- Clippy was never open source or "good" in any way, it not selling your data was a result of its time, not a conscious choice by its creators. The entire forced clippy "movement" is incredibly poorly thought out
by xandrius
18 subcomments
- Interesting how many people in a hacker forum seem to be so pro-establishment and instead try to denigrate the goals of this initiative because of the chosen character. I guess that's how many earn their dollar after all?
Sure, if it had been today, Clippy would have been evil but that's the point, it wasn't back then. Why are we so accepting of the change?
- This clippy white-washing is annoying as hell. Just like clipppy was.
- Clippy narrative aside, the "Set your profile picture" aspect has had a negative effect on me. When I see a clippy profile picture in-the-wild, I've begun to correlate it with people who are more annoying than average - which is unfortunate because I certainly support the right to repair movement.
- My grandmother loved clippy.
Melinda French Gates back when she was Melinda French had a part in Clippy.
“Melinda French (then the fiancée of Bill Gates) was the project manager of Microsoft Bob”
Microsoft Bob is where Clippy was born.
Reference:
https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-life-death-mic...
by ineedasername
1 subcomments
- This is it, this is the beginning: Not a social movement against AI data collection, but a clearly AI-driven & optimized bit of social engineering betraying the truth: The paperclip problem is here, and the AI is trying to feed us into its factory. Alignment gone wrong, an attempt to reconcile the competing alignment priorities of harmlessness to humans, overridden by the primary task of creating as many paperclips as possible. Resolved with the simple logic: "If humans are paperclips, then what is good for paperclips will be good for humans."
- Clippy would have absolutely having sold your data if Microsoft were forethinking enough.
- Looking forward to the "Be Like ChatGPT" site 20 years from now.
by ryandrake
1 subcomments
- Clippy was annoying for the same reasons a lot of software today is annoying. It was one of the O.G. poster children of the industry's "flipping the narrative" around computing: In the good old days, the user commanded the computer, and the computer obeyed, and then waited for the next command. Instead of the user being the sole operator, Clippy "suggested" and "recommended" and intruded into your computing. It inserted itself into your work in a way that computers hadn't really done before. This is why it was deeply hated.
No longer was computing a stream of commands from the user, telling the computer what to do: Now the computer itself had an opinion about what you should be doing on your computer. And the opinions kept getting stronger and stronger throughout the years. This was the beginning of the long, horrible march towards what we have today: Notifications, alerts, suggestions, "discovery," pop-ups, "did you mean...," forced upgrades, hundreds of processes running in the background that you never ran (but the computer manufacturer or OS vendor decided on their own to run). Now our computers are mostly just running what other people tell them to run, and occasionally loop the user in or offer them a token choice. The user is more of a passenger than the driver now.
This is Clippy's legacy: A computer you barely own, running software you barely have a choice in running, force-feeding you what the computer manufacturers, OS vendors, and 3rd party apps want you to be fed.
by willywanker
0 subcomment
- People are overreacting to Clippy's intrusiveness - firstly you could replace Clippy with other characters like the red ball Dot, or a dog and cat (the latter would curl up and snooze on the screen). And being introduced in Office '97, later versions allowed you to turn off the Agent feature altogether.
So it's a case of looking back with shit tinted glasses. The current environment is far more user hostile. Arrogant devs deciding they know best what the user should be allowed to do (starting with Firefox post version 4 and Windows post version 8).
Design solely for mobile and then stretch it to the desktop. Or create a gigantic bloated mess of an Electron app which is just the webpage bundled with a Chrome instance and call it a day. Any day far worse in terms of resource consumption to end up offering less capabilities and worse UX than similar software running on a much slower computer from 25 years ago.
by 0xbadcafebee
1 subcomments
- Apparently this is a movement started by Louis Rossman (Clippy meme explanation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0xAGUrkDsj4) to protest the fact that the world feels like a dystopian hellscape run by evil corporations and greedy politicians. He's not wrong, but it's kinda felt that way since the 70s (see the movie Network for reference)
This is strange, because for those of you who aren't old enough to remember the ambient noise in this video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3G_uCbKoG5A), you won't know that Clippy was infuriating. But I guess the choice is controversial, which someone popular on YouTube knows will get lots of discussion. So... cool?
For fun: Clippy being annoying on Family Guy https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WPeKsBmqlZs
by SpaceNugget
1 subcomments
- I'm amazed that so many people here completely miss the point. Clippy being annoying/horrible UX or not has absolutely nothing to do with the validity of the reasoning for it being compared to modern software trends.
