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
Clippy was definitely hostile. It would constantly monitor user actions just so that it could interrupt us. Wasted CPU cycles and our time when CPUs weren't very fast. Clippy was hated by everyone. It was not just useless. It was intrusive, wasteful, and hostile. I can't believe my eyes that anyone could think that Clippy is an appropriate mascot for anything good. If anything, Clippy would be a perfect mascot for the trillion dollar companies that exploit our data.
Is there such a thing as anti-rose-tinted glasses? I feel like this is an example of that.
No one here is saying that Microsoft was good, which seems to underlie your insistence on Clippy being so horrible - they're saying that a mistake like this one wasn't born from anti-user sentiment. Microsoft had engaged in plenty of anti-consumer action by then, but Clippy wasn't an example of it - its inclusion was misguided because the software industry was still in the exploratory phase in terms of UX, and some designers thought that putting silly faces and characters on things would make computers easier to learn and use in the rapidly-expanding market. Which is why you also see less annoying forms of character images pop up in some other Microsoft software of the day, acting as flashier textboxes.
They didn't purposefully waste CPU time by disregarding good software engineering practices (like what's happening everywhere now), they just misplaced a part of the performance budget to something that wasn't very useful. They didn't integrate Clippy as an essential part of the Microsoft experience, making it uplink your actions to Microsoft (which could have been done by then) or making Windows into the "Clippy OS". It was just an interactive help pop-up. If you didn't want it, you could have unchecked it from the very first version's install dialogue, and it would never appear anywhere. You could disable it afterwards. After a short run, Microsoft admitted their mistake and removed this feature for good, even making fun of it in a few Flash shorts and games. Nothing from this list even remotely approaches what Microsoft does today, and they will never return to the already-low-bar that was there 20 years ago.
You could say the same about Microsoft's telemetry in Windows which this article is complaining about due to it being opt in. The telemtry's purpose is to improve user's experience by allowing Microsoft to make the product better by knowing where things are going wrong or if they are making harmful changes.
You’re both making similar points I think. It was “bad” - for all the reasons you mention, but back then it was done seemingly to try to add functionality that people wanted, it was just shitty, and that was as bad as it gets.
Now nothing is done even remotely to try and help the customer. Every feature and every stupid “nudge” is done with pure malice, as the thinnest possible pretext to extract more information, more ad revenue, etc. from the user.
Clippy sucked, it would be nice if it still represented the worst kind of corporate shenanigans, but now it’s benign and naive compared to the evil rapaciousness arrayed against us by virtually all modern software.
So my point stands doesn't it? If Clippy was as hostile as it could be with the technology available then, and the trillion dollar companies hoarding our data are as hostile as they can be with the technology present now, is Clippy a good mascot for an initiative like this or is it a good mascot for the trillion dollar companies?
Clippy is a mascot for the trillion dollar companies. It's emblematic of the beginning of the end of user-centric computing. It marks the new era of intrusive business-centric computing.
It's not about data or technology at all. It's about property rights. User-centric computers (ideally) don't do anything their users don't want them to do. Business-centric computers don't care about what the user wants; they serve the interests of business (either the manufacturer or the user's employer).
In my circle of friends: Clippy was something to be mocked, not hated. Hate is a very strong word. I doubt any of us thought that it was hostile, because it was clearly intended to be a friendly aide for those who did not know how to use computers. The fact that we mocked it said more about us than it said about those who liked it.
> It would constantly monitor user actions just so that it could interrupt us.
With the intention of helping us... Today, it's done with the intention of changing us, to be more profitable to our digital masters. The idea is that if Clippy was bad, what's happening now is way worse. Clippy is a significant improvement over the modern setting.
> With the intention of helping us... Today, it's done with the intention of changing us, to be more profitable to our digital masters.
This sort of thinking sends us straight onto a slippery slope. If you asked any of these trillion-dollar companies why they feel the need to exploit our data, they would insist it is all for our benefit, to provide better recommendations and personalize our experience, and other such nonsense. It is much the same logic that was used to justify Clippy's wasteful behavior at the time.
The fact is that these trillion-dollar companies now and Clippy then were exploiting our resources (data now, CPU then) to push features down our throat that they decided were "beneficial" or "helpful" for us.
The only redeeming feature of Clippy was that you could disable it easily. Can't do that with the trillion dollar companies.
Exactly, it was the first thing you'd do when you launched Word. Nowadays, the only option available would be "See less of Clippy" and he'd be back in the next session.
I think GP is using "hostile" as a synonym for "malicious". Yes, Clippy was disruptive to your workflow, but it wasn't (as far as I know) exfiltrating private data, installing malware, trying to sell you on Bitcoin, etc.
It wasn't possible to exfiltrate data in those days because internet access wasn't ubiquitous. In that setting, wasting CPU cycles and our time so Clippy could pop up with its "helpful" was almost malicious.
