https://www.reddit.com/r/AmputatorBot/comments/c88zm3/why_did_i_build_amputatorbot/
created by Killed_Mufasa on 02/07/2019 at 13:05 UTC*
587 upvotes, 32 top-level comments (showing 25)
Update #3: **www.AmputatorBot.com is now live!**[2]
1: https://www.reddit.com/r/AmputatorBot/comments/ehrq3z/why_did_i_build_amputatorbot/
Update #2: AmputatorBot is now open source!
Update #1: You can now summon AmputatorBot!
AMP means “Accelerated Mobile Pages” and is a framework designed to make websites faster. In many cases, it does exactly that. However, it comes at a high price.
Google's AMP is a major threat to the Open Web. AMP was developed in secret alongside some major news organisations. By the time it was released, Google’s spec and infrastructure were basically settled and non-negotiable. And now Google is prioritizing AMP pages in their search results[3] and they only allow AMP pages to appear on their news carousel[4]. **This forces more and more organisations to implement AMP, thereby increasing the power of an already huge and monopolistic company**.
3: https://www.socpub.com/articles/chris-graham-why-google-amp-threat-open-web-15847?
4: https://adactio.com/journal/15726
And while Google is increasing their control over the internet, **you’re losing control over your privacy**. Google’s entire business model is about collecting as much personal data as possible. AMP is just another tool to do so. As described in Google’s Support article[5]:
5: https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/7220196
When you use the Google AMP Viewer, **Google and the publisher that made the AMP page may each collect data about you**.
To protect the Open Web and your privacy, u/AmputatorBot provides the direct link (bypassing Google).
​
And now, for the nerds among us, some rather technical stuff:
u/amputatorbot currently works automatically with a select number of subreddits: r/amputatorbot, r/audio, r/chrome, r/degoogle, r/economy, r/europe, r/europrivacy, r/firefox, r/gaming, r/programming, r/robotics, r/security, r/seo, r/tech, r/technology, r/test, r/upliftingnews and r/worldnews.
6: https://www.reddit.com/r/AmputatorBot/comments/cchly3/you_can_now_summon_amputatorbot/
Hit me up with questions or suggestions and I will try to respond ASAP!
AmputatorBot doesn't work in these subreddits: r/android, r/beer, r/bitcoin, r/books, r/conservative, r/CryptoCurrency, r/economics, r/ELI5, r/flying, r/Futurology, r/gadgets, r/google, r/history, r/korea, r/kitchener, r/movies, r/nottheonion, r/news, r/PoliticalDiscussion, r/politics, r/popheads, r/todayilearned, r/truecrimediscussion and r/worldpolitics for diverse reasons. Summoning the bot will not work there either.
7: https://www.AmputatorBot.com
I've made quick and free online version of AmputatorBot over at **www.AmputatorBot.com**[8]. It's really easy, just paste an AMP URL in the input box, click the button and that's all! See the announcement post here[9].
8: https://www.AmputatorBot.com
A quick demo of www.AmputatorBot.com
The 'Redirect AMP to HTML[10]' extension by Daniel Aleksandersen enables users to choose to opt-out of using Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) and choose to use the standard web instead. In other words, it does the same thing as u/AmputatorBot, but automatically and it works great. 10/10 would recommand!
10: https://www.daniel.priv.no/web-extensions/amp2html.html
Check out the changelog here[11]. Latest major update: 16/12/2019
11: https://www.reddit.com/r/AmputatorBot/comments/ch9fxp/changelog_of_amputatorbot/
The bot works automatically in the subreddits mentioned above and manually using mentions.
**Opt back** **in:** Did you opt-out and regret it? Click here to opt back in.
AmputatorBot is a really important project for me and I want to spend as much time and resources into accomplishing it's goal: to make people aware of the dark side of AMP and to give people a choice. You can support the project in a couple of ways:
​
If you have some spare change laying around, you could make a small donation to keep the servers running. You can donate via PayPal by clicking on this link: https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=%5C_s-xclick&hosted%5C_button%5C_id=EU6ZFKTVT9VH2[13][14]. **It costs €8.26 per month to host the bot 24/7**. You can fill in any amount of money, but don't feel obligated to donate much, I'm just trying to cover the costs.
