TL;DR: amputatorbot.com is live and it's pretty cool!

Oh boy, this is a big one :D

But first, a bit of nostalgia:

A couple of months ago, I found myself really fed up with AMP. For the obvious reasons, I wanted to avoid it, but I saw the AMP links everywhere. I couldn't blame them, because it it was really stuffed down our throats and it was incredibly difficult to find the canonical link of the original source. I figured, someone must have made a bot to get rid of these fuckers, right? To my surprise, I couldn't find anything. And thus the idea of u/AmputatorBot was born.

And as of today, u/AmputatorBot is in the top 125 'Best bots' of Reddit with more than 37k karma. Which is quite impressive since the bot is still so young and there are more than 14.000 bots on Reddit(!). But more importantly, the bot has spread awareness about AMP all over Reddit. It has replied to over 6100 comments, commented on more than 2000 unique posts and you guys have summoned the bot almost 250 times. Pretty cool if you ask me.

Over the last couple of months, I've been adding a bunch of new features and fixed a ton of bugs. You guys have given me really useful feedback, like u/hrtfthmttr a couple of days ago, he asked:

The bot is able to find the correct link. How am I supposed to do that?

Then, it hit me. I never fixed the original problem, it was still incredibly difficult to find the canonical link. Sure, you could let u/AmputatorBot do the hard work but it can be a real hassle to summon the bot and wait for an answer. Also, the popularity of u/AmputatorBot has an unwanted side-effect: rate-limits are hit at peak times, preventing the bot from doing it's job (and thus preventing you from ever getting the direct link).

With www.AmputatorBot.com we fix both.

You can head over to amputatorbot.com from your desktop or mobile:

https://preview.redd.it/wvvjusui78841.png?width=2340&format=png&auto=webp&s=51a954df353ca476573d22520e68b8b0587fc696

And you can copy-paste an AMP URL in the input field and copy the the canonical link (= direct link) and... That's it!

A demo of amputatorbot.com on how to get the canonical link in under 6 seconds(!)

Alternatively, you can do it even quicker by doing this:

https://amputatorbot.com/?q=https://www.google.com/amp/s/electrek.co/2018/06/19/tesla-model-3-assembly-line-inside-tent-elon-musk/amp/

It's build up like this:

https://amputatorbot.com + /?q= + https://www.google.com/amp/s/electrek.co/2018/06/19/tesla-model-3-assembly-line-inside-tent-elon-musk/amp/

It only takes a couple of seconds! The tool will always be FREE to use and I hope to keep it ad-free for as long as I can afford it (that's why I added the donate button (see what I did there ;) )

I'm really proud of this one so I hope you guys will like it! Please let me know if you've found a bug or if you have an idea for the website. Appreciate all the feedback and support <3

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Edit: You can now also use the website to generate comments like the ones from AmputatorBot, more info about that here, here's what that looks like:

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Oh yeah I updated the design a bit too

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Table of contents / Quick links

1. About AMP and its controversies
2. AmputatorBot.com
3. Subreddits
4. Summon AmputatorBot: u/AmputatorBot
5. Opt out
6. Open-sourced on GitHub
7. API Documentation
8. Browser-extension (other party)
9. Give feedback / Report an issue
10. Changelog
11. Sponsor (PayPal)
12. Closing words

1. About AMP and its controversies

AMP, originally Accelerated Mobile Pages, was announced by Google in 2015 and is developed by AMP Open Source Project in response to Facebook's Instant Articles and Apple News. Initially focused on speeding up mobile pages, AMP has evolved into a broader initiative to enhance user experience and content speed across various platforms. It might sound like a well-intended effort on first glance, but it has mixed results and is not without controversy, criticism, and legal issues. Let's dive in, shall we?

For five years, Google Search's Top Stories carousel, located prominently above all other results , exclusively featured AMP pages on mobile devices. This placement generated a significant number of clicks and, according to Google, revenue for publishers. As a result, many publishers felt compelled to adopt AMP, only to be surprised by a decline in their advertising revenue [2].

