
Ask HN: How can we destroy AMP? - buboard
All ideas welcome
======
pknight
I would urge people to tell Matt Mullenweg and core WordPress developers that
they don't want AMP in WordPress core. Since WordPress runs on >30% of the
web, if WP adopts it, it will make the choice for most of the web that
websites must shape themselves in the way Google wants it. Google is currently
doing a stellar job penetrating WordPress and using its increasing influence
to support its own business interests.

~~~
Animats
Probably the most effective move that can be made right now. Affects a huge
number of sites.

Challenge for WordPress: make it work faster without AMP than with AMP.

~~~
lern_too_spel
How can you make something faster than prerendered?

~~~
pcmaffey
Prerender it.

Should be table stakes for sites nowadays.

~~~
o-__-o
Well. You can’t prerender a BGP announcement at your ISPs border. So your
locally cached prerendered version on -insert some random ISP here- will
always be slower than google in 99% of the cases.

Been competing against google since 2005, I’ve seen a thing or two.

~~~
pcmaffey
For sure you're not going to be faster than google. But if you're site is > 3x
slower than AMP, people will notice and prefer AMP. The point is to stay
competitive.

------
djflutt3rshy
Reduce the demand for it. Include easily accessible "article only" mode, make
your site friendly to current Reader Modes for all major browsers. No
obtrusive ads, no 500 trackers bogging down the browser. Quick loading. Just
give us the info we need, nothing more. Just like ad blockers were a response
to websites not respecting people's attention and safety, likewise AMP is a
response to them not respecting people's time.

~~~
untog
All of that would be awesome, but it won't kill AMP.

AMP isn't popular because users love it. It's popular because Google shows
AMP-only results for the first screen (often two or more screens) of search
results on their site. You can make as beautiful an experience as you want,
but users won't see it when they search, so they won't ever get to experience
it.

~~~
jotm
I haven't seen an AMP page in over 2 years, and I use Google search a lot.
Anytime I saw one I clicked away in disgust, so maybe they're filtered for me.

The problem is all the people and big websites that don't seem to care at all
about their own content pushing amp as some sort of great solution for website
speed. Sad, but it seems to have died down.

~~~
buboard
Are you using your phone? I see them all the time (and its pretty easy to
notice with the hiding of the address bar).

~~~
icebraining
Maybe they're using Firefox for Android, Google doesn't seem to be pushing AMP
links to it (yet?).

~~~
buboard
I dont know about that but they do push them to Safari on iphone

------
lttlrck
Maybe stop using google and other search engines that prioritize AMP in the
results. I’ve been using DDG for a long time now and don’t miss google at all.

~~~
xref
I switched from Chrome+Goog to Firefox+DDG...but had to dump DDG a week later.
The results just aren’t anywhere near on par with google. The results have no
dates so I’m constantly served results to outdated tech info (5 year old posts
about Cassandra, no thanks DDG), and they only present 1 link to an article vs
the more info-dense google format with 1 primary link to say, StackOverflow,
and 4 more possible hits smaller just below it presented as “more from this
site.”

Basically I get more done faster with google search, however much I hate the
goog panopticon. I’ve also switched to Apple News and Maps so I’m very much
trying to dump goog, but search is where they still really excel.

I do wish I’d come back to Firefox sooner though, absolutely love it post
quantum.

~~~
half-kh-hacker
I've taken to using DDG and when I find that the results are unsatisfactory, I
stick a '!g' at the start or the end of my query, and it redirects to the
google results page.

~~~
xref
Like I mentioned though, with no dates every page is unsatisfactory. I’m not
gonna waste time clicking each link to look at the date before I devote time
to reading it