It may not seem that way now, since even visiting a simple blog page consumes far more processing power than an entire Windows boot sequence from that era and no one thinks twice about it. But when Clippy was introduced, processors were slow, resources were tight and squandering CPU time for no good reason brought it close to being considered outright harmful.
> It wasn't possible to exfiltrate data in those days because internet access wasn't ubiquitous.
It was, and we rightfully called software doing it "spyware", or more generally "malware". Today we call this "telemetry" and somehow it became standard practice in software engineering.
The "what" is material to this conversation. BonzaiBuddy, a 90's or early 2000s malware that showed a purple monkey on your desktop, hijacking your computer and collecting your web browsing habits in Internet Explorer, a totally different program, and sending it to advertisers, is different from your computer telling Adobe when Photoshop crashes so they can fix it.
Photoshop does not monitor your traffic in Chrome/Safari/Firefox/Brave/Ladybug/etc. Photoshop does hit the Internet to use Creative Cloud for fonts and stuff, so they do know about that, though. The difference is in kind. How you're using Photoshop is relevant to Adobe, the creators of Photoshop. The websites you're browsing are not relevant to them and none of their business.
Clippy was Daikatana of its time. Horrible, poorly thought out and annoying. Yet in most way, infinitely better than modern AAA shooters.
Louis Rossmann talks about it in his original Clippy talk: the issue isn't going to the good old days[1], but to spook current set of software rulers to do better. Think of it as an Anonymous mask for the Right to Repair.
I don't need clippy for the right to repair movement though.
Louis is great - the right to repair movement is much bigger, though. Louis made the movemoent more widespread, of course with his channel, but right to repair kind of can even be found when GPL was founded. Of course the GPL focused more on software and not on hardware, but to me these are basically almost identical fights / causes. It is the question as to who owns/controls something.
Sure. And you don't need Guy Hawks mask to have Anonymous, yet we did.
Right to repair (RtR) needs a vocal majority to really move the needle. Politicians hate when people unite around things that they work against. Namely unchecked corps doing whatever they want and donating them money.
When are anti-monopoly judges going to split GOOG and MSFT?
It definitely looks only annoying by modern standards because today we are willing to let websites load MBs of crap into our browser to show text news and nobody thinks twice about it.
But when Clippy was forced upon us then it definitely felt user hostile. The threshold for what computer users (there were fewer of them) would call user hostile was lower then. The only redeeming feature of Clippy was that you could disable it easily. But it was still user hostile when it ran.
So yes, coming from the context of those old days, Clippy was both annoying and user hostile then.
It's a pet peeve of mine that the norms have changed so much so that such user hostile UX is considered "annoying" at most today when the right term for it IMO is "user hostile".
Your comment leaves me unsure: were you actually alive when clippy was a thing, or do you only know about it from stuff you read? Because I was alive at the time and remember clearly that it was disliked even at the time.
I agree clippy was useless. Whether it was hostile or not - I think it actually was hostile. It jumped out of nowhere and stole my time. So I actually group clippy into neutral but slightly evil category.
Clippy was bothersome to me, but somehow some people liked it or had fond memories. This effort may not make a difference, but whatever- it’s fun for someone.
And AI taking your data is not the biggest problem. Many sites and devices have been taking your data. LLMs can’t use that much data currently to do anything. Thumbprinting people, business server side data collection, and lack of laws around that is a bigger threat to privacy, but it’s too late. There’s nothing you can do about that.
Want to be an activist? Let people know AI will always be imperfect and support moral and ethical behavior in respect of all perspectives and abilities for the betterment of humanity.
Clippy is almost certainly the most hated computer avatar in all of human history. Jar Jar Binks or Wesley Crusher come to mind as equivalent foci of psychic negativity. Using him for any movement is self-sabotage, not to mention all the organizations you will scare off because using a copyrighted/trademarked character invites legal risk.
That's a load of learned helplessness horseshit. The users need to be loud in telling these companies that "this is not okay" and the companies need to listen or face consequences. How about YOU start by phoning your local representative instead of telling other people that nothing can be done.
Clippy was chosen precisely because it was so famously bad.
The point of choosing Clippy is to imply that much of what we have now is more anti-user than one of the most anti-user pieces of software of the 90's.
Yes, I see the same flaw in the argument. Retrospectively looking back and saying it was good because it didn't do any of the shit companies do today; but, really, it wasn't as bad as it could be because the technology just wasn't there to begin with. Counter-factual either way, but calling it "good" is a stretch.
Not to take away from the movement, though. I think it's great.
The technology was certainly there, BonziBuddy existed around the same time and was widely condemned as a spyware and adware ultimately resulting in its demise. Today Microsoft officially does many of the things BonziBuddy used to do and people just see it as normal.
Oh, damn, I recall that motherfucker now that I look at the picture. I was a kid back then and had no context of it being spyware.