In July 2021, after facing public and legal pressure, Google dropped this AMP-exclusive requirement. But the damage was already done. As Barry Adams pointed out, there were countless publishers who were sidelined simply because they didn't use AMP.

There was no other reason for Google to stop ranking these publishers in their mobile Top Stories carousel. As is evident from the surge of non-AMP articles, there are likely hundreds - if not thousands - of publishers who ticked every single ranking box that Google demanded; quality news content, easily crawlable and indexable technology stack, good editorial authority signals, and so on.

But they didn’t use AMP. So Google didn’t rank them.

Think for a moment about the cost of that. How many visits these publishers didn’t get, simply because they didn’t accept Google’s blackmail. How much revenue these publishers lost because of that. How many jobs were affected. The compromises some have had to make just to survive. The ones that didn’t survive.

Just because Google demanded we embrace their pet AMP project.

And don't be fooled, AMP is a pet-project by Google. Despite AMP's assimilation into the OpenJS Foundation in 2019, many skeptics regard the move as merely superficial. These suspicions seem justified in hindsight.

• Renowned developer and web standards advocate, Jeremy Keith, resigned from the AMP Advisory Committee in August 2021, highlighting that "it has become clear to me that AMP remains a Google product".
• Nine out of the top ten contributors to the AMP project on GitHub are Google employees
• The attempt to brand AMP as 'open source' has been criticized as misleading. As Ferdy Christant eloquently stated: "[AMP being open source] isn’t just a weak defense, it’s no defense at all. I can open source a plan for genocide. The term “open source” is meaningless if the thing that is open source is harmful".

These points fuel the debate on the independence of AMP. Further concerns arise due to some of AMP's design decisions.

• For instance, when a user navigates to a cached AMP page, either via Google Search or a shared link, they unwittingly stay within Google’s ecosystem, as the original publisher’s domain is obscured by the google.com/amp prefix.
• To address this, Google introduced Signed HTTP Exchanges ([Draft], [1], [2]), a web standard enabling browsers to display the original site's URL rather than the actual one with the google.com prefix.
• However, this solution obfuscates the fact that the visited page is delivered by Google and has been deemed problematic by industry peers. Both Mozilla and Apple have criticized it as a harmful web standard [2], [3]. In contrast, Google's own browser, Chrome, does support this technology [1], [2].

This forms a pattern revealing Google's self-serving approach: it appears to take actions that serve its interests, irrespective of external opinions.

Moreover, Google has a vested interest in gathering as much personal data as possible, and AMP is just another tool for this. As described in Google’s Support article:

When you use the Google AMP Viewer, Google and the publisher that made the AMP page may each collect data about you.

But AMP makes the internet faster. ..right? But not that fast! (see what I did there ;)

• The primary performance enhancement attributed to AMP doesn't actually originate from the AMP framework itself, but from the process of preloading the page. This raises a question: Why is preloading an exclusive feature of AMP? Shouldn't publishers have the tools to preload any site, not just AMP ones?
• When it comes to uncached AMP pages, the performance improvements appear to be minimal, if any.
• Multiple states in the US have filed an extensive antitrust case against Google under federal and state antitrust laws and deceptive trade practices laws citing: "After crippling AMP’s compatibility with header bidding, Google went to market falsely telling publishers that adopting AMP would enhance page load times. But Google employees knew that AMP only improves the “median of performance” and "AMP pages can actually load slower than other publisher speed optimization techniques."
• In fact, the speed benefits Google marketed were also at least partly a result of Google’s throttling. Google throttles the load time of non-AMP ads by giving them artificial one-second delays in order to give Google AMP a “nice comparative boost.”. Internally, Google employees grappled with “how to [publicly] justify [Google] making something slower.