~~~
your-nanny
then use DDG's time filter.

~~~
dingsbumps
That's tough when the only filters are "1 month", "1 week", and "1 day". Is
there some way to get 1 year? I ask as a daily ddg user

------
donohoe
The whole marketing aspect behind AMP is that its fast. This is the narrative
that has sucked most publishers in. It is also not true (to the degree you
think).

I run a leaderboard of major news publishes (mostly English language based
ones). It relies on WebPageTest.org and tests about 60+ articles pages nightly
on 3G and 'Fast 3G' speeds. The myth that you cannot have a fast web page AND
have ads on it is a myth. Several organizations do it and do it well (DotDash
dominates the board with their sites).

[https://webperf.xyz/](https://webperf.xyz/)

Before I hit API limits on WPT I was also testing against the AMP version of
the page too. The speed differences between the regular page load and the AMP
page load was often very similar. I recall in some cases (Quartz, Guardian,
NYT) that regular pages loaded faster than AMP.

That aside, assuming a regular web page took 10 seconds to load (a top 10
article) you would expect that the AMP page would be faster, say down to 2 or
3 seconds in Load Time in order to make the effort of having yet another
template/format to support and to justify the effort to re-implement
analytics, pay-wall, and ads?

Very often it was the a saving of only a second or two. It all adds up, but as
someone who works with resource strapped publishes thats not worth the
resources. Thats especially true when I could have spent all that time
optimizing our regular pages instead of this other project.

Why do people think AMP is faster? Pre-caching by Google.

The thing is Google (IMHO) could pre-cache regular web pages too. They don't.
They don't even issue guidelines on how to make your site cache friendly, they
insist on this whole specification/implementation and insist on hosting it
remotely and create all sorts of barriers.

~~~
hn_throwaway_99
I have a different take. It's not that you can't do normal HTML as fast as
AMP. It's that by _preventing_ a lot of the things that make "normal" sites
slow, it changes the whole conversation at publishing companies.

For example, here is an example conversation at a web company before AMP (and
this is not really hypothetical - I had more than a few conversations like
this):

Marketers: We need you to add these 623 tracking pixels from these 300 ad
networks to the page.

Developers: But that will kill page performance!

Marketers: But you guys are smart, make it work!

And after AMP:

Marketers: We need you to add these 623 tracking pixels from these 300 ad
networks to the page.

Developers: Get bent. AMP doesn't allow that, and without AMP our SEO
positioning will tank.

Marketers: Oh, OK.

~~~
a1369209993
And in a world where Google isn't malicious:

Marketers: We need you to add these 623 tracking pixels from these 300 ad
networks to the page.

Developers: Get bent. If we add tracking pixels our SEO positioning will tank.

Marketers: Oh, OK.

~~~
thephyber
This is a wishful thinking counterfactual. No major search engine ever weighed
obscene numbers of tracking pixels or heavy page weight very high in their SEO
algo.

I'm not saying Google doesn't have perverse incentives (and with AMP, they
do). But it wasn't fixed before Google and AMP is one of the counterweights to
web ads + tracking beacon overload.

~~~
a1369209993
> This is a wishful thinking counterfactual.

Well, _yes_ , I did _say_ that.

> in a world

------
tgsovlerkhgsel
The reason why we have AMP in the first place is that normal news websites are
unusable. The extra caching/preloading it enables is a bonus, but the main
benefit comes from AMP websites not being as shitty as regular sits.

It's pretty easy to make usable web sites with regular HTML, and it's almost
certainly possible to make just as shitty AMP sites. However, AMP solved the
political/bureaucratic problem by providing a strong carrot to make a non-
shitty version of the web site, and made it easier to make a non-shitty one
than a shitty one.

The publishers already have to spend time remaking their web site, and the
goal they get provided with is "keep it simple and lightweight", and doing
shitty things is made hard/expensive. So they grumble and do it, getting it
mostly right. (Although they seem to have realized the "potential" and started
shittifying the AMP pages too).

They could have a normal experience that is very similar. Yet, they still
serve the non-AMP, ad- and tracker-laden main page that takes 20x as long to
load, jumps around while doing so, and tries to blast you with an autoplaying
video that remains stuck to your screen while you scroll.

I don't get the hate for AMP - it somehow succeeded in the impossible quest to
get publishers to make less shitty web sites, and it does improve user
experience by preloading the pages.

It's just like with the "acceptable ads" program - some web sites
participating in it serve significantly less shitty ads to people who only
allow "acceptable ads", while serving a worse version _of the same ad_ to
everyone else.

So maybe, to answer your question: Build a standard (or extend the AMP
standard) that works just like this, but is enforced by the browser. Much
harder to do and unlikely to get enough momentum/incentive to actually
succeed, though.

