook's Instant
| Articles (or whatever they were called), and, as an extension,
| a death grip on publishers.
|
| Everything else in AMP served that.
| [deleted]
| DrBenCarson wrote:
| The point is Google keeps users captive and content publishers
| hostage. All for a glorified CDN serving "light" static pages.
| pornel wrote:
| The AMP project allowed Google to dictate how ads can be
| served, and host publishers' pages themselves. Don't forget
| Google is a tracking-based advertising company.
|
| It was very convenient that these things could be bundled in a
| package with some webdev best practices, a JavaScript
| framework, and marketed as a (questionable) speed improvement.
|
| I've worked for a publisher that abandoned serving their own
| fast no-JS article pages in favor of half-assed AMP pages full
| of slow iframes, because Google favored any use of AMP over
| actual page speed. It took Google many years to ease that AMP
| favoritism.
| openasocket wrote:
| > We were immediately told that we could not discuss an ongoing
| court case in the AMP advisory committee. That's fair enough. But
| will it go both ways? Or will lawyers acting on Google's behalf
| be allowed to point to the AMP advisory committee and say, "But
| AMP is an open source project! Look, it even resides under the
| banner of the OpenJS Foundation."
|
| Google's lawyers will most likely do something like that, though
| . But there's nothing stopping you from contacting the
| prosecution and offering testimony against the claim that AMP is
| open source. Unless the AMP advisory committee is somehow
| considered a party in the lawsuit? Though even then, depending on
| how the committee works, I don't think they could ban you from
| communicating with the prosecution.
|
| Actually I'd expect members of the advisory committee to be
| deposed. The prosecution explicitly mentions the AMP committee in
| their suit: "Although Google claims that AMP was developed as an
| open-source collaboration, AMP is actually a Google-controlled
| initiative. Google originally registered and still owns AMP's
| domain, ampproject.org. In addition, until the end of 2018,
| Google controlled all AMP decision- making. AMP relied on a
| governance model called "Benevolent Dictator For Life" that
| vested ultimate decision-making authority in a single Google
| engineer. Since then, Google has transferred control of AMP to a
| foundation, but the transfer was superficial. Google controls the
| foundation's board and debates internally" . Both Google and the
| prosecution will likely depose members of the committee to get
| testimony regarding those facts.
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(page generated 2021-08-18 23:01 UTC)