I stand corrected in my original comment.
> In 2002, an article in Consumer Reports Web Watch labeled BonziBuddy as spyware, stating that it contains a backdoor trojan that collects information from users. The activities the program is said to engage in include constantly resetting the user's web browser homepage to bonzi.com without the user's permission, prompting and tracking various information about the user, installing a browser toolbar, and serving advertisements.
Yeah, so not much different from modern Big Tech, lol.
Ironically, the only thing Clippy was missing for it to be genuinely useful was... LLMs. Hooked up to GPT-4 + bunch of tool calls, it would've delivered far beyond what originally promised.
Which is why I'm both dismayed and impressed with how badly Microsoft keeps screwing up Copilot. This stuff isn't hard, unless you want to make it hard.
You are obviously correct, but I don't know that it really matters.
As I see it, the movement is about pointing out that the most useless dumbest biggest failure of a mega corporation is actually great in light of their current practices.
Why does it matter whether they would have messed it up if they implemented it today?
Restated: the point is not that clippy is great. The point is that he sucked, and that he is great relative to what kinds of products Microsoft is creating today.
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?
> instead try to denigrate the goals of this initiative because of the chosen character
Incorrect. Nobody is denigrating the goals of the initiative. All criticism I see is directed at the choice of the mascot only.
You know... people can love an initiative and criticize its mascot at the same time. The two are not incompatible.
> Clippy would have been evil but that's the point, it wasn't back then.
I was around when Clippy was introduced. It was universally hated. If anything, Clippy would be a good mascot for intrusive AI tools and services that harvest our data without regard for our privacy, not least because Clippy constantly monitored user actions just so that it could interrupt them.
If we want a mascot for tools that respect our data, it should definitely be something far less evil than Clippy.
> Incorrect. Nobody is denigrating the goals of the initiative. All criticism I see is directed at the choice of the mascot only.
The top comment, a thread you participated in, claims "The entire forced clippy movement is incredibly poorly thought out" after criticism of using clippy as a mascot.
Disagreement is not denigration. Like the sibling said, don't go so far in tge opposite side of the "you're either with us or against us" rhetoric that's been common for movements, the world is much more complex than that.
You can agree with the goals of an initiative and still think it is poorly thought out.
OP is acting as if anyone criticizing this thing must clearly be opposed to their entire world view, accusing them of being paid shills. No. Maybe they just (rightfully) don't like Clippy, and don't want a movement they care about to turn into that.
Clippy was pretty universally hated back in it's day though. The way it just refused to let you do anything without it's help was annoying.
People complain about getting AI shoved down their throats. Clippy was worse in this regard. At least AI doesn't have a dancing animated character that eats up half your processing power with it's silly animations.
> Interesting how many people in a hacker forum seem to be so pro-establishment
Here's my perspective:
1) Coastal liberal inner city males with a tech flair and an interest in Apple, have decided that due to lack of social skills and/or inner circle it would be good to keep themselves busy with creating a business. Actually, business is a Republican term, let's call it a startup, - hold that rainbow flag for me will you -.
2) They start to realize, that startups operate in an environment with rules, their "business plan" eventually bumps into those rules. Those rules are what made their piece of land - commonly called a country - a nice place to live.
3) Meanwhile, various interests parade on "news" outlets telling the constituents that "rules bad for business, business made us great, everything else tried has failed".
4) Deregulation is the pill, libertarianism/freedom/liberty talk is the bacon wrapped around it
5) The city male realizes that he has more in common with the bigshot businessman that he thought, its only a few billions that set them apart
6) Furthermore, it has been accepted as an axiom that anyone can make it in US (immigrant went from poor being rich feelgood story on cnbc anyone?)
Business establishment is legitimate power in the US, also they are not being pro-establishment, they are being pro let-me-do-this-thats-the-only-thing-i-have-going-for-me
Also, let's ditch the terms good/evil. They are straight up juvenile.
You mean a forum run by a VC company and frequented mainly by startup bros? Or at least by people working for the "tech" companies responsible for this whole mess?
I think this speaks to one of the tensions at the heart of HN and Silicon Valley as a whole: it's borne out of both the counter-cultural hacker mentality and the SV venture capital industry and the big tech behemoths that proceeded them. Strange bedfellows.
hackernews is a wanabe venture capitalists/techbros who want to roleplay/feel like hackers site and on the way picked up a few random people like hackers/hobbyists/devs
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 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.
You would do this for any profile picture that everyone will use. People here just don't like any movement as they are supporter of corporate. They are either multi-millionaires or temporary embarrassed millionaires. They will make every movement including unions negative.
That’s the problem with non-hate driven movements isn’t it. As the number of supporters grow, the less “cool” it becomes. Hate is the outlier, where it grows linearly as the more people feed it.