~~~
pvorb
The problem with AMP is not that it limits what website creators can do. The
problem is that everything is served via Google's servers and that you can
have a perfectly optimized, mobile-friendly website and still have no chance
in Google's search results because there is a similar result that uses AMP.

~~~
noobquestion81
One thing I don’t understand here is whether AMP = google?

I hate privacy abuse as much as anyone, but I thought it was a standard for
less insane HTML pages that any “renderer” could show. Didnt cloudflare etc do
this?

Basically can someone ELI5 where the actual hate comes from (aside from being
annoyed because you use google search)? Because I am all for news sites being
anything other than what we get today (20mb of js ads and tracking crapware
etc)

edited for clarity in my questions

~~~
jml7c5
Let's say I make a page for my site that loads in 100ms in the average
browser. The AMP page for some other site loads in 100ms too. In a sane world,
these would have the same hope of appearing in search results. In the real
world, my site will receive a ding in search ranking, even though it's just as
fast. My choice is either to be less visible, or make an AMP page for no
reason and cede some control to Google (well, Bing as well I suppose, but it's
really Google's game here).

------
snek
You're asking the wrong question. AMP isn't bad, Google ranking AMP pages over
equally-fast non-AMP pages is bad. But Google's main goal here is to
preload/render content without the content knowing it is being preloaded, so
that the page appears to load instantly when the user clicks on it.

What I think actually needs to happen is a standard for deferred navigation
where the UA can be told to load a bunch of resources and then choose one of
them to actually navigate to (basically what AMP does). The problem here is
that Google is (as we type here) actively coming up with horrible standards
like signed exchanges so that they never have to send users away from their
own domain, so I don't think they would be fans of a standardized system that
killed AMP.

~~~
shkkmo
> AMP isn't bad,

No, it is clearly bad. You seem to even agree. The stated reason for creating
AMP may be good, but the technology and standard itself is bad.

~~~
cameronbrown
Like all things this is not as black and white as you'd think. AMP as a web-
components toolkit is actually fairly nice and I totally get the flip side of
why people think it's dangerous.

~~~
shkkmo
> AMP as a web-components toolkit is actually fairly nice

It is? What do you like about it? What does it help you do more easily?

AMP is in no way necessary to build "user-first" fast loading pages.

AMP was created to allow aggregators to ensure they could cache and serve
content without the user leaving the portal.

As publishers are desperate for the traffic, they have adopted AMP to make the
aggregators happy.

The user is never given a choice, they just end up stuck with a cached AMP
page and confused about how to reach the publisher's real website.

This "user-first" framework is really more "user-last"

------
haasted
Add an option in adblocking software that automatically redirects to the real
article. I imagine there’s a fairly big overlap between users of adblocking
software and users that dislike amp.

------
donohoe
Start with this [http://ampletter.org/](http://ampletter.org/)

"We are a community of individuals who have a significant interest in the
development and health of the World Wide Web (“the Web”), and we are deeply
concerned about Accelerated Mobile Pages (“AMP”), a Google project that
purportedly seeks to improve the user experience of the Web."

[https://github.com/amp-letter/amp-letter.github.io](https://github.com/amp-
letter/amp-letter.github.io)

------
the_duke
No-one has mentioned the to me most obvious answer: if your employer wants
to/is using AMP, heavily lobby against it. Convince other developers. Get your
manager on your side. Write the CEO.

Do so with good arguments why it's a bad move, not with "omg Google is evil".

Do the same thing as a user: if you are using a site that has AMP deployed,
write them. Them them why it's bad for them and for their users, and how this
pushes you to other alternatives.

~~~
lonelappde
That requires having a reason to oppose AMP beyond generalized dislike of
Google.

~~~
donohoe
Start with this [http://ampletter.org/](http://ampletter.org/)

~~~
lern_too_spel
The very first reason it gives is nonsense. Your boss will probably laugh at
you if not fire you.

"AMP keeps users within Google’s domain and diverts traffic away from other
websites for the benefit of Google."

