I'm personally neutral on it. In general, product managers hate complicating the product experience with settings and engineers hate maintaining multiple code paths for the same feature.
We did add the link away from AMP, so that users who cared have a per-link opt out. We know that most users love the experience.
I understand you don't want to keep 100 billion options around, that makes perfect sense.
But haven't you seen the level of vitriol that comes up every time AMP is discussed? This isn't a minor thing, a lot of people REALLY dislike it. I have SERIOUSLY considered switching to a different search engine entirely because of this.
The fact that there is now a link to get to the normal page after I've already gotten to the AMP page is not a solution to the issue. As an end-user that feels like I'm complaining that her website is too hard to read because of the noisy background and you're telling me I could just use print preview where the background doesn't show and read it that way.
This feature has significantly change the way I use Google for the worse, and in the time since it was first launched it really hasn't gotten any better for me. It's so bad my OS vendor is starting to incorporate workarounds directly into their code.
If I Google something how do I open five tabs to go look at? I have to ignore every AMP result because I can't open them in a tab. So would Google deems to be the "best" content is now unavailable to me.
I don't have a choice to simply turn it off.
Not everyone will. If you read the comments here there are people who do like it.
But there are clearly a lot of us who HATE it with a passion because it's made your website so much harder to use.
> This isn't a minor thing, a lot of people REALLY dislike it.
> But there are clearly a lot of us who HATE it with a passion because it's made your website so much harder to use.
You really seem to overestimate the size of HN readership compared to the rest of the internet.
It is a minor thing. We are a niche audience living in a bubble. We're not - by far - the typical or target users. Our usage behavior is - mostly - irrelevant to Google.
The world has over 3 billion internet users. Let's say that HN has 3M unique monthly users, and that only 10% of those comment, and they are split between liking and hating AMP.
That gives you 150k people who hate AMP compared to 3 billion users on the internet.
Why would you build and maintain a feature for 0.005% of your users?
> Why would you build and maintain a feature for 0.005% of your users?
Even taking at face value the assumptions that yield your numbers (not obvious to me that's safe):
150K is still a pretty large audience.
It's an influential audience, to the extent that tech and therefore thinking about tech is influential.
It's an audience that understands the implications of technology choices like this and can articulate them.
Also, I don't understand the assumption that this audience is completely complementary when it comes to understanding how the rest of the population thinks. I expect it's at least as likely a bet that there are people in the rest of the population who sense something is off or some aspect of the experience is degraded but can't understand and articulate the issue at as high a resolution as it is likely that everyone in the rest of the population simple does not care.
And you really don't have to be some kind of programmer or other ubernerd to see some of the relevant issues in play with regards to URLs and walled gardens.
No, it's tiny. And considering how HN readers usually user adblock, and rarely click on ads, it is a completely irrelevant audience for Google.
But let's say you make $10 out of each user per year. That's $1.5M in yearly revenue. It barely pays for 3 employees at a large tech firm.
> It's an influential audience, to the extent that tech and therefore thinking about tech is influential.
>It's an audience that understands the implications of technology choices like this and can articulate them.
Considering how even HN readers are divided about AMP, I'd say that the net impact of HN audience on AMP is zero. We're not as influential outside the tech bubble as you think.
> Where would you draw the line… what percentage of users would have to dislike amp for you to think it was reasonable to add an option?
One easy piece of math is (cost of adding and maintaining that feature) vs. [(users who dislike) x (% of users who would quit you) x (profit per user)]
For example, if 10% of all users disliked it (300M users), but only 1% of those would leave your services (3M users) and you made, on average, $10 per user in profit, you'd be putting $30M/year of profit at risk, which is probably enough to hire a few people to build and maintain that feature.
> But haven't you seen the level of vitriol that comes up every time AMP is discussed?
Mostly on HN. And it's clear from this thread that a lot of vitriol comes from deeply ideological positions rather than real technical reasons. That won't be fixed by adding an opt-out.
You're right that would remain no matter what. I don't care that much on the ideological position. My objection is purely from a user experience standpoint.
My assumption is that the idea logical issue is much stronger here on hacker news than among the public at large. Much like views on free software purity.
My guess, for lack of better reasoning, is that the percentage of people on hacker news who hate the experience is roughly the same as those in the "real world". I wouldn't expect that being more technically inclined would make people more likely to like AMP or dislike it (ignoring idea logical issues).
