[HN Gopher] Twitter rolls back AMP support, no longer sends user...
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Twitter rolls back AMP support, no longer sends users to AMP pages
Author : twapi
Score : 458 points
Date : 2021-11-18 18:02 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (searchengineland.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (searchengineland.com)
| al_ak wrote:
| What happened to all the AMP defenders that used to flood the
| comment section?
| a254613e wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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
| joconde wrote:
| Maybe Google fired them?
| sneeeeeed wrote:
| Retasked obviously.
| framecowbird wrote:
| I'm happy to see AMP fade into irrelevance... What was the main
| driver of its decline? Why did Google stop aggressively pushing
| it?
| afavour wrote:
| 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.
| s17n wrote:
| It was originally launched as a defensive strategy against
| Facebook Instant Articles. Those never really took off, so AMP
| wasn't necessary for anything.
| fluxem wrote:
| I guess, after the success of AMP, the Product Manager got
| promoted or moved to a new company. https://killedbygoogle.com/
| user3939382 wrote:
| 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...
| ilamont wrote:
| 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#IOpNs...
|
| https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2018/10/was-the-medias-
| big-p...
|
| https://washingtonmonthly.com/2021/03/13/facebook-is-
| killing...
| underwater wrote:
| Well he was kinda right, except the product was TikTok, and
| not Facebook.
| cphoover wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Because without going through the standards process it is a
| unilateral de-facto standard that has been pushed on the web
| without community involvement.
| foolfoolz wrote:
| 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
| afavour wrote:
| IMO AMP _was_ still a problem. It's a version of HTML de
| facto controlled by Google. There's window dressing of a
| foundation or whatever but Google calls the shots on what it
| does and does not do. To me that made AMP a five alarm fire
| right from the start.
| jaywalk wrote:
| And it had to be proxied through Google's servers. To hell
| with it.
| jeffbee wrote:
| This is false.
| RNCTX wrote:
| I wonder why someone who works at google bothers to come
| here to try to defend the worst practices of the company.
|
| I mean, it's never going to go well.
|
| Is it some sort of deranged catharsis in trying to
| convince yourself?
| jaywalk wrote:
| Why, because there's also a Bing AMP proxy? Come on. AMP
| pages in Google search results are proxied through Google
| 100% of the time, by design.
| afavour wrote:
| In fairness AMP does not have a requirement to use a CDN.
| It _allows_ the use of a CDN which was another reason why
| Google pushed it (to do all kind of same-domain tricks),
| but to keep on topic, I actually don 't think Twitter
| used that Google cache.
| jaywalk wrote:
| If Twitter was serving valid AMP, they didn't have a
| choice on using the Google cache or not:
|
| "As a publisher, you don't choose an AMP Cache, it's
| actually the platform that links to your content that
| chooses the AMP Cache (if any) to use."
|
| "Caching is a core part of the AMP ecosystem. Publishing
| a valid AMP document automatically opts it into cache
| delivery."
|
| https://amp.dev/documentation/guides-and-
| tutorials/learn/amp...
| afavour wrote:
| Eh? By your own quote:
|
| > it's actually the platform that links to your content
| that chooses the AMP Cache (if any) to use
|
| Twitter (the platform that links to AMP content) could
| choose which AMP cache if any to use.
|
| Oh, I guess maybe the confusion here is that your
| argument is that as a page publisher you cannot opt out
| of the Google CDN? I read your original statement as "it
| is not possible to view AMP content without using the
| Google CDN"
| jaywalk wrote:
| Right, I'm mainly just talking about Google search
| results. I probably should have made that more clear up
| front.
| traek wrote:
| The original article is talking about traffic from
| Twitter to publisher sites, not traffic from Google to
| Twitter. Twitter never used AMP for pages on their own
| site.
|
| In this case Twitter is the platform, not the publisher,
| and would absolutely have been able to not use the Google
| cache.
|
| > Now, when using one of Twitter's mobile clients, users
| will be sent to the amphtml URL in their browser, instead
| of the link that was shared in the Tweet. Users will load
| this link directly, not via a page cache. [0]
|
| [0] https://developer.twitter.com/en/docs/twitter-for-
| websites/a...
| nightpool wrote:
| We're on a discussion page for an article about Twitter's
| use of AMP in their own app, which was never proxied
| through anything, much less proxied through Google.
| underwater wrote:
| Twitter directly linked to AMP pages on the publisher's
| site. They didn't link to a cache at all.
| 0des wrote:
| I'm curious if anybody else is noticing how G is tracing
| the same paths AOL once did.
| cardosof wrote:
| Yes and Google too shall pass.
| eternalban wrote:
| Would be nice to have a post-mortem on 'how to recognize
| the outline of an emerging juggernaut'.