> As the number of supporters grow, the less “cool” it becomes
Does it really matter if movement is cool or not?
I hate corporate bullshit shoving AI down our throats and enshittifying everything it touches, that's why I changed my profile picture to clippy. I, frankly, don't care about character or what's the meaning behind it. But I want for other people to see how many of us are fed up with shit.
>> I've begun to correlate it with people who are more annoying than average
This I don't understand, because in my experience, people with clippy pfp are usually helpful. I usually see them on the top of youtube or reddit comments, giving good advices and answering questions.
i don't know what you were actually supposed to do with it, but in real life i spent a lot of time building houses/forts so i did that in bob too. in a different era i'd've just done all that in minecraft.
I doubt that. Privacy was eroded slowly through successive micro-violations.I remember when it was a big deal that gmail inspected your email contents, "but don't worry, no humans actually read it, we just mine the data to suggest better ads, but hey you get 'unlimited' storage when hotmail limits you to 4mb, so there's that!"
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.
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.
Well said. I've long been a believer in computer literacy. Streamlined UX/UI has made people, especially the younger generation worse at using & troubleshooting computers. It's painfully obvious in the corporate world nowadays. Clippy to me, absolutely played a part in this.
This doesn't annoy me but the movement of using this image feels extremely confusing and uneventful. Like wearing a ribbon, but with some weird attachment to an enterprise?
It's not a revolution, we can't just go with pichforks to Microsoft offices and demand de-enshittification of Windows.
It's a movement of "we are fed up with this shit".And our only tools are:
making people aware of how awful Windows, Mac and rest of Big Tech world are and to make people switch to Linux, because it's the only platform that is free from this bullshit and gives you some freedom.
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?
Basically, this. My first tech job was IT support at the time and ordinary people using their computers for actual work liked them too. I remember the dog/puppy being particular popular. At worst the assistants were seen as charmingly naff, not actively hostile. They were simple for power users to disable and this weird retroactive hatred for them feels more like some kind of nerd bitterness over the fact that normies ever started using computers in the first place. There was plenty of reason to be critical of Microsoft in those days that wasn't their office assistant.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Clippy really ... wasn't bad? It mostly stayed out of your way, occasionally showed a button to perform a useful task, and could interact with the help system without having to click through 3 menus.
It wasn't a panacea but it was at least positive-value, unlike most current AI.
Maybe it's the generation gap? As a kid, I loved that I could "play" on the PC with Clippy, which mostly consisted on trying it to appear and make it do something. I get that if you were trying to get some work done, it might have been annoying.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I think HN users are mostly in support of right to repair, there isn't much to discuss there. Criticism of a bizarre branding choice is not a criticism of the movement as a whole.
I think it's (partially) because the link is mainly a video; there isn't a mention of those things in the site text either. Perhaps the submission should have [video] so as to be clear about what the main content is.
The two are utterly confounded for many who'd otherwise be a receptive audience to the message. It's a case of utterly unnecessary self-sabotage.
HN itself frequently has to address distractions within a story or discussion of it to surface significant or substantive themes. That the campaign here is blundering so hard out of the gate bodes poorly.
It's like picking Reaganism as a mascot for a democratic socialism movement. Doesn't make any sense and is a major factor why we moved in the direction we did. It's shooting yourself in the foot right out of the gate. Bad decision and isn't going to do their movement any favors. I'm not going to take them seriously if that's the kind of decisions they make.
No? Clippy was an attempt at an assistant for average joes who didn't really know how to use a computer, and got out of your way when you hit the go away forever button. It could've been link bonzi buddy, same era, except clippy genuinely wasn't malicious. All the tech was there for clippy to embed itself into your computer and steal your data, but it didn't. A genuine winner of the yellow paper star of you tried.
Nowadays a lot of people still need computer use help, but every assistant is a bonzi buddy that wants to hijack your computer. Clippy was the last big non-malicious computer assistant.
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.
Usually i am against these kinds of comments throwing a bit of shade at the community, but if ever it was justified, it's this comment right here. And honestly it's not just this post and the resulting senseless debate over whether Clippy is good or relevant. The degradation has really been noticeable for the past year at least.
There's still good content but i increasingly feel like i need curation for a curated feed. I find myself remembering moments like this more and more and consciously redirecting my attention to other things because it's starting to feel as dumb as social media.
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
Quite the opposite: clippy was useless but not hostile which is a sobering contrast to software that is hostile and therefore worse than useless.
It's a cute nostalgic way to say "the bar was on the floor and you blew it anyway."
Clippy was definitely hostile. It would constantly monitor user actions just so that it could interrupt us. Wasted CPU cycles and our time when CPUs weren't very fast. Clippy was hated by everyone. It was not just useless. It was intrusive, wasteful, and hostile. I can't believe my eyes that anyone could think that Clippy is an appropriate mascot for anything good. If anything, Clippy would be a perfect mascot for the trillion dollar companies that exploit our data.