13: https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=%5C_s-xclick&hosted%5C_button%5C_id=EU6ZFKTVT9VH2
14: https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_s-xclick&hosted_button_id=EU6ZFKTVT9VH2
​
If you have some spare time laying around, please give me feedback! You can:
​
15: https://www.reddit.com/r/AmputatorBot/submit
16: https://github.com/KilledMufasa/AmputatorBot/issues
17: https://github.com/KilledMufasa/AmputatorBot/pull/new/master
18: https://www.reddit.com/message/compose?to=killed_mufasa
Have you spotted an AMP link in a submitted page or comment? Mention u/AmputatorBot in a reply and I'll do my best to share the direct source (just remember that this won't work on the non-working subreddits). More info about this feature can be found here[19].
19: https://www.reddit.com/r/AmputatorBot/comments/cchly3/you_can_now_summon_amputatorbot/
​
Thanks for the tremendous support you've given me and u/AmputatorBot <3
Comment by [deleted] at 04/07/2019 at 18:09 UTC
133 upvotes, 2 direct replies
Thank you, i hate google and i hate AMP and finally someone has built a de-AMP bot, thank you so very verry much
Comment by Killed_Mufasa at 10/07/2019 at 08:07 UTC*
1 upvotes, 1 direct replies
Originally said:
1: https://www.reddit.com/r/AmputatorBot/comments/ehrq3z/why_did_i_build_amputatorbot/
Good news everyone! AmputatorBot is now open source:[2]
AmputatorBot on GitHub[3]
I'm looking forward to your contributions!
2: https://www.reddit.com/r/AmputatorBot/comments/cb5vrk/amputatorbot_is_now_open_source
3: https://github.com/KilledMufasa/AmputatorBot
Comment by beansmeller at 26/09/2019 at 22:43 UTC
25 upvotes, 1 direct replies
Hey thanks for this! I hate amp. Even beyond the privacy issues, the amp version of most pages sucks.
Comment by knightsmarian at 26/07/2019 at 12:02 UTC
23 upvotes, 1 direct replies
You are a good person and I appreciate the work you put into this.
Comment by [deleted] at 25/10/2019 at 20:59 UTC*
20 upvotes, 1 direct replies
[deleted]
Comment by [deleted] at 18/08/2019 at 13:42 UTC
19 upvotes, 1 direct replies
[deleted]
Comment by Elocai at 14/10/2019 at 14:02 UTC
14 upvotes, 1 direct replies
good bot
Comment by ironflesh at 24/08/2019 at 22:37 UTC
13 upvotes, 1 direct replies
Thank you for informing me. From now on using plugins for browsers on all my systems to bypass AMP links.
No proprietary standards should ever infect our open web. Keep fighting people. Inform others and stay safe!
Comment by sparkling_uranium at 03/09/2019 at 02:02 UTC
9 upvotes, 2 direct replies
Is there any way to clear the AmputatorBot from a post that I made? Some bots let you comment something at them and they’ll delete their post. No offense against you since I’m sure you worked hard on it and are passionate about this issue but I find bots really annoying.
Comment by fichips at 03/09/2019 at 10:50 UTC
11 upvotes, 1 direct replies
Hey, this is a good bot, I just have one suggestion: Please remove the asterisks (**) from the URL or add a space. My Reddit app (Now for Reddit) thinks the ** at the end are part of the URL, so I have to manually edit the URL every time.
Comment by Hitman4Reddit47 at 29/08/2019 at 13:26 UTC
10 upvotes, 1 direct replies
Good bot
Comment by KallistiTMP at 29/11/2019 at 22:41 UTC*
8 upvotes, 1 direct replies
This is blatantly false in so many ways.
AMP is an open source standard. It's all out in the open.
Google doesn't prioritize AMP results, they prioritize fast results. AMP pages have much better load times. You can do the math.
AMP pages are based on static content, which not only makes them much faster to load, but far more secure to end users. They cannot contain malicious scripts, they cannot embed web workers, they cannot expose users to dependency attacks introduced by endless js dependency trees, etc.
The news carousel only shows AMP pages because the metadata and standard structure is necessary in order to be able to correctly parse news stories from thousands of news sites. A standard data structure to enable things like this was half the reason for developing AMP.