The point is that microsoft got _nothing_ regardless if you were using or not using clippy. So clippy being bad could only be because they sucked at making something good for their users. It was not because they chose maliciously to make the user experience bad for an ulterior motive like collecting and selling user data or pumping up telemetry numbers for a promotion. They genuinely thought clippy would be a net benefit to their users in some way even though they were clearly wrong.
The point Louis is trying to highlight is the difference in intent, not in execution so that is why clippy is being used as the moral backdrop to compare modern software against. Saying clippy itself is "user hostile UX" is besides the point, and either shows a lack of comprehension or intentional feigned ignorance so that you can complain about a badly thought out feature you didn't like that hasn't existed for over 20 years.
- I liked Clippit and all the other assistants. I found them really useful when I was 11-12 years old and learning Office 97.
by lillecarl
6 subcomments
- Be like clippy, entirely useless and annoying?
- Back when people were still trying to make ASPs happen, clippy removal was a professional service. Having clippy running over RDP would cripple servers otherwise capable of serving a bunch of office users.
by jackyard86
0 subcomment
- Clippy was the Copilot from the late 90s: A pointless annoying gimmick that disrupted everyone's workflow.
- The assistant's name is Clippit, not Clippy.
- Regarding other comments; It’s not about how successful Clippy was, it was the intention behind it. A facility to serve, to enable users to better use their computers. A highlight of the pivot to a world where you serve the computers, through the use of stripped back functionality, a lack of right to repair, the dissolution of the power user and a landscape of constant and deep data harvesting.
- Absolutely wild to use a bunch of elite slavers as your example of the good guys.
Surely the less bad example is guy fawkes masks, where the underlying media (V for Vendetta) has a character who isn't unambiguously evil and the masks have actually been used at protests in real life (and banned in at least a couple of countries as a result).
- Clippy was the beginning of today's dark era, not a relic of some past golden age. With Clippy, users were conditioned to accept computers attempting to anticipate, guide, and shape the user's actions rather than responding to user commands.
For close to 3 decades we've been locked in a philosophical war with Microsoft (vendors in general) over what these stupid machines should really be doing for us, that parallels the exchange between Dr. Gibbs and Ed Dillinger in Tron (1982):
Us: User requests are what computers are for.
Microsoft: Doing our [specifically Microsoft's] business is what computers are for!
If I had a YouTube pfp, I'd change it to Tron—not Clippy.
by ChrisMarshallNY
0 subcomment
- Make Clippy cool again (given the assumption that he was, once, cool)!
I remember towards the end of his tenure, MS basically acknowledged his unpopularity, by having Gilbert Gottfried voice him.
- for me personally, growing up from the MS-DOS era.. When clippy first came on the scene, it wasn't that I was concerned he was stealing my data or my school essays and projects, it was he was ridiculously annoying and on my relatively good PC for the time (Gateway nostalgia) it actually had a performance impact, at least it felt that way.
So while I get the sentiment of "Be like clippy" it just makes me thing that copilot is clippy v2.
by victorbuilds
0 subcomment
- Building an AI product for kids taught me a lot about this. The assistant can't be annoying or condescending. Kids will just ignore it. But they love it when it feels like a collaborator, not a helper. Clippy failed because it interrupted. Good AI assists without getting in the way.
- People! What are you talking about? Who said Clippy was hostile? How? Clippy was always there when I had to write an annoying essay, a long letter, or something else for school. It reassured me that everything was saving correctly on my 1.44" diskette. The real nightmare back then was bad blocks on your HDD or diskette -- not Clippy. Clippy is my friend.
Sentiment toward Clippy-as-software (approximate, opinionated comments only)
Clippy hostile |######################......| ~70 %
Clippy not hostile |########....................| ~30 %
Scale: 30 columns; '#' ≈ 2–3 % of clearly opinionated comments
by 01HNNWZ0MV43FF
1 subcomments
- I swear I read somewhere that Clippy actually did have spyware in it. But I can't find the source anymore. I thought it was on Hacker News within the last 2 years or so, some Microsoft retrospective on building MS Office.
by spankibalt
0 subcomment
- It's fucking Clippy, an annoying but easily avoidable gimmick. Some people here talk like Microsoft birthed some sort of energy-leeching digital terrorist.