Is there such a thing as anti-rose-tinted glasses? I feel like this is an example of that.
No one here is saying that Microsoft was good, which seems to underlie your insistence on Clippy being so horrible - they're saying that a mistake like this one wasn't born from anti-user sentiment. Microsoft had engaged in plenty of anti-consumer action by then, but Clippy wasn't an example of it - its inclusion was misguided because the software industry was still in the exploratory phase in terms of UX, and some designers thought that putting silly faces and characters on things would make computers easier to learn and use in the rapidly-expanding market. Which is why you also see less annoying forms of character images pop up in some other Microsoft software of the day, acting as flashier textboxes.
They didn't purposefully waste CPU time by disregarding good software engineering practices (like what's happening everywhere now), they just misplaced a part of the performance budget to something that wasn't very useful. They didn't integrate Clippy as an essential part of the Microsoft experience, making it uplink your actions to Microsoft (which could have been done by then) or making Windows into the "Clippy OS". It was just an interactive help pop-up. If you didn't want it, you could have unchecked it from the very first version's install dialogue, and it would never appear anywhere. You could disable it afterwards. After a short run, Microsoft admitted their mistake and removed this feature for good, even making fun of it in a few Flash shorts and games. Nothing from this list even remotely approaches what Microsoft does today, and they will never return to the already-low-bar that was there 20 years ago.
You could say the same about Microsoft's telemetry in Windows which this article is complaining about due to it being opt in. The telemtry's purpose is to improve user's experience by allowing Microsoft to make the product better by knowing where things are going wrong or if they are making harmful changes.
personally i found it just a tiny annoyance, like a cartoonish popup that didn't understand context enough to be useful.
The “Clippy OS” was Microsoft Bob. The dog in the search dialog, Rover, was also from Microsoft Bob.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Bob
> No one here is saying that Microsoft was good, which seems to underlie your insistence on Clippy being so horrible
No, it obviously doesn't underlie their criticism ... and that claim is ad hominem.
I think there are numerous reasons why Clippy is a poor choice for a mascot, and your correspondent presented some of those reasons.
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You’re both making similar points I think. It was “bad” - for all the reasons you mention, but back then it was done seemingly to try to add functionality that people wanted, it was just shitty, and that was as bad as it gets.
Now nothing is done even remotely to try and help the customer. Every feature and every stupid “nudge” is done with pure malice, as the thinnest possible pretext to extract more information, more ad revenue, etc. from the user.
Clippy sucked, it would be nice if it still represented the worst kind of corporate shenanigans, but now it’s benign and naive compared to the evil rapaciousness arrayed against us by virtually all modern software.
So my point stands doesn't it? If Clippy was as hostile as it could be with the technology available then, and the trillion dollar companies hoarding our data are as hostile as they can be with the technology present now, is Clippy a good mascot for an initiative like this or is it a good mascot for the trillion dollar companies?
Clippy is a mascot for the trillion dollar companies. It's emblematic of the beginning of the end of user-centric computing. It marks the new era of intrusive business-centric computing.
It's not about data or technology at all. It's about property rights. User-centric computers (ideally) don't do anything their users don't want them to do. Business-centric computers don't care about what the user wants; they serve the interests of business (either the manufacturer or the user's employer).
In my circle of friends: Clippy was something to be mocked, not hated. Hate is a very strong word. I doubt any of us thought that it was hostile, because it was clearly intended to be a friendly aide for those who did not know how to use computers. The fact that we mocked it said more about us than it said about those who liked it.
I say that clippy was at least a failed attempt to be helpful.
I didn't care for it, but it was easy to turn off.
> It would constantly monitor user actions just so that it could interrupt us.
With the intention of helping us... Today, it's done with the intention of changing us, to be more profitable to our digital masters. The idea is that if Clippy was bad, what's happening now is way worse. Clippy is a significant improvement over the modern setting.
> With the intention of helping us... Today, it's done with the intention of changing us, to be more profitable to our digital masters.
This sort of thinking sends us straight onto a slippery slope. If you asked any of these trillion-dollar companies why they feel the need to exploit our data, they would insist it is all for our benefit, to provide better recommendations and personalize our experience, and other such nonsense. It is much the same logic that was used to justify Clippy's wasteful behavior at the time.
The fact is that these trillion-dollar companies now and Clippy then were exploiting our resources (data now, CPU then) to push features down our throat that they decided were "beneficial" or "helpful" for us.
The only redeeming feature of Clippy was that you could disable it easily. Can't do that with the trillion dollar companies.
I think the argument is that clippy would totally have done that if it was an option back then.
That was later admitted in an interview:
https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/40537126
I think it's more like thinking about clippy reminds me of simpler times in general.
Disabling clippy was a single click the first time when it came up. And that was it. Now, how many times I need to say to Edge to fuck off?
