- Microsoft used to have an app called Office Lens. It helped color correct and keystone adjust documents scanned with a phone camera. They pushed an update that gutted the app and said this app has been replaced by OneDrive. After installing OneDrive and dodging multiple dark pattern storage upsells, I discovered the OneDrive app doesn’t have any of the document scanning tools. I’m sure someone got a bonus for increasing OneDrive installs though.
- I got caught out by exactly this, and I'm not exactly tech illiterate. what made it even more annoying is by the time I'd realised what had happened, it was practically impossible to get the files back out of OneDrive (since I decided that this was enough Windows for me, and went back to Linux), since the webui does NOT handle downloading lots of small files well, and you just end up getting a partially complete zip file. I gave up in the end as nothing in there was particularly important. This is an incredibly annoying default.
- What's also irritating is that onedrive will use some kind of 'smart' caching system to delete the local copy of a file. Which is all fine and dandy until you need said file when you don't have an internet connection. Explaining this to users is very difficult, they just know that something broke and usually when it was very important.
(OK, what's even more stupid is IT departments who don't understand that onedrive has any problems at all, and insist on it and refuse to set up an actual backup system for user devices because 'onedrive will back everything up')
- From perusing reddit, I see some Windows users tempted to consider Linux, often because of Windows 11. But then, many of them won't move because: it doesn't work just like Windows; there is some Windows application they must have, or maybe they just don't want to learn the alternatives. Or they use word/excel/powerpoint and have to interact with others who do also.
The brainwashing, high tolerance for pain and misery (and expense!), and lock-in makes it close to impossible for ordinary computer users to escape.
- Not just storage expense. Recently I work extensively for a very large financial institute. They provide me with Windows terminal to work on the project. I initially expected to myself to work on a very institutional security constrained environment. Instead, the workspace keep popping up with annoying msn Ads inadvertently, out of any context. The default browser, Edge, was default to msn, which is full of more distracting Ads. They trick corporate users to be their Ads viewers using their trustworthy image in enterprise IT. No idea why they think that revenue would worth the downsides.
- So I never saw the 2020 series Space Force. But this clip[0] about Windows updates just happened into one of my feeds today and I was physically bowled over laughing. I must have watched it a half dozen times in rapid succession.
I suspect I'm just one of today's lucky 10,000 and everyone else here is already in on the joke, but I can't not share.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k899IiwP-iw
by liendolucas
5 subcomments
- From the WinUtil screenshots presented in the article I'm absolutely shocked about all the things that you presumably want to turn off or delete to have a "clean" Windows (to some extent if that's possible at all). It's also ridiculous that you need an external tool to easily disable/remove/uninstall every single thing you don't want .
I haven't used Windows since many many years ago and the few times I sit down to interact with someone else's computer I suffer so much that after a few seconds I simply give up, I can't stand anything about it.
If someone were to use Windows, besides WinUtil, are there a set of recommended open source scripts to clean up all the shit out of a fresh Windows installation?
Just to be aware in case of emergency or extreme need...
by rng-concern
0 subcomment
- My wife ran into something similar to this. Microsoft changed the bucket that email attachments went into for quota purposes. She had a lot of emails with pictures attached, so was immediately above the new quota, and she stopped receiving emails.
This definitely puts a fire under one, as she had to quickly under pressure (as each day was missed emails), figure out which emails to keep/backup.
We signed her up for a new gmail immediately.
The experience was stressful. Very poor.
by joshstrange
3 subcomments
- I'm shocked that I can't find a single top-level comment that understands that the general public does not back up their data. We can call OneDrive a dark pattern or saving customer's butts from themselves. If it wasn't the default: "What do you mean all my pictures are gone forever because I never turned on OneDrive?".
I have no love for Microsoft but I'm having a really hard time seeing how it isn't the smart default to backup the user's files/photos to the cloud. Sure, if you are here on HN then maybe you have NextCloud, Immich, Dropbox, Google Drive/Photos, etc, that you make sure to backup your pictures to. I can assure you the general public does no such thing unless it's the default in the OS.
