The Drawbacks of AmebaOwnd as a platform

So after using and exploring AmebaOwnd now for over two years (Although I’ve only recently started using it more religiously) I’ve got a pretty good idea of the good and the bad side of choosing AmebaOwnd for a platform, so this post is going to be about the negative aspects of choosing AmebaOwnd as a platform. I will update this as I come across new things.

These are just personal opinions to be honest and it depends on how you view the drawbacks. Limitations may be a make or break for some, others will be fine with certain limitations and consider it a trade off for a faster loading website.

You can’t change the slugs of posts at all, and pages you can only change the end slug, but there’s still a random number in front of your page. This makes for a bitch in Google Analytics, and is of zero benefit to SEO.

While this was the case prior to a recent update, AmebaOwnd continuously makes improvements including recent updates to SSL, enabling you to now serve custom domains over SSL using free certificates from LetsEncrypt.

This ones kinda weird but instead of your AMP pages just being a /amp on the end of your URL they are actually found on amp.amebaownd.com/posts/yourpostnumber

I don’t know why this is either but even with premium subscription to remove the branding on your regular static URL, they still keep branding on the footer of your amp pages.

Ameba apparently practices zero moderation on content posted to blogs. There is a a feature to report blogs or users so you’ll don’t see as many spam bot sites like this:

Which I mean can be a good or bad thing, undermoderation vs overmoderation. Facebook will moderate your posts like all the time, but Ameba like I’ve never ever heard a thing. But all those spam blogs persist and especially in English.

The comments widget on AmebaOwnd is seriously garbage. You can’t just freely post on a post here, if you go to enter a response, it automatically prompts you to install AmebaOwnd. Seriously who the hell is going to download a full app and sign up for a service just to comment on a website post? They’ll be gone as soon as the prompt comes up.  It also doesn’t enable you to comment via another social network like Facebook or Twitter etc. 

What this translates into is your website or blog having severely limited interaction outside of Japan and AmebaOwnd users. And interaction amongst users on your platform reduces your bounce rate and keeps users on your website for a longer amount of time. 

AmebaOwnd in this sense is pretty flawed and there missing out on a lot by making poor choices like this. 

Ameba really took the social aspect out of AmebaOwnd really. In the sense that if your browsing on the web and see a website you like that happens to be a AmebaOwnd website, and you click on the users Add button, you’ll be asked to login again. Which is somewhat normal yes, but If it were Facebook or another social network you’d be able to click to add a user and then have that link open the app on your device and add the users or perform whatever function your doing from web to mobile app. 

So Ameba omitting comments and their lack of organization and interactivity between web and mobile app is actually quite frustrating and severely limits the amount of users who will Interac with your website.

Seriously? So you are stoked that instant articles are a breeze setup (Well. You were a year ago when they were even relevant and not spam filled junk full of fake news) and then you find out half the code is wrong and all that displays is your headers and your images, so unless you manually edit in the <p> tags in correct places then you have a awkwardly spaced photo album.

You’re actually so much more limited in this case because unless your using iFrames, your limited to the provided JavaScript with AmebaOwnd.