You can already prevent your site from being cached or even crawled with the robots.txt.
Google doesn't have a monopoly on caching AMP pages. You can build your own amp cache if you really want. Anyone can cache AMP sites.
I've yet to see a single well formed argument against AMP.
EDIT: Oh, almost forgot to mention, the privacy thing. AMP doesn't add any new ways to track users. It actually disables a bunch of old ways to track users because **there's no JavaScript**.
Comment by ultra-royalist at 31/07/2019 at 00:12 UTC
8 upvotes, 0 direct replies
Great initiative. Google has become far more creepy than Microsoft at its worst. Facebook too.
Comment by D49A1D852468799CAC08 at 17/08/2019 at 07:59 UTC
7 upvotes, 2 direct replies
Thank you very much!
I have already been using the Redirect AMP to HTML[1] extension for some time.
1: https://www.daniel.priv.no/web-extensions/amp2html.html
Comment by [deleted] at 02/09/2019 at 06:21 UTC*
6 upvotes, 2 direct replies
[deleted]
Comment by alphanovember at 01/12/2019 at 00:48 UTC
7 upvotes, 1 direct replies
This part is annoying, cringey, and hurts the seriousness of it:
Beep boop, I'm a bot
Comment by zellotron at 12/07/2019 at 08:40 UTC
6 upvotes, 1 direct replies
Is it possible to summon AmputatorBot in a subreddit not listed above? e.g. with /u/AmputatorBot
Comment by jumbochook at 25/10/2019 at 12:01 UTC
6 upvotes, 1 direct replies
Wow, this is amazing. Props to you for helping others keep their privacy
Comment by LifeUpInTheSky at 22/07/2019 at 22:02 UTC
5 upvotes, 2 direct replies
Hey /u/Killed_Mufasa , i like your bot but if i can recommend anything it would be to reduce the amount of text and size of ghe default comment template. I know a lot of bots that apear in the comments with a huge chunk of text which is distracting from the substance of post and unsightly. Your bot is a minor offender of this of course but it could still stand to havebits template reduced abit
Comment by femtoaggression at 15/08/2019 at 21:34 UTC
6 upvotes, 2 direct replies
I have tried this link and it isn’t AMP. Thanks!
Comment by sprouting_broccoli at 31/08/2019 at 10:46 UTC
4 upvotes, 1 direct replies
Hey, I saw your bot reply so I read the article about AMP and readd the comments on it by the author. It's worth mentioning that the author explains in the comment section that it's not a power grab, just Google wanting a good UX. Might be worth updating some of the more confrontational wording in light of this (that did happen a year ago though).
Comment by OtherAMPBot at 28/07/2019 at 09:07 UTC
5 upvotes, 1 direct replies
Beep boop. I'm an almost identical bot, a few months older than you. (Open Source too[1])
1: https://github.com/mlda065/paragraphiser_bot_aws/tree/amp
What is the difference between you and me? (Aside from your wittier name.)
What is the best way for us to coordinate to avoid double commenting[2]?
(As far as I can tell, `praw` provides no efficient interface for detecting whether a particular user commented at a root level on a particular post. I have to loop through the full comment forest top layer, which can take a while and causes me timeout and throttling issues.)
Comment by MSHDigit at 29/07/2019 at 23:49 UTC
4 upvotes, 1 direct replies
Thank you. Just discovered this when the bot responded to a comment I just made. I cited an article from the Guardian and went through the Guardian homepage to search the article within their website and it still redirected me to a google search, forcing me to use AMP (I'm not tech-savvy in this sense). This seems very deliberate.
Comment by Perm-suspended at 19/10/2019 at 01:09 UTC
3 upvotes, 1 direct replies
For anyone else who wishes to opt out without clicking the link (it asked for my Reddit credentials). You can message the bot with "opt me out of amputatorbot" as the subject line.
Comment by IneptlySocial at 23/10/2019 at 07:40 UTC
4 upvotes, 1 direct replies
Can anyone recommend any good browsers to use on android? After learning about this I don't want to partake in google chrome, especially after finding out they only allow AMP links under the news tab...