No, it keeps users within the link aggregator's domain, whether that is
Google, Bing, Baidu, or a link aggregator made by a third party. The publisher
is OK with this because it makes loading from all of those link aggregators
instant, just like when they publish for Apple News; but in this case, they
can publish once and support multiple aggregators.

~~~
donohoe
As someone who works for publishers, no, we were not happy about this at all
and it did pull readers from our sites.

~~~
lern_too_spel
> no, we were not happy about this

Compared to Apple News? It serves the same purpose but gives more control to
publishers.

------
gruturo
Write to Apple and plead the case properly, framing it as a privacy/tracking
issue, which it is. They recently took a lot of steps to safeguard users’
privacy. If they kill it by embedding a de-amp’er in safari, the incentive and
ROI to keeping amp pages drops quite a bit. Help your Android-using
acquaintances set up Firefox.

~~~
Ayesh
I'm pretty sure you Google can sue Apple if they add a de-AMP feature to
Safari on anti competitive grounds.

------
tyingq
There's a fair amount of interest in the US Congress to entertain antitrust
conversation around Google, Facebook, etc.

Find some way to get a charismatic US Senator spun up about AMP.

~~~
tyingq
Not personally recommended, but...

AMP pages are hosted on a google.com uri. Get some kind of controversial
content up on an AMP page, and start a grassroots "OMG, Google is hosting this
bad content via AMP" campaign going with some tech-ignorant group. Maybe works
better if AMP is fronting some other Google controlled user-content domain.

~~~
buboard
We could probably push to categorize google.com as spam/dangerous

------
dccoolgai
Conspiracy theory: most of the problems AMP solves were already solved by
Google Reader, but it was hard to sell ads on that... so they killed it 2/3
years before introducing AMP to beg the solution and swoop in with AMP.

------
martin_a
I think eliminating the demand is the ultimate way.

The "promise" of AMP is fast delivery of the page and ease of use on mobile
devices.

Once we (as in "content creators" or whatever) start building our sites that
way, AMP will get used less and less.

~~~
donohoe
And that has started. Checkout ThoughtCo from DotDash

[https://www.thoughtco.com/understanding-equivalent-
equations...](https://www.thoughtco.com/understanding-equivalent-
equations-4157661)

[http://webpagetest.org/result/190803_ZS_b6b97a597768a9aac0ba...](http://webpagetest.org/result/190803_ZS_b6b97a597768a9aac0ba97be25433862/)

One side-effect is AMP now provides a reason not to do anything about your
regular crappy pages.

~~~
martin_a
Big thumbs up! Looks great on mobile and works very well. I think I will drop
them a line and congratulate them later on their efforts. Maybe others should
do so, too.

------
decentralizer
By creating a extension which blocks AMP, for ourselves. But, if we really
need to destroy AMP from internet. Unfortunately it is not really possible,
unless if you have enough money to buy Google.

~~~
tedmiston
Seems like a reasonable solution on desktops, but where I see AMP the most is
on mobile.

I don't think it's possible to block AMP in Safari on iOS.

~~~
decentralizer
Actually it is possible. It doesn't have to done on client-side. You can do it
via DNS settings with Pi-Hole on your network, or create your own private
tunnel with Pi-Hole. After that, you need to block subdomains with _amp._. Or
even you can create your own iOS app for it, and yes it is also possible.

~~~
tedmiston
Great idea. Do you have more info on how this can be done with the Pi-hole? I
have been wanting to set one up already anyway.

------
deweller
Can you give me a high level overview of what your motivation is for
destroying AMP? I'm not trying to troll. I really would like to know.

~~~
buboard
I don't, but i am asking how it can be done. I see it increasingly more online
and i wonder if one day it will seize the entire web. If it can't be stopped,
that's a problem

~~~
lonelappde
Do you want to kill JavaScript too? It also took over the web.

~~~
zzzcpan
Who doesn't want to kill that security, privacy, performance nightmare?

~~~
krapp
Most people, actually.

------
tambourine_man
As a user, I go to the trouble of clicking the original link after entering an
AMP site. Not much because I think it will make a dent in the access
statistics, but because I really hate the experience.