| enkrs wrote:
| Google calls the shots on what _the web_ does and does not
| do via the majority browser - Chrome. I wouldn 't consider
| AMP any more dangerous than Chrome in this argument. There
| were other problems with AMP.
| afavour wrote:
| I'm certainly not a fan of a Chrome monoculture either
| but AMP crossed all browsers so I see it as more
| dangerous.
| avereveard wrote:
| amp was the modern attempt to replicate the turd that was
| wireless application protocol and I'm glad it's dying.
|
| I'm also glad the community mood shifted about it, no
| longer than a year ago negative comments about amp where
| drowned in downvotes
|
| luckily vote count doesn't make ppl right or wrong.
| SquareWheel wrote:
| > no longer than a year ago negative comments about amp
| where drowned in downvotes
|
| This is the strangest case of revisionist history I've
| ever seen.
| uncomputation wrote:
| 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.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| This is exactly right. Imagine a hypothetical where
| Microsoft created AMP - no one would use it! The technology
| itself sucked. The only reason some publishers adopted AMP
| at all was to get/maintain favourable placement on Google,
| the only search engine that matters.
|
| I'm just hoping that the death of AMP on the web will also
| kill Google's ambitions for rolling it into Gmail[1].
|
| [1] https://developers.google.com/gmail/ampemail/
| nightpool wrote:
| The idea of a proven-safe subset of HTML with no custom
| JS that's suitable for adding interactivity to emails is
| actually really interesting to me, and I hope it
| continues. It's been really great to be able to reply to
| Google Docs comments from within my email client, and the
| same things that make AMP good for rehosting make it a
| good foundation for interactive email.
| lelandfe wrote:
| And that's not even discussing the fact that Google
| penalized non-Google ads on AMP.
|
| https://mobile.twitter.com/simonw/status/145194762451316736
| 3
| stingraycharles wrote:
| AMP pages being hosted by Google is a pretty big problem as
| well, though. In my opinion a step in the wrong direction of
| the centralization of the internet.
| tdeck wrote:
| Twitter has become incredibly hostile to users not signed into
| an account (e.g. many search visitors), so AMP or not isn't
| going to make a big difference.
| pnw wrote:
| Agreed. They've made it almost unusable if you hit it from an
| embedded browser page.
| [deleted]
| kristianc wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| xchaotic wrote:
| 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.
| toast0 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| justapassenger wrote:
| 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.
| debesyla wrote:
| By the looks of it even the founders of AMP think that too...
| (Google doesn't promote AMP pages any more.)
| tyingq wrote:
| Google also has some legal docs with unredacted statements
| about AMP that went public. So, more reasons to not talk
| about it.
| [deleted]
| djbeadle wrote:
| 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.56...
| tarkin2 wrote:
| 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.
| tyingq wrote:
| 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.
| summm wrote:
| It was terrible for end users as well.
| tyingq wrote:
| I was trying to give some grace that a lightweight terrible
| AMP page might be better than a 100Mb newsorg.com page.
| joconde wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| I'd guess for the SEO?
| 0x00000000 wrote:
| 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.
| slig wrote:
| Reddit web experience is horrible by design. They don't want
| you browsing using your browser.
| Rygu wrote:
| Am not getting AMP Reddit links anymore in search results. In
| Europe.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| > ...not a lot of capital around for them to spend on that.
|
| I feel a little bad for publishers. This is the second[1] time
| in recent memory they've followed the pied piper of a big tech
| company into wasting money on ultimately useless ventures. I
| hope someone in management learns a lesson from this and is
| more skeptical of FAANG in the future.
|
| [1] The first time being the Facebook video push that was based
| on faulty metrics (https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-
| overestimated-key-vide...).
| notreallyserio wrote:
| They're also the folks that decided to host user-hostile ads
| (full-screen overlays, autoplay video, showing those ads to
| paying* customers). At some point you've gotta just say
| they're getting what they deserve.
|
| * typo. trying out a new keyboard, SwiftKey. so far so bad.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| 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
|
| [2]
| https://old.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/pryy44/megathread_ap...
| acheron wrote:
| > the Safari extension that redirect all Reddit links into
| Apollo
|
| oh, I didn't realize that was something that existed. thanks,
| that will help.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| deergomoo wrote:
| Same dude has an app that redirects all AMP links to their
| non-AMP versions, so you can eliminate it entirely.
|
| https://amplosion.app
| aelzeiny wrote:
| 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
| DevKoala wrote:
| > 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/145161991699...
| dmart wrote:
| To expand on this, Google introduced an artificial delay when
| loading ads on non-AMP pages:
| https://mobile.twitter.com/tmcw/status/1451938637982142467
| nightpool wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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.
| rsanheim wrote:
| AMP pages have been far more annoying in my experience. It
| breaks the standard web controls (ie no tap on the top to
| scroll to top), breaks copying links, and locks you into
| the google ecosystem at the user's expense.
|
| Thank goodness its falling out of favor.
| notreallyserio wrote:
| IMO the issues with controls are worth the tradeoff. The
| alternative ends up being annoying sites like arstechnica
| (non-AMP) which relocates content while you're reading
| it.