Try consoling a few people about how the pictures or files they hold dear are gone forever and then come back and talk about this "dark pattern".
This blog post is somehow a success story? No, it's a ticking time bomb. Great, you free'd up space for email at the expense of un-protecting all his pictures/files. That's not a win.
The author gets _so close_ to the point but manages to miss it completely:
> but I suspect that he deleted files (including family photos) for which he had no other backup.
> I’m a computer nerd, and if you are reading this you probably are as well. We can change that setting ourselves without much thought, and we probably have backups of our important data in case recovery is necessary.
But they couldn't make 1 more tiny hop to "my neighbor will not manage backups and so these files are now at risk".
by asdefghyk
1 subcomments
- I'm surprised their has not been a class action here, about how ( unskilled , mainly ) people are tricked? / Forced ? into using cloud storage.
- When you use your highly restricted/infosec encrusted enterprise Windows laptop and still see the Xbox App, you know Microsoft have lost all respect for their customers. Consumer laptops are just a pure sales distribution channel on top of an OS that can now barely handle spying on you, selling you things AND actually doing the thing you bought it for. The most eye-opening moment when you switch to Linux is that it takes as fast as you typing your password in to start using it. You realize just how much Microsoft has fundamentally compromised software and people are too used to it to assume computers aren't just slow by default.
- Google is no better. My family mostly uses iPhones, and on a big extended family vacation, I suggested we use Google Photos to create a shared album to document the trip. Everyone installed the Google Photos app on their iPhone so they could contribute... which resulted in all of them having their email accounts disabled.
What happened? Google Photos on the iPhone backs up all your photos by default, and, like Microsoft, Google "shares storage" between email and photos. The minute Google Photos was installed, it started backing up photos until the paltry free tier was reached, at which point it disabled the associated gmail account since it was "out of storage".
Talk about an anti-pattern; I spent a good chunk of time on that trip helping people get their storage back so they could send email again.
I'll never recommend Google Photos to anyone ever again.
by VerifiedReports
0 subcomment
- To be fair (and I hate Microsoft, so it's painful), Microsoft is not alone here. Google and Apple perpetrate similar BS, with Google Drive being a major offender.
by jcalvinowens
1 subcomments
- I've been replacing old windows machines with raspberry pi fives for my extended family. They all love them!
The cost makes the biggest difference: everybody is resistant, but caves and tries it when I say it only costs $100.
- Apple also does this with iCloud storage and it's maddening, not easy to reconcile, and threatening to turn off.
- Not that it's any excuse, but Apple does something similar by saving your photos to iCloud and deleting them from your local storage without telling you.
I have seen the following scenario play out twice already:
- The free iCloud tier runs out of storage because of the photo backups
- Apple spams the user with warning notifications and emails and incentives to upgrade
- User sees that nonsense and decides they don't really need iCloud backups (sometimes they didn't even know it was on) and turn it off
- But oops, turns out iOS had "helpfully" removed the original photos from the local device to "save space", and now the photos are inaccessible
- User tries to turn iCloud back on to access their photos but iOS now refuses to do it because the account is out of storage space (but don't worry, you can still upgrade to a paid plan!)
- The photos are now held hostage by Apple
You can access the photos from the iCloud website, but the download interface is clunky because it is not made for mass exports. And in this age of smartphones and apps, how many people know this is even an option? When this happened to an elderly family member of mine, it was only sheer luck that he had his iCloud password written down somewhere and I was able to rescue his photos from Apple's jaws.
by TheOtherHobbes
1 subcomments
- I had a similar issue. I ended my O365 subscription. Outlook kept complaining I had exceeded my free storage, which surprised me because I've never used OneDrive for anything, and my email storage was well under the limit.
I deleted a ton of useless emails anyway, but that didn't fix the problem. Somehow I had more than 25 gigs of space being used on a cloud system I'd never used, tied to an email account which supposedly needed less than 500 Mb of storage.
