
Summary of My Meeting with Google AMP Team - akras14
https://www.alexkras.com/i-had-lunch-with-google-amp-team/
======
CPLX
I don't get it. What's there to have a long lunch about? The concept wasn't
particularly complicated. Get rid of the horrible and dishonest user
experience where you click on a link to a page hut don't get taken to that
page.

> I think I did a decent job communicating this concern to Paul and Malte.
> They both assured me that they understood the problem and are confident that
> they can find a solution that will work for everyone.

How about instead they just order some delivery and delete the fucking part
where URL's were rendered unusable instead of this vague "is there anything
else I can reassure you about" non-answer?

~~~
ominous
AMP is terrible. I ignore any results that start with the AMP symbol.

From time to time I still check if they included a way to go the real site.

My fear is that websites start using AMP as their CMS, because I can see it
looking like a good idea "Hey guys, we don't need to manage how content! Let's
just publish directly to Google and be done with it. So long, node.js"

------
blurrywh
We all confronted Google with an abuse of power in a previous AMP HN thread[1]
and Malte Ubl and Paul Bakaus from Google seem to follow our sentiments
closely but didn't dare to reply in the previous thread. Instead they
preferred to have a quiet and safe lunch with just one of us. Good to know.

Malte and Paul, what you are doing is a huge abuse of power with a random
specced product and you are not listening to your users, especially those on
Github. Many people made lists of drawbacks and the previous thread is full of
many more. AMP is heavily flawed and beside the abuse of power, AMP is from a
UI perspective an utter disaster: You wan't to improve the mobile user
experience but steal so much screen real estate from am already limited mobile
view, I made a quick mockup:
[http://imgur.com/a/VYVZ0](http://imgur.com/a/VYVZ0) Just tell us, why does
the bottom navbar on iOS stays now with AMP sites forever and does steal even
more real estate? Who made this design decision and all the other random
design decisions?

It would be great if Malte and Paul finally take the responsibility and
comment to all the previous attacks _here_. I guess that Sundar has been
informed about the dissatisfaction with AMP and it's now really time to give a
statement. It seems that Google has already slightly deranked AMP sites in
their SERPs which shows that even internally Malte and Paul are not fully
backed up.

[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13414570](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13414570)

------
pavelmelnichuk
> Fat bar at the top ... scroll out of the view as you scroll into content

I think you have been drinking the punch at your lunch. That bar is still a
problem and should not be there. There is a native back button, and there is
no need for that bar. It lowers conversions for everyone's websites and
increases everyones bounce rates.

Of course there is no problem with everything else google has implemented in
terms of speeding up the web. That's great. It was a major achievement and a
lot of good engineering went in to the caching, rendering, and image resizing
and optimization machine that is AMP.

Your meeting should have been about hijacking the ui.

> I did not bring this up because I forgot :)

You punked out [0]

[0] [https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-
instant&ion=1&e...](https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-
instant&ion=1&espv=2&ie=UTF-8#q=punked+out+curb+your+enthusiasm)

------
Aaargh20318
As a user of Google Search I just want an option to permanently disable AMP
from my search results.

I've set DuckDuckGo as my search engine on my phone for the time being as
Google Search is practically unusable to me.

~~~
Accacin
Apparently encrypted.google.com doesn't serve AMP pages. However, using
DuckDuckGo might be the better option in the long run.

~~~
Aaargh20318
Unfortunately, that's not one of the options in mobile Safari. I can choose
from Google, Yahoo (they still exist?), Bing and DuckDuckGo.

Sure, I could bookmark it and use it that way but I like the convenience of
being able to search from the address bar.

~~~
thallian
Using !g on DuckDuckGo will search on encrypted.google.com

------
CommanderData
How does one disable AMP? It destroys the experience.

I visited a subreddit with AMP and couldn't see nested comments or do sorting
and other things. It literally hijacks the functionality.

Why reinvent the wheel to add those features when I am happy visiting the site
to get it natively.

~~~
andybak
Not sure if this is still relevant but:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/changelog/comments/53q42z/read_redd...](https://www.reddit.com/r/changelog/comments/53q42z/read_reddit_faster_via_google_with_amp/)

> For now if you want to vote or comment and you end up on an AMP page click
> the “View more comments” button below the first set of comments. This will
> take you to our regular mobile web experience where you can vote and comment
> to your heart's content.

~~~
CommanderData
View more comments did nothing. This is going back 1-2 weeks ago. Maybe it was
broken or my phone had an issue.

Either way I'm not sure how to feel about AMP. I think it may force web devs
to actually do something about bloat which is a very good thing or make bloat
worse by offsetting mobile users to use AMP pages only and serving bloat pages
to desktops.

------
orbz
I'll take the unpopular opinion from the end-user's perspective here: When I
was recently traveling and only had access to an overused satellite connection
and my phone, the only pages that were even remotely usable were AMP pages.
Given that I can definitely see the niche that they're trying to fix, not
really to help us with a blazing fast, low latency 5G connection on a new top
end phone.

Sure you could argue that companies can create a similar experience with their
web sites but let's be honest that only few would invest the time for it, and
then they'd still have a discoverability problem.

AMP might still be somewhat flawed, but it's a centralized step in the right
direction, and it does sound like the team is open to feedback, so I'll give
them points there even if they haven't made it perfect yet.

------
inian
Prev and prev to prev HN discussions
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12888921](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12888921)

~~~
akras14
Thank you for your comment, inspired me to write this:
[https://www.alexkras.com/emotionally-surviving-as-a-write-
in...](https://www.alexkras.com/emotionally-surviving-as-a-write-in-the-age-
of-social-media/)