Exactly, it was the first thing you'd do when you launched Word. Nowadays, the only option available would be "See less of Clippy" and he'd be back in the next session.
I think GP is using "hostile" as a synonym for "malicious". Yes, Clippy was disruptive to your workflow, but it wasn't (as far as I know) exfiltrating private data, installing malware, trying to sell you on Bitcoin, etc.
It wasn't possible to exfiltrate data in those days because internet access wasn't ubiquitous. In that setting, wasting CPU cycles and our time so Clippy could pop up with its "helpful" was almost malicious.
It may not seem that way now, since even visiting a simple blog page consumes far more processing power than an entire Windows boot sequence from that era and no one thinks twice about it. But when Clippy was introduced, processors were slow, resources were tight and squandering CPU time for no good reason brought it close to being considered outright harmful.
> It wasn't possible to exfiltrate data in those days because internet access wasn't ubiquitous.
It was, and we rightfully called software doing it "spyware", or more generally "malware". Today we call this "telemetry" and somehow it became standard practice in software engineering.
The "what" is material to this conversation. BonzaiBuddy, a 90's or early 2000s malware that showed a purple monkey on your desktop, hijacking your computer and collecting your web browsing habits in Internet Explorer, a totally different program, and sending it to advertisers, is different from your computer telling Adobe when Photoshop crashes so they can fix it.
Except Photoshop does both, doesn't it? Not to mention, the OS itself.
This is a difference of degree, not of kind.
Photoshop does not monitor your traffic in Chrome/Safari/Firefox/Brave/Ladybug/etc. Photoshop does hit the Internet to use Creative Cloud for fonts and stuff, so they do know about that, though. The difference is in kind. How you're using Photoshop is relevant to Adobe, the creators of Photoshop. The websites you're browsing are not relevant to them and none of their business.
Clippy was Daikatana of its time. Horrible, poorly thought out and annoying. Yet in most way, infinitely better than modern AAA shooters.
Louis Rossmann talks about it in his original Clippy talk: the issue isn't going to the good old days[1], but to spook current set of software rulers to do better. Think of it as an Anonymous mask for the Right to Repair.
[1]https://youtu.be/2_Dtmpe9qaQ?t=344
I don't need clippy for the right to repair movement though.
Louis is great - the right to repair movement is much bigger, though. Louis made the movemoent more widespread, of course with his channel, but right to repair kind of can even be found when GPL was founded. Of course the GPL focused more on software and not on hardware, but to me these are basically almost identical fights / causes. It is the question as to who owns/controls something.
Sure. And you don't need Guy Hawks mask to have Anonymous, yet we did.
Right to repair (RtR) needs a vocal majority to really move the needle. Politicians hate when people unite around things that they work against. Namely unchecked corps doing whatever they want and donating them money.
When are anti-monopoly judges going to split GOOG and MSFT?
annoying != hostile
It definitely looks only annoying by modern standards because today we are willing to let websites load MBs of crap into our browser to show text news and nobody thinks twice about it.
But when Clippy was forced upon us then it definitely felt user hostile. The threshold for what computer users (there were fewer of them) would call user hostile was lower then. The only redeeming feature of Clippy was that you could disable it easily. But it was still user hostile when it ran.
So yes, coming from the context of those old days, Clippy was both annoying and user hostile then.
It's a pet peeve of mine that the norms have changed so much so that such user hostile UX is considered "annoying" at most today when the right term for it IMO is "user hostile".
Popping up on my screen was hostile to me.
Your comment leaves me unsure: were you actually alive when clippy was a thing, or do you only know about it from stuff you read? Because I was alive at the time and remember clearly that it was disliked even at the time.
I agree clippy was useless. Whether it was hostile or not - I think it actually was hostile. It jumped out of nowhere and stole my time. So I actually group clippy into neutral but slightly evil category.
Clippy was bothersome to me, but somehow some people liked it or had fond memories. This effort may not make a difference, but whatever- it’s fun for someone.
And AI taking your data is not the biggest problem. Many sites and devices have been taking your data. LLMs can’t use that much data currently to do anything. Thumbprinting people, business server side data collection, and lack of laws around that is a bigger threat to privacy, but it’s too late. There’s nothing you can do about that.
Want to be an activist? Let people know AI will always be imperfect and support moral and ethical behavior in respect of all perspectives and abilities for the betterment of humanity.
Clippy is almost certainly the most hated computer avatar in all of human history. Jar Jar Binks or Wesley Crusher come to mind as equivalent foci of psychic negativity. Using him for any movement is self-sabotage, not to mention all the organizations you will scare off because using a copyrighted/trademarked character invites legal risk.
That's a load of learned helplessness horseshit. The users need to be loud in telling these companies that "this is not okay" and the companies need to listen or face consequences. How about YOU start by phoning your local representative instead of telling other people that nothing can be done.
