> 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 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?