I hope that the option of an 'opt out' or 'disable AMP' option (whether globally or on a per-result basis) is explored in the future. As an iOS user I have found AMP to be a frustrating experience. I'm sure you are including iOS users when you say "We know that most users love the experience" but for me AMP has been annoying.
I wrote a comment earlier about my experience with AMP from my perspective as purely a user. Please excuse some of the rantiness of it. Like i said, I can get a little frustrated with AMP at times.
> We did add the link away from AMP, so that users who cared have a per-link opt out. We know that most users love the experience.
You know that most users love the experience, or you know that most users take the path of least resistance and don't click away using a UI whose purpose isn't particularly clear yet?
I can't go into details, but in general we closely track analytics for our product (like most companies with websites would) and run AB experiments to see how changes impact user behavior.
I really question drawing a conclusion from analytics saying people are using it versus actually liking it. I know some folks at work have used it and they regard it as broken enough to call in a ticket about their device being broke.
Analytics is a pretty well known idea. I question the base theory that it will answer this specific question.
Also, given that the indicator for an AMP page is a greyscale, hard to see icon and words, people who don't want to use AMP might hit it because they are in a hurry and the text they are looking at is black and noticeable.
Google search basically is a function where you input a search string and it returns a list of URL's matching the search criteria. That's all I need and want it to do. AMP breaks the core behaviour of Google Search, it no longer provides a list of URL's that match my criteria. Basically most search results aren't actual search results anymore.
There's a happy medium between a product with too many settings and code paths and a product that has none. We're not asking for AMP to run in a plethora of different ways, we're asking for an on/off switch.
Because the majority of people enjoy it? And the common user wants fast load and doesn't care about the philosophy of data retention and web ownership?
Reddit links via Google search results were broken for months on my iPhone because of AMP. How many other users had the same issue and no idea what was going on?
That's reddit's fault and isn't anything inherently wrong with AMP itself. Just because someone uses the technology wrong doesn't mean we should hate on the technology. If I use AngularJS to make a Neo Nazi site, should we all boycott that library?
The fact that the vast majority of users wants something does not make it right any more than letting your kids decide what's for dinner every day is right. At some level what people want in the short term is overruled by the longer term consequences.
This whole discussion reminds me of the people ranting against RMS who many years later come to the conclusion that he probably was right all along only by then the horse has bolted.
The long term consequences of AMP are to consolidate Google's power and to make Google even more of an intermediary deciding who gets to see what. It's an end run around the kind of openness that is a cornerstone of the web and I care deeply about that openness and will oppose vocally any attempt to hijack the web for fig-leaf reasons.
Note how Google is slowly boiling the frog by doing all those things that they said they'd 'never do' and how their 'don't be evil' motto gets trotted out time and again to show us how they are good little web citizens when in fact they ram their unilateral solutions down our throats in the interest of their bottom line while pretending it is all about the 'user experience'. Accidentally gaining control over the content delivery of the pages containing advertising tags of competing ad networks sure must look like a nice and juicy bonus.
See… I really don't care about the ideology here. If people want to get in bed with someone who doesn't have their best interest at heart that's their choice.
Borders and Toys'R'Us both decided to partner with Amazon for a while. I'm not sure why they thought that was a good idea, but that was their choice.
What I care about is the user experience. That's where I'd be happy with an option to simply disable it on my devices.
I think it's kind of unfortunate that it's not possible for people to discuss AMP without both issues coming up and confusing things. But that's life.
Thankfully, We don't rank RFCs or make technical choices based on what users appear to tolerate and/or enjoy. Nor do we set ethical laws or guidelines based on what citizens tolerate. Opinions of people trained/educated in a specialized domain will always carry more weight than that of a random person.
But forget all that, on a simpler level, if you do nothing most things stay the same. If you're happy with the status-quo, you're welcome to be silent. Others prefer vocal protest.
Im in the camp that also hates AMP with a passion. It feels weird not liking much of what Google has been doing lately but AMP for me gets in the way of me sharing articles with my friends and family. It also gets in the way of me sharing a clip of the text so the people I'm sharing with including myself have the proper link and some context to get them to read further.
i really like AMP, and i wish google would give people an option to disable it just so we could have a discussion about AMP on HN that wasn't completely taken over by people whining about how AMP is an evil plot to destroy the web because it scrolls funny on iPhones.
AMP is Google's new closed web, like AOL. So the opt-out is to find alternatives. If you don't have any alternatives, then Google can do whatever they want to you.