You have a very revisionistic take. Clippy was pure terror and it still angers me to see that smug paper clip.
more like choosing an assault rifle as your logo if your movement is to ban nuclear weapons.
Clippy was chosen precisely because it was so famously bad.
The point of choosing Clippy is to imply that much of what we have now is more anti-user than one of the most anti-user pieces of software of the 90's.
Exactly, it hearkens to the halcyon days when Microsoft was the biggest evil in tech.
Yes, I see the same flaw in the argument. Retrospectively looking back and saying it was good because it didn't do any of the shit companies do today; but, really, it wasn't as bad as it could be because the technology just wasn't there to begin with. Counter-factual either way, but calling it "good" is a stretch.
Not to take away from the movement, though. I think it's great.
The technology was certainly there, BonziBuddy existed around the same time and was widely condemned as a spyware and adware ultimately resulting in its demise. Today Microsoft officially does many of the things BonziBuddy used to do and people just see it as normal.
Oh, damn, I recall that motherfucker now that I look at the picture. I was a kid back then and had no context of it being spyware.
I stand corrected in my original comment.
> In 2002, an article in Consumer Reports Web Watch labeled BonziBuddy as spyware, stating that it contains a backdoor trojan that collects information from users. The activities the program is said to engage in include constantly resetting the user's web browser homepage to bonzi.com without the user's permission, prompting and tracking various information about the user, installing a browser toolbar, and serving advertisements.
Yeah, so not much different from modern Big Tech, lol.
Amusingly, it still seems to be available for download (and requires a whopping 16 MB of RAM): https://bonzibuddy.org/download.html
Ironically, the only thing Clippy was missing for it to be genuinely useful was... LLMs. Hooked up to GPT-4 + bunch of tool calls, it would've delivered far beyond what originally promised.
Which is why I'm both dismayed and impressed with how badly Microsoft keeps screwing up Copilot. This stuff isn't hard, unless you want to make it hard.
"Agentic Clippy"
Yes if Clippy was released in 2025, it would surely be stealing your data without thinking twice.
So basically like Bonzai Buddy, the first spyware that tried to help you search stuff
You are obviously correct, but I don't know that it really matters.
As I see it, the movement is about pointing out that the most useless dumbest biggest failure of a mega corporation is actually great in light of their current practices.
Why does it matter whether they would have messed it up if they implemented it today?
Restated: the point is not that clippy is great. The point is that he sucked, and that he is great relative to what kinds of products Microsoft is creating today.
The point is that the internet brought us a lot of bad things.
Clippy refers to a time before the internet.
yeah clippy absolutely would have sold your data if he'd been clever enough to do that.
A modern day Clippy would no doubt be like Friend Computer.
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?
> instead try to denigrate the goals of this initiative because of the chosen character
Incorrect. Nobody is denigrating the goals of the initiative. All criticism I see is directed at the choice of the mascot only.
You know... people can love an initiative and criticize its mascot at the same time. The two are not incompatible.
> Clippy would have been evil but that's the point, it wasn't back then.
I was around when Clippy was introduced. It was universally hated. If anything, Clippy would be a good mascot for intrusive AI tools and services that harvest our data without regard for our privacy, not least because Clippy constantly monitored user actions just so that it could interrupt them.
If we want a mascot for tools that respect our data, it should definitely be something far less evil than Clippy.
> Incorrect. Nobody is denigrating the goals of the initiative. All criticism I see is directed at the choice of the mascot only.
The top comment, a thread you participated in, claims "The entire forced clippy movement is incredibly poorly thought out" after criticism of using clippy as a mascot.
Disagreement is not denigration. Like the sibling said, don't go so far in tge opposite side of the "you're either with us or against us" rhetoric that's been common for movements, the world is much more complex than that.
You can agree with the goals of an initiative and still think it is poorly thought out.
OP is acting as if anyone criticizing this thing must clearly be opposed to their entire world view, accusing them of being paid shills. No. Maybe they just (rightfully) don't like Clippy, and don't want a movement they care about to turn into that.
> All criticism I see is
* My criticism is
> Nobody is denigrating the goals of the initiative.
You're flooding this thread with your tangent about Clippy, which is diverting focus from the main issue regardless of your intentions.
> I was around when Clippy was introduced.
FWIW, so were many people on this forum and definitely the people behind this movement.
Clippy was pretty universally hated back in it's day though. The way it just refused to let you do anything without it's help was annoying.
People complain about getting AI shoved down their throats. Clippy was worse in this regard. At least AI doesn't have a dancing animated character that eats up half your processing power with it's silly animations.
I was there too and Clippy was annoying because it popped up here and there but you definitely could do whatever you wanted without it.
To be fair, I kind of liked it. I must have been a target audience, as a kid learning windows it made the computer feel less threatening, dunno.