As a coder, if I'm honest, money speaks louder, unfortunately. If they pay me
I'll do it, as others obviously do, but that's something we could have a hand
on changing collectively.

~~~
blahblahblogger
> As a coder, if I'm honest, money speaks louder, unfortunately. If they pay
> me I'll do it, as others obviously do

Agreed. The company I work for is doing AMP and are getting real business
value from it.

As such money does speak louder and if the users of our product are engaging
with it more because of AMP, why would we go against it?

Philosophical reasons aren't enough. To give people and companies a reason to
oppose AMP you'd need to frame the reasons in a way that includes business
considerations.

~~~
api
What value are they getting other than being ranked higher?

~~~
mosen
That’s an extremely compelling reason in itself.

------
SamWhited
If you're a U.S. voter, vote for Elizabeth Warren
([https://elizabethwarren.com/](https://elizabethwarren.com/)) in the
Democratic primary and then in 2020. She's pledged to break up companies that
abuse their position as both the platform and the product. Once we have a
congress and executive branch that are amenable to actually enforcing anti-
trust laws in office, then make your case that allowing Google to operate AMP
servers and prioritize ranking sites that use it is a bad thing.

Without regulation, I'm fairly convinced the big tech companies will continue
to find ways to abuse their power.

~~~
buboard
At best, google will break out of alphabet. The problem remains. Warren is
indeed the most likely to fight google's dominance, but i m afraid regulation
will only make it worse for their competitors.

~~~
SamWhited
What I'm most hoping she tries to do is break Android out of Google. Google
owning the app store and forcing their products onto peoples phones with
magical root powers that other apps don't have is one of the bigger problems I
have with Android and its ecosystem. But we'll see; fingers crossed that the
political will exists to actually do something and that she can leverage it.

------
enriquto
Maybe not the easiest, but certainly the most elegant way, is to social
engineer the whole society to make "google-free" a really cool thing.

------
starbugs
To me it looks as if AMP is on the edge of being legal in terms of antitrust
law. Even if Google doesn't admit to it, I bet they prefer AMPed sites in the
ranking. The AMP icon might be another thing that makes it difficult with
regard to legal considerations. This might be one of its major weaknesses.

------
zzo38computer
If you make many web pages that do not require JavaScript, CSS, and many
images or videos, then that also improves the speed, and is better for
accessibility.

For other cases you do need some scripts and stuff, I have suggested a
"widget" attribute nd <widget> element. Both <script> and <widget> elements
support the widget attribute. If recognized by the browser and enabled by the
user, then the element and its contents are replaced by something
implementation-dependent (and not necessarily representable in normal HTML).
Otherwise, a <widget> element acts like <span>. This also improves speed, as
it can skip loading a script if it has its own version, and possibly also use
a native code version specific to the browser or an extension. It also allows
better user customization, for example if a special text editing widget is
used on the web page (rather than a normal <textbox>), then it can be replaced
with one that has vi or emacs key bindings, or to implement it without
animations if the user wants to implement that script without animations.

The other alternative, for stuff that doesn't need HTML and HTTP, is to use
Gopher. Then, no need to consider what kind of user interface is used and any
other kind of accessibility; it already is!

------
bdarnell
Don't destroy it, embrace it. AMP is the low-javascript web many of us pine
for. If browsers implemented AMP natively (and it were properly standardized),
it would be great, and it has tons of potential for things like RSS readers.
Google's heavy-handedness here has a lot of problems, but if they've managed
to get publishers on board with a move away from the JS quagmire we should be
pushing in the same direction and not fighting against it.

~~~
the8472
AMP still includes javascript that does many retarded things, including
_hiding the site contents until the JS is loaded_ , often from 3rd party CDNs.
So if you're blocking the amp JS then the site just shows a blank screen,
until some CSS animation trickery blends it in a few seconds later.

In other words if you use a content blocker AMP can be slower than the page
would be without it.

~~~
gregable
AMP hides the entire page to avoid what is known as a Flash of Unstyled
Content (FOUC). The document unhides as soon as a single AMP javascript
resource loads, or an 8s timeout if that fails. That javascript is very
cacheable and is often already in the browser cache to begin with.

