Alex Kras, a software engineer, writes about web development, Git, Google AMP, interviews, and getting posts onto Hacker News.
HN links him for his critical posts on Google AMP and his guide to the HN front page, which one commenter calls not-easy advice.
The difference between "stealing traffic" and the "Google Search Mobile is a captive newsreader" is nuanced.
It's surprising and upsetting to people when they find out that in Google Search Mobile, their attempt to navigate to an AMP-lightning-marked search result doesn't result in a navigation to the target site, while an attempt to navigate to a non-AMP search result does go to the target site, as one would damn well expect. It's upsetting, because the designers of Google Search Mobile have gone through great lengths to hide the fact that the navigation didn't occur, and have adopted UI elements that intentionally try to mimic familiar navigation cues from browsers, rather than playing up the fact that they're viewing proxied content in a wrapping frame.
On the other hand, the 'stealing traffic' critique is memetic from a catchy title by a much-revised blog post, and seems to genuinely be upset that bytes that would ordinarily be transferred between the end user and the article's originating host stop short of of the distant origin [1], and get served from a Google-owned CDN instead. It's a technically unsound mishmash of complaints, most probably deriving from the aforementioned behavior of the Google Search Mobile page, but imbued with the subtext that Google is exploiting publishers by providing a CDN. That's absurd. Maybe Google's exploiting publishers with its captive newsreader, but not by providing a CDN.
[1]…
If you look at the AMP docs (https://www.ampproject.org/docs/guides/discovery), publishers use <link> tags to point to the AMP page. For the original article, the AMP version lives at https://www.alexkras.com/google-may-be-stealing-your-mobile-traffic/amp/ but the URL could follow whatever scheme the publisher wants.
Since Google search is most likely discovering the AMP page via the <link rel="amphtml"> tag, they really should just use that URL. The Google servers do add a couple minor things beyond being a distributed cache though. First, there's swipe navigation to other articles if the link was located in the top carousel in search results. Second, if you are on a laptop, the Google servers will redirect you to the full version rather than use the AMP cache.
One of the comments in Alex Kras's linked page asks "Can’t you make a direct link to your site’s page auto generated on your article templates?" [0] which seems a very reasonable, though perhaps not ideal, solution that doesn't require Google to make AMP optional, something I think Google is very unlikely to do.
[0] https://www.alexkras.com/please-make-google-amp-optional/#comment-55683
AMP, as pushed by Google, is essentially Google re-hosting a pared-down, mobile-friendly version of your site.
Alex Kras has two blog posts that got a lot of traction early on that highlighted some issues with this trend [1] [2].
[1] https://www.alexkras.com/google-may-be-stealing-your-mobile-traffic/
[2] https://www.alexkras.com/please-make-google-amp-optional/
It's not new news, it looks like a rehashed version of this article I found
https://www.alexkras.com/do-not-share-your-google-photos/
Reading that one closer I found
https://www.theverge.com/2015/6/23/8830977/google-photos-security-public-url-privacy-protected
Which is from 2015.
Bad URL. Link to the post https://www.alexkras.com/front-page-of-hacker-news-in-5-easy-steps/
It's not bad advice, but most steps are not so easy. Perhaps I'd recommend not to repost too much. In some cases it goes out of control and the mods ban the user and site.