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| > AMP pages load incredibly fast, are incredibly responsive
|
| Compared to an unfiltered web experience. AMP content is
| still burdened with mountains of unnecessary JS that hurts
| performance.
| nightpool wrote:
| > Thing is...we don't need AMP to get those features.
|
| I addressed this in another comment thread
| (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29269423), but I
| disagree. The fundamental problem is one of incentives--
| individual companies don't have the leverage to fight back
| against ad companies and advertisers that want to implement
| bad user experiences and slow loading JS. Google's adoption
| of AMP forces publishers and ad networks fall into line, by
| enforcing limits on floating ads, popover, interstitials,
| custom JS, etc. Is this self-interested on Google's part?
| Maybe. But it's hard to argue that it's not ultimately
| better for the consumer.
| acdha wrote:
| > 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
|
| Kind of, some of the time. In practice, that massive amount
| of render-blocking JavaScript made it slower - I noticed this
| on a daily basis using the web on the subway here in DC. The
| Washington Post loaded consistently faster without AMP, but
| the big win was the long tail where you could read content on
| normal pages but AMP was either blank until you reloaded, or
| took 5-10 seconds longer because once the AMP JS loaded it
| then had to fetch all of the resources it'd blocked behind a
| lazy-loader.
| jeffbee wrote:
| AMP solves a social problem for newspaper owners. They are all
| evil, venal people incapable of hiring for or motivating
| technical staff to make the right choice for users. This is why
| your average local newspaper or TV station site downloads 100MB
| of crap, fires 10000 timers per second, and needs 10-60s to
| render on your phone. AMP puts these jerks in a straightjacket
| while also trying to ensure they still get paid.
|
| Theoretically there's a marketplace where better/faster news
| sites would be preferred by readers, but in actual fact all the
| news outlets are owned by the same guy.
| afavour wrote:
| > This is why your average local newspaper or TV station site
| downloads 100MB of crap, fires 10000 timers per second, and
| needs 10-60s to render on your phone
|
| No, the reason for that, almost all of the time, is ads. It's
| true that local news rarely hires talented developers (they
| don't have the money) but even if they did they'd still be at
| the mercy of shitty ad code written by shitty ad providers.
| One of which is Google! So they generously solved the problem
| they created by setting up a new walled garden.
| reaperducer wrote:
| _AMP solves a social problem for newspaper owners. They are
| all evil, venal people incapable of hiring for or motivating
| technical staff to make the right choice for users._
|
| Don't forget how they sit on top of piles of money bags
| twirling their mustaches, taking lollypops from children, and
| cackling "Ha ha ha ha ha!" while looking down on the plebs
| below. Don't forget that!
| nightpool wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| uncomputation wrote:
| The way I see it, the constant pressures from ads
| departments is the issue and having to make an appeal to
| Google is not a good solution. We should not have to rely
| on having Google back us up on what constitutes a "good"
| page. So, I don't agree that it's "really, really
| important." If anything, it's a sad picture of digital
| journalism. I think what's really, really important is
| having the freedom to design your site without having to
| worry about Google's arbitrary judgment of that design and
| not needing to rely on pleasing a search engine to show up
| in its results.
|
| AMP definitely does not hold anyone accountable. Look at
| Reddit. Absolutely atrocious UX after AMP from what is just
| a basic forum. Instead, AMP makes everyone - regardless of
| content, design, or purpose - obey the same Google-approved
| standard of design, using Google-approved fonts and Google-
| approved CSS. In my view, AMP is the UX disaster because I
| hate the way it looks and have to remove the AMP from every
| news article I read. Oftentimes, publishers have a better
| idea of how their content should look than Google does.
| Especially smaller ones which have a strong focus on
| design.
| Spivak wrote:
| I mean relying on a massive corporation's total dominance
| over the web and semi-arbitrary rules for reward and
| punishment in order to tell the "business" side of your
| company no isn't exactly something I would be touting as a
| positive thing.
|
| All of this crap is because sw engineers don't have a
| professional association with an ethics board. Can you
| imagine if you could put the experience of your users first
| and tell your business to fuck off when they ask for this
| nonsense secure that they really can't just fire you and
| find someone who will sell out.
| rezonant wrote:
| Good riddance. AMP is terrible.
| pupppet wrote:
| Let's keep this trend going!
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