~~~
the8472
The page is also readable without that script and browser engines already
delay the initial paint. So this is entirely unnecessary.

------
pornel
Kill the adtech/surveillance industry.

AMP is an admission that the open Web has failed. The number of trackers, tag
managers, popups and other crap to "monetize" pages has gone out of control
and made majority of pages painful to open (at least without some crap filter,
like an adblocker — or AMP).

If you manage to restore the health of the open Web, it'll be hard to sell a
walled garden instead.

------
Waterluvian
An important (but not the only) point to consider when answering this
question: _STOP_ expecting consumers to give a crap about nerdspeak topics or
to care about hypothetical dystopian futures. Almost all users don't know or
care about AMP. They just want stuff to load fast.

------
siriniok
"Let's build sites that don't require AMP."

    
    
      *gets thrown out of the window*

------
chrischen
To kill it you need to propose s truly open alternative that also honestly
addresses some of the reasons why Google wants AMP to exist, without ceding
control to Google. This probably means some system or voluntary limit on
JS/HTML that can ensure fast loading.

If anyone were to propose this it’d probably be Bing or DDG.

~~~
buboard
limit javascript to 640K of memory. so easy to implement and would fix most
sites. Some other things like custom fonts could be removed from mobile
browsers. The rest should be OK - 2 or 3 more seconds to load a page are not
important really. After all, reading an article usually takes entire minutes,
so shaving off the initial 2 seconds of reading is immaterial.

~~~
chrischen
> After all, reading an article usually takes entire minutes, so shaving off
> the initial 2 seconds of reading is immaterial.

But finding the right article to read may require browsing through many pages,
and after dozens those seconds can add up.

Also the solution cannot be to restrict all JS and web pages. It needs to be
an open and opt-in framework.

~~~
buboard
i d be fine with some restriction to JS. Heavy JS pages are bad for the
environment and disrespectful of the time of users.

------
ampthrowaway5
Disclaimer: I will be joining Google in a few weeks, opinions are obviously my
own. Anon account because I don't know where I stand yet in this regard.

I'm one of the few people who doesn't have too much of a problem with AMP
(obvious bias aside). Take this advice AMP devs who might be reading: Listen
to the community, and communicate back without being condescending. A bit of
humility goes a long way.

Your developer marketing over AMP is awful and you need to fix it. Not working
with the tech community is causing immeasurable damage to the AMP/Google brand
for the people who want to work at your company (engineers) who feel
personally attacked by this.

Be careful.

[http://ampletter.org](http://ampletter.org)

~~~
buboard
Your employer should move AMP widgets into the browser , completely scrap the
google CDN from it, and stop prioritizing amp pages.

~~~
cameronbrown
This seems like an anti-trust issue.

------
SimonPStevens
AMP itself is not the problem. It is actual one possible solution to the
problem of heavy slow pages.

The problem is that it is tied to Google.

We don't need to destroy it, we need to make it into an open standard that all
browsers and search engines can implement for the same benefits.

~~~
lonelappde
Done.

amp.dev/documentation/guides-and-tutorials/learn/spec/amphtml/

~~~
tyingq
An open standard that includes rules like "your page must include this Google
controlled JS url which will contain whatever we want".

That pretty much kills the "open" bit.

~~~
geofft
Agree, but technically if the spec is well-defined browsers can recognize that
JS URL as a magic string instead of actually loading that JS, sorta like how
browsers don't actually go to w3c.org when they see an HTML 4.01 doctype.

Perhaps the right place is to lobby the WHATWG for an explicit exception in
the definition of the script tag to handle these ampproject.org URLs in an
API-compatible way.

~~~
tyingq
If you don't load the js, the amp specific tags don't work. So, for example,
no images.

~~~
geofft
I mean that browsers should implement support for the AMP-specific tags
directly, without needing to load the JS to do so. If the AMP spec is
complete, then this should theoretically be possible.

------
OldHand2018
Why would you want to destroy AMP? AMP is Google's attempt to become the next
Compuserve.