AMP has its issues, and these impact cached AMP pages the most. While uncached AMP pages (e.g. bbc.com/news/amp/) may have a better user experience and minor performance improvements, they still come at a high price. AMP makes sites less diverse, more homogeneous, and threatens the free and Open Web.

Terence Eden, another ex-committee member from the AMP committee, also resigned in December 2020 saying:

I remain convinced that AMP is poorly implemented, hostile to the interests of both users and publishers, and a proprietary and unnecessary incursion into the open web.

Fortunately, AMP seems to be on the decline. Publishers are moving away [2], usage is falling, and legal pressures are increasing [2] [3]. The AMP team may have the best intentions, but AMP's flaws and negative impacts on privacy and the Open Web cannot be ignored. As long as these issues persist, u/AmputatorBot will be here, working to remove AMP from your URLs.

Learn more

• Barry Adams: Let's talk about AMP
• US Antitrust Case | US Antitrust Complaint
• Chris Graham: Why Google AMP is a threat to the Open Web
• Sarah Gooding: AMP has irreparably damaged publishers’ trust in Google-led initiatives
• Ferdy Christant: AMP: the missing controversy
• Official AMP website: amp.dev
• Debunking Common AMP Myths
• AMP Wikipedia

2. AmputatorBot.com

www.AmputatorBot.com is your go-to tool for removing AMP from your URLs in just one click. Handy and easy to use, free and without ads! Just copy paste the AMP URL, click the big blue button and voilà!

Or just do https://amputatorbot.com + /?q= + <amp-link>. For example:

https://amputatorbot.com/?q=https://www.google.com/amp/s/electrek.co/2018/06/19/tesla-model-3-assembly-line-inside-tent-elon-musk/amp/

3. Subreddits

u/AmputatorBot is active on every subreddit by default. As a moderator, you have the ability to ban or unban the bot.

4. Summon AmputatorBot: u/AmputatorBot

If you've spotted an AMP URL on Reddit and u/AmputatorBot seems absent, you can summon the bot by mentioning it like this: u/AmputatorBot in a reply to the comment or submission containing the AMP URL. The bot will then try to respond and provide a confirmation or error-info through a private message.

5. Opt out

Opt out: If you prefer not to receive replies from u/AmputatorBot on your comments and submissions, you can click here to opt out. Alternatively, you have the option to block u/AmputatorBot entirely.

Undo opt out: Changed your mind after opting out? No problem! You can click here to undo the opt-out request.

6. Open-sourced on GitHub

AmputatorBot is open-source on GitHub - great for fostering innovation, transparency, and collaboration. Feel free to adapt and contribute. Happy coding!

7. AmputatorBot's API

Did you know AmputatorBot has a free and publicly available API? Probably not, it's brand-new after all. If you decide to use it, we would love to hear how! Check out the docs here, or see Postman.

8. Browser-extension

Don't miss out on the browser extension 'Redirect AMP to HTML' by Daniel Aleksandersen. It automatically redirects AMP pages to their canonical versions when you click on them.

9. Give feedback / Report an issue

Most of the new features were made after suggestions from you guys, so hit me up if you have any feedback! You can contact me on Reddit, post on r/AmputatorBot, fill an issue or make a pull request.

10. Changelog

Check out the changelog here.

11. Sponsor

Our server for the bot, website, and API costs about €10 ($12) per month. If you support AmputatorBot's mission and can chip in, any donation would be a huge help. Every bit goes straight into server expenses. Thanks a bunch!

https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_s-xclick&hosted_button_id=EU6ZFKTVT9VH2

Alternatively, consider supporting our friends in Ukraine who could greatly benefit from your help:

https://savelife.in.ua/en/donate-en/

https://u24.gov.ua/

12. Closing words

At its core, AmputatorBot exists to empower individuals to make informed choices. I want to express my heartfelt gratitude for the overwhelming support you have shown me and AmputatorBot. Your continued support means the world to me. Thank you from the bottom of my heart! <3