Nilay PatelMay 8, 2023
Anil Dash
This is a great overview by @davidpierce about the fatally flawed AMP effort from Google. As @zachleat notes, a number of prominent web developers *did* (quite bravely) speak up against it, even as Google treated it as an inevitability for the internet. https://www.theverge.com/23711172/google-amp-accelerated-mobile-pages-search-publishers-lawsuit
Google AMP: how Google tried to fix the web by taking it over

Google promised to create a better, faster web for media companies with a new standard called AMP. But even after wide adoption, its poor implementation led to publishers abandoning AMP and, in the end, ruined the trust they had in the internet giant.

The Verge
May 8, 2023 at 8:07pmWeb
Show threadAnil DashMay 8, 2023
@davidpierce @zachleat AMP was one of the technologies that got me to write about "fake markets", a way of identifying the coercive and extractive pattern of the tech giants, which echoes across not just publishing with AMP, but the house brands of ecommerce titans like Amazon, and even the on-demand and gig economy platforms like Uber. https://www.anildash.com/2017/03/01/tech_and_the_fake_market_tactic/
Tech and the Fake Market tactic - Anil Dash

A blog about making culture. Since 1999.

Show threadAnil DashMay 8, 2023
@davidpierce Back in 2014, before Facebook officially named its effort to capture publishing as "Instant Articles", I offered up a fairly pithy assessment: https://twitter.com/anildash/status/526731697174630400 "Attention publishers: If you obey Facebook here & make your mobile content live within their platform, you are DUMB." At the time, I was worried I was being too direct and it would hurt my career or offend my friends who were media execs. As it turns out, I wasn't direct enough.
anildash.com on Twitter

“Attention publishers: If you obey Facebook here & make your mobile content live within their platform, you are DUMB. http://t.co/h9VCVW1l5b”

Twitter
Show threadNihl L'AmasMay 8, 2023

@anildash @davidpierce @zachleat The only real victims here are us, the end consumers of degrading news content. Mobile news websites are massively awful and hostile to users. More than half the page covered with popups, slow loading pages filled with dozens of paste-in tracking scripts, and video players which lag or don't work at all.

And Google isn't above garbage mobile websites. They remove important features from mobile versions of news and image search, accounts, etc.

Show threadJoe CrawfordMay 9, 2023
@anildash @davidpierce @zachleat yeah, https://trib.tv/2017/03/31/amp-breaking-news/ was an excellent summary of all that was broken with AMP. published 2017. I thought of it as a cure worse than the disease of page bloat.
AMP: breaking news | Andrew Betts