Eventually after a lot of searching I discovered the magic page that gave me direct access to OneDrive's actual storage - which was not, somehow, the page that gave access to the files.
OneDrive was storing a lot of attachments, and deleting emails and clearing the trash didn't delete them.
Or something like that. Whatever the magic words were, I did eventually find them and fix the problem.
But it took a while, I had to resubscribe for free for a month to make it happen, there was a lot of confusing side information online suggesting I should open a ticket (good luck with that on a consumer account) and generally it Just Didn't Work.
I can imagine people resubscribing for another year just to make it all go away.
This has been my lifelong experience of Microsoft - shockingly poor, contemptuous, or downright stupid interface design, Kafka-esque indifference to the user experience, and constant unwanted friction and complication, around a suite of core consumer products that are mediocre to start with.
- Google Photos does the same thing, aggressively prompting the user endlessly until they give in. A solution to that is disabling the malicious application and installing Google's Gallery app instead, that possesses no ransomware capability from what I've last heard of it. Make no mistake: Google and Microsoft know very well this behaviour will lead to people subscribing to services they have, for the most part, no use for. It is therefore explicitly by design, deceiving tech-illiterate people threatening to delete files they never meant to upload.
- Microsoft has been disrespecting their user base for a very long time now. This is not news. Stop giving them your money.
by JumpCrisscross
1 subcomments
- Are the number of computers running Windows rising or falling? (Most curious for the U.S. and Europe.)
- Microsoft could tone it down a bit (especially all the full screen harassment after windows updates) but I wonder how many casual users have had their bacon saved precisely because their documents and desktop got pushed to the cloud?
by aucisson_masque
0 subcomment
- > Microsoft is actively hostile towards its users.
No shit.
And I see some of the same pattern with Apple now, for instance by default files on iOS get downloaded to the iCloud. And phone get backed up too, same as photos. It just happens that the free 5gb of iCloud storage is slightly not enough for all this shit, and you quickly get a pop up showing you that you must purchase an iCloud subscription.
I know that work because my mother almost fall for it.
- Office in the Mac is AWFUL about this.
By default, it saves to a OneDrive you never asked for and can never find. You can't permanently change the location of your saved documents-- just change it once, and the setting stays "forever", maybe, until a software update fucks it up for you again.
Auto-save is disabled if you're not using OneDrive.
Nobody asked for OneDrive. It makes it a goddamned nightmare to find your files. I was trying to make it easy for my partner to save their files to the same location every time, make it easy to find in the Finder, make it easy for mailing attachments. No such luck.
- If you want to experience Microsoft dark patterns just install a fresh copy of windows. Last a checked there were seven adversarial prompts where they try to trick you into doing something they want but you don’t.
Send us your usage data! (No)
Sign in with an online account (I want a local account)
And on and on.
Fuck those guys.
- I don't use Windows at home. What happens if you don't have Outlook but your personal local files still fill up OneDrive storage? Do you get error messages that files aren't being backed up? Are you unable to save files?
- MacOS does this as well, and it drives me nuts. No, I do not want files on my desktop to be synced to iCloud.
- I long ago learned to pay the 2$ a month or whatever the hell to just have 1TB of storage and remember to keep my user account drive small enough where I never hit the amount.
by 1vuio0pswjnm7
0 subcomment
- Actual title: How Microsoft abuses its users
- you should see Outlook 365. constant nagging about adding the url as the default mailto. Constant nagging for feedback. Mail doesn't load at consistently. OneDrive is just as bad.
- Anytime any device in any context greets you with "Hello" or "Welcome", it is announcing that it doesn't belong to you, and that you must be vigilant to its exploitation of you.
Windows is remarkable in that it is constantly editing itself, revising terms of service without notice, nudging, cajoling, and end-running you and at every turn.