Just keep doing your own thing and let Google turn itself into a platform for
idiots.

~~~
cced
So that another company can replace them?

------
clircle
Stupid question. I have been using Google Search on my work computer for the
past year or so, but I haven't seen any changes to any of the sites I've
visited. I use firefox with ublock origin everywhere. Do either of these
prevent AMP from loading? or is it so subtle that I don't notice it?

------
notatoad
It's easy: convince a huge majority of the publications that produce actual
content people want to read to start making their websites fast, lightweight,
and cacheable. Then there will be no need for AMP.

Until you can accomplish that, destroying amp will only make the internet
worse.

~~~
xvector
I would rather have slightly slower websites than Google control even more of
the web.

~~~
notatoad
Yeah, but you aren't everybody. That attitude doesn't accomplish anything.

Google gains control by finding problems and solving them their way. You can't
gain that control back by dismissing those problems. if you want to reduce
Google's control you have to solve a problem (that affects other people, not
just you) before they do, or in a better way than they can.

~~~
xvector
I don't really agree here.

Solving a problem has never been justification for a solution that brings even
more.

For example, an totalitarian dictatorship would solve a ton of problems with
the US political system today. But that doesn't make it an acceptable
solution.

When your solution brings more harm than it resolves, it's better not to have
it in the first place.

------
nudpiedo
You can lobby against it in the same fashion there was a small campaign
against infinite scrolling portals.

Also you can create an extension for yourself which rewrites the URL and opens
the slow version of the same page.

At the end everyone is free, for the good or for the bad.

------
mancerayder
Come up with a news aggregation service that's not necessarily Apple news to
compete with news.google?

Does this require lawyers and negotiations with publishers?

Sincerely,

news addict

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api
Make a browser extension to de-amp links?

~~~
rhexs
If only this was possible on Safari mobile.

~~~
thephyber
You can always buy a Google phone to get away from AMP...

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JustSomeNobody
You can’t because “everyone else is using it, so we can’t be the only ones
not” style thinking.

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lvs
I love how you all just walked blithely right into the open jaws of this.
Naysayers just a year or two ago were getting downvoted to hell on here. Now
you've gotten the taste of the acid in the first stomach, and you think
there's a way to climb back out. You don't seem to be grasping monopolistic
companies as the ruminants they are.

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EwanToo
I've switched to bing search as an experiment, that's basically how you kill
AMP

~~~
ocdtrekkie
Unfortunately Bing also implements AMP. :/

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magoon
AMP can be great for us, if they would fix the implementation.

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jawns
Easy. Just destroy Google. Done.

~~~
geofft
I wonder if it is sufficient to fire the people at Google who work on AMP. Is
management actually invested in AMP enough to re-staff it, or are they merely
okay with it?

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PaulHoule
(1) The political attack: Google is increasingly coming under fire for being a
monopolist. Such attacks could lead to the demise of or restrictions being put
on AMP.

(2) The technical attack: kill the web as we know it. The idea here is that
the web is hopelessly corrupted by the entanglement of text with code (e.g.
Javascript,) the advertising-based business model, pop-ups, etc. A particular
sign of this is "scanning" behavior where you go to Google News or Hacker News
or your round of daily blogs and hit "reload" to see what is new. This has
multiple insidious effects on the human nervous system, one is that some of
your attention is used to suppress content that you've seen before, which
lowers your working IQ.

It may sound like science fiction, but I think we need to replace the web
browser with an intelligent agent which can "scan" content for us and only
show us what is new, interesting, non-toxic, etc.

~~~
krapp
>It may sound like science fiction, but I think we need to replace the web
browser with an intelligent agent which can "scan" content for us and only
show us what is new, interesting, non-toxic, etc.

Your cure is worse than the disease.

At the moment, I can choose to use AMP or not, can choose to use Javascript or
not, and can choose to publish whatever I like to the web, and whomever wants
to can read it.

Your solution would appear to require me to only publish static documents
which are "new, interesting, non-toxic, etc," under some arbitrary and
proprietary guidelines, because that's all people would (or should) be allowed
to see.

No thank you. I'd rather have freedom from all of the gatekeepers of web
culture, be they FAANG or contrarian hackers.