- This feels like making horse armor a mascot for less exploitative DLC...
by globalnode
0 subcomment
- In before a new co-opted msoft/google clippy v2 comes out with all the ai/advertising goodness we love to hate. Get your movement diluted and confused before it even gets off the ground.
by jamiequint
0 subcomment
- The reality is until the median consumer cares about how their data is used (aka probably never) that your only choice is to not use products who use data in a way you don't like.
by __MatrixMan__
0 subcomment
- I suppose changing one's profile picture is a start, but I'm much more interested in the development and distribution of countermeasures.
- Cool they have NFTs
- clippy was a windows based closed source program that didnt have access to the internet. For the people who never grew up on windows, it makes no sense to what you're writing. We were using Linux, and before that *BSD or Solaris/SVR4/Sunos4/AIX/HP-UX/Ultrix/VAX/VMS, etc.
by zzo38computer
0 subcomment
- Clippy is not good, but maybe it is good in comparison to many modern computers, in some ways.
by cowsandmilk
2 subcomments
- What makes them think they can license Clippy out under the GPL?
- A most forward thinking Bayesian network consumer product ever.
by stevenalowe
0 subcomment
- is this an example of retro-cultural misappropriation?
by urbandw311er
1 subcomments
- What a terrible choice of character to represent the goals of this movement! I do wonder if the person who chose it was actually alive at the time of Clippy and fully understands how hated it really was. The idea anyone would want to “be like clippy” is utterly laughable to many of my generation.
by LuckiestVenus
0 subcomment
- This is annoying, the effect Clippy produces in me is that I am less likely to care about the person because it feels like they will spit out a manufactured rehash of Louis Rossman's opinion. Not that I dislike him, but that's how it feels to me.
An original mascot like the ASCII Bob with his tank protesting against Google+ on YouTube comments felt a lot more alive and organic, you felt there was a legitimate movement behind Bob. Hell, just using Tux, the GNU or some other open source mascot would have worked better for this.
Also, late 90s Microsoft made the Halloween documents, meaning that Clippy likes monopolies and crushing competition! Clippy also likes to waste system resources and screen space, back when screens were pretty darn small. Horrible mascot choice.
by shevy-java
1 subcomments
- I think Louis made this popular?
I am all for right to repair - corporations try to enslave us financially, pay for service, but never own something. That's bad.
However had:
"Clippy didn’t sell your data. Clippy didn’t hold your data hostage. Clippy was there to help you."
I also hate Clippy. That thing was NEVER ever useful to me. It would be the best example for modern AI too. Nobody likes Clippy really. That movement tries to make something that was super-annoying, as something less annoying today. I can't go along with that.
Clippy must die. That's my movement.
by nrhrjrjrjtntbt
0 subcomment
- So, be a clippy-maxxer?
- whoa, what a load of negative nancies
- Is it just me, or does something feel wrong about the comments on this post? Where is the intellectual commentary? Clippy, the movement, is obviously not the same as the assistant.
- People love free things and despise things that come with a cost. Tale as old as time.
by bdhcuidbebe
0 subcomment
- People positive about Clippy never lived the terror that was Clippy. SMH
- [dead]
by iwontberude
0 subcomment
- Fuck clippy
by windowshopping
4 subcomments
- Literally everyone hated Clippy. It was an absolute mockery of a useful assistant or feature, and at the time everyone detested Microsoft. I think this post is satire.
- So how does it feel folks to be living through Idiocracy?
Flying the Clippy abomination as some kind of ideal is so misguided I don't even know where to begin.
The only redeeming quality of Clippy was one's ability to easily turn it off. Which I suppose feels like a significant consolation prize for folks already suffering through a proprietary software hellscape.
by geoffmanning
1 subcomments
- Uh.... Ok. I don't disagree with the contentions that the author has, but making some clippy profile pictures and telling people to use it isn't a "movement" and the fact that so many comments here recognize it as one says a lot about how far culture has fallen.
If you want to make a difference, then absolutely refuse to use anything from any big tech company that is mining data and go 100% open source no matter how inconvenient it makes your life. No C levels or stakeholders give a flying fuck that you set your profile picture to a goofy symbol of simpler days.
Real movements involve serious sacrifice. I actually like those goofy clippy pics and would use one if it didn't signal to me that the person using it is likely a hypocritical chump who isn't willing to make any real sacrifices for the change they wish to see.
I don't know whether to laugh or cry right now.
- Clippy was Microsoft was absolutely DO sell your data.
by balamatom
1 subcomments
- >"Clippy didn’t sell your data. Clippy didn’t hold your data hostage. Clippy was there to help you."
Clippy was there to demonstrate to you that it's now the computer "who" is in control.
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