Update cannot be stopped, yet updater messages make it seem like you are initiating work and responsible for its successful completion:
"You're 90% there...",
"Don't turn off your PC",
"Something didn't go as planned, don't worry your data is safe",
which is eternally followed by "Welcome" lets arrange a few things...
Apple's dark patterns are far lower key as they supply the total stack, it's feels more custodial.
Linux if it says anything-- which it usually doesn't say much-- will say these changes are well-known to wreck things but you're at our mercy, them your system is put into some polluted state associated with a bygone era and all your config and data is your problem hope you're skilled at IT.
- I recently helped my mother-in-law configure a new Windows 11 laptop. I knew Microsoft did this, I was deliberately looking to avoid OneDrive, and it _still_ burned me. It silently uploaded all of her personal documents that I had transferred from an older computer. I was livid.
Microsoft has permanently lost me as a customer. Every friend and family member who listens will upgrade to something else.
by legitster
5 subcomments
- We've really got to stop calling every bad UI a dark pattern. "Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by incompetence." Having worked at MSFT I can tell you there's a LOT more incompetence than malice.
- This has been default experience for "normies" for quite some time now. Same for Google gallery which syncs to gdrive.
Just today we had a guy who got similar messages from one drive as one in the blogpost, and made the mistake of asking chatgpt about it. After renaming, moving, deleting and even doing regedit as llm instructef, some of the files went missing, some we managed to find.
Few weeks ago I had to explain over the phone how to setup windows without ms account, and we had to resort to turning off WiFi in the house lmao
by hsbauauvhabzb
0 subcomment
- Recently I noticed autosave is not enabled by default on word, I clicked to enable and it prompted me to save to one drive as apparently that’s the only way to enable autosave, a feature which has been around since ~Word 2000.
- Just replying to the headline: Well, duh! What do we expect?
Reading the article, I still feel the same way.
- even if you remove one drive in next update it will be installed automatically.
by ImPostingOnHN
0 subcomment
- This is part of a broader, financialization-related push across the entire economy to convert one-time-purchase revenue into steady, predictable, ratchet-able recurring revenue.
As an added bonus for them, they can sell laptops with less storage (= fewer chips in this tight market) with the expectation that the customer will store everything in the cloud, with plenty of overage fees.
- I see a lot of hate for Google in this thread but at least one thing they do well: it's really easy to fix. Takeout actually works. You can just download your photos and leave. As the top post identified here, Microsoft makes this a REAL pain to leave after they snared you.
- Onedrive: "How would you like your files sorted?"
Me: "Can I do alphabetical and perhaps by creation time?"
Onedrive: "NO! Absolutely not! I will sort everything based on the last time you opened the document."
:|
- If you think this is egregious wait till you experience Apple products.
- Thanks to obsession over KPI and metrics in general, we can no longer trust big tech corporations. It seems they've forgotten WHY you actually want to play fair, they can no longer be trusted.
We need to teach non-technical people that in this reality, a scam might come directly from the real seemingly "reputable" company.
- This is some real title gore, and I don't know who is to blame. As it appears:
> Microsoft is employing dark patterns to goad users into paying for storage?
That Microsoft is employing dark patterns is neither surprising nor a question. Can you explain this gross departure from the actual title jpmitchell[1]? Here is the original for reference:
> How Microsoft abuses its users
This is much more interesting and accurate.
1. https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=jpmitchell
- My tech illiterate family members fell for this Microsoft dark pattern. Revolting
- Email scammers often make their initial emails intentionally full of red flags to automatically filter out anyone smart enough to avoid the scam, and leave them with a pool of people willing to accept any amount of scummyness and abuse.
Windows is the exact same thing but for operating systems. If you're still using it in 2026, it's because you want to be a mark.
- Well, colour me surprised :)
by selectively
8 subcomments
- [flagged]
- So to free up space you delete folders instead of moving your familyvphotos that you don't have backup.
Can we stop a bit this all evil Microsoft fault?
And the author have a solution.
Yeah those headline are buzzing.
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