Comment by Killed_Mufasa on 03/12/2019 at 09:50 UTC

6 upvotes, 1 direct replies (showing 1)

View submission: Why did I build AmputatorBot?

AMP is an open source standard. It's all out in the open.

See the post: "Google's AMP is a major threat to the Open Web. AMP was developed in secret alongside some major news organisations. By the time it was released, Google’s spec and infrastructure were basically settled and non-negotiable." So yes, it's open source now, but most design decisions have already been made and just because something is open source, doesn't mean everyone can just make changes to the code.

Plus, when you actually look at the code open sourced, you'll see that they have only provided projects for the end-user to use.

Google doesn't prioritize AMP results, they prioritize fast results. AMP pages have much better load times. You can do the math.

stolen from a comment on the article I posted: "AMP results are listed at the top of the page. If Alice, Bob, and Oscar have pages on google that come up when a user searches for 'zebras' in their respective order, and then Oscar adds AMP to his site, Oscar will now have a page ranked above Sally and Bob. It has nothing to do with Google's PageRank. Everything will be even once Sally and Bob put AMP on their sites; however, now everyone is forced to use Google's AMP BECAUSE Google is the market leader. If DuckDuckGo had their own proprietary version of AMP, no one would use it because no one uses DuckDuckGo!"

AMP pages are based on static content, which not only makes them much faster to load, but far more secure to end users. They cannot contain malicious scripts, they cannot embed web workers, they cannot expose users to dependency attacks introduced by endless js dependency trees, etc.

This is true, I'm not arguing with you about the benefits of Amp. In fact, Every single comment of u/AmputatorBot contains the text: "Amp often loads faster". But in my opinion, the costs outweighs the benefits.

The news carousel only shows AMP pages because the metadata and standard structure is necessary in order to be able to correctly parse news stories from thousands of news sites. A standard data structure to enable things like this was half the reason for developing AMP.

Okay, so Google, one of the most powerful companies in the world with tons of highly intellectual employees and the best web scraping tools out there, is incapable of scraping news articles? Also, since HTML5, we have semantic elements like `<header>`, `<summary>` and hell even `<p>` for paragraphs. I'm aware that AMP adds more similar minded elements, but claiming that AMP is necessary for something like the news carousel is just misleading.

You can already prevent your site from being cached or even crawled with the robots.txt.

But there's the thing, most organisations don't want to such a thing because it would hurt their numbers. They are essentially forced to use AMP. There are countless articles out there of publishers who felt forced to use AMP.

Google doesn't have a monopoly on caching AMP pages. You can build your own amp cache if you really want. Anyone can cache AMP sites.

I didn't claim that? But Google is a huge company with major marketshares in a lot of branches.

Oh, almost forgot to mention, the privacy thing. AMP doesn't add any new ways to track users. It actually disables a bunch of old ways to track users because there's no JavaScript

This is also just blatently false. There *is* (or can be) JavaScript on AMP pages[1]. And there are hardly any limitations when it comes to tracking users. My point was, if you use a website without AMP or any trackers, only the organisation behind the website can track you. However, if you use a website that has implemented AMP, now both the organisation behind it ánd Google can track you.

1: https://amp.dev/documentation/guides-and-tutorials/develop/custom-javascript/

I would argue that AMP could have been great, but it has too many flaws that I will not tolerate.

Lastly, let me just make clear that I appreciate your comment, every kind of feedback is appreciated and I encourage discussions about difficult topics like this. Thank you :)

Replies

Comment by mirh at 04/12/2019 at 01:20 UTC

3 upvotes, 1 direct replies

So yes, it's open source now, but most design decisions have already been made and just because something is open source, doesn't mean everyone can just make changes to the code.

Nobody is even "free" to make changes to the linux kernel code then. Is it less open source? You are handwaving that argument.

Speaking of which, since a couple of months AMP is exactly that, a project under the openjs foundation.

Plus, when you actually look at the code open sourced, you'll see that they have only provided projects for the end-user to use.

If you can host everything yourself, then the danger is.. what?

There is (or can be) JavaScript on AMP pages[1]. And there are hardly any limitations when it comes to tracking users.

1: https://amp.dev/documentation/guides-and-tutorials/develop/custom-javascript/

So like every other page ever?