Seems possible to say Clippy is a poor mascot for this and also not be shilling for the establishment.
If anything I’m appalled precisely because I _do_ support the goals of the initiative! So I think you’ve got your thinking a little mixed up there.
None of the comments I've read thus far are criticising the goals, just the figurehead.
> Interesting how many people in a hacker forum seem to be so pro-establishment
Here's my perspective:
1) Coastal liberal inner city males with a tech flair and an interest in Apple, have decided that due to lack of social skills and/or inner circle it would be good to keep themselves busy with creating a business. Actually, business is a Republican term, let's call it a startup, - hold that rainbow flag for me will you -.
2) They start to realize, that startups operate in an environment with rules, their "business plan" eventually bumps into those rules. Those rules are what made their piece of land - commonly called a country - a nice place to live.
3) Meanwhile, various interests parade on "news" outlets telling the constituents that "rules bad for business, business made us great, everything else tried has failed".
4) Deregulation is the pill, libertarianism/freedom/liberty talk is the bacon wrapped around it
5) The city male realizes that he has more in common with the bigshot businessman that he thought, its only a few billions that set them apart
6) Furthermore, it has been accepted as an axiom that anyone can make it in US (immigrant went from poor being rich feelgood story on cnbc anyone?)
Business establishment is legitimate power in the US, also they are not being pro-establishment, they are being pro let-me-do-this-thats-the-only-thing-i-have-going-for-me
Also, let's ditch the terms good/evil. They are straight up juvenile.
Realism, not idealism, is generally what makes good products and movements.
This is a marketing initiative to push opinion on an important issue and people are criticizing the marketing.
You seem to think that people should approve of an advertisement if they approve of the product.
> hacker forum
You mean a forum run by a VC company and frequented mainly by startup bros? Or at least by people working for the "tech" companies responsible for this whole mess?
I think this speaks to one of the tensions at the heart of HN and Silicon Valley as a whole: it's borne out of both the counter-cultural hacker mentality and the SV venture capital industry and the big tech behemoths that proceeded them. Strange bedfellows.
hackernews is a wanabe venture capitalists/techbros who want to roleplay/feel like hackers site and on the way picked up a few random people like hackers/hobbyists/devs
Between 2010-2016 (2019 at most)that sentiment was realistic. A nobody could have a good idea and a good execution and they can have a chance.
Now SV is all about grift. Everyone knows it. A nobody still has a chance, they just need to accept it needs to be a grift of some soft.
This clippy white-washing is annoying as hell. Just like clipppy was.
100% this. Clippy was killed by Microsoft for a reason: it was a UI gimmick. The team that made it just wanted to show actions were in-progress.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YObNc2jbD0k
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 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.
You would do this for any profile picture that everyone will use. People here just don't like any movement as they are supporter of corporate. They are either multi-millionaires or temporary embarrassed millionaires. They will make every movement including unions negative.
That’s the problem with non-hate driven movements isn’t it. As the number of supporters grow, the less “cool” it becomes. Hate is the outlier, where it grows linearly as the more people feed it.
Fortunately, the right to repair doesn't need to be cool for me to support it.
But you will associate maskot or picture of any movement to annoying people when more people used it.
> As the number of supporters grow, the less “cool” it becomes
Does it really matter if movement is cool or not? I hate corporate bullshit shoving AI down our throats and enshittifying everything it touches, that's why I changed my profile picture to clippy. I, frankly, don't care about character or what's the meaning behind it. But I want for other people to see how many of us are fed up with shit.
>> I've begun to correlate it with people who are more annoying than average
This I don't understand, because in my experience, people with clippy pfp are usually helpful. I usually see them on the top of youtube or reddit comments, giving good advices and answering questions.
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...
i spent a lot of time playing with microsoft bob.
i don't know what you were actually supposed to do with it, but in real life i spent a lot of time building houses/forts so i did that in bob too. in a different era i'd've just done all that in minecraft.
Clippy would have absolutely having sold your data if Microsoft were forethinking enough.
Most importantly, Clippy happened before computers were permanently online. For it to harvest any data, I guess you'd need to mail in a floppy disk.
I doubt that. Privacy was eroded slowly through successive micro-violations.I remember when it was a big deal that gmail inspected your email contents, "but don't worry, no humans actually read it, we just mine the data to suggest better ads, but hey you get 'unlimited' storage when hotmail limits you to 4mb, so there's that!"
Looking forward to the "Be Like ChatGPT" site 20 years from now.
Clippy is not good, but maybe it is good in comparison to many modern computers, in some ways.
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.
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.
Well said. I've long been a believer in computer literacy. Streamlined UX/UI has made people, especially the younger generation worse at using & troubleshooting computers. It's painfully obvious in the corporate world nowadays. Clippy to me, absolutely played a part in this.
Be like clippy, entirely useless and annoying?
Be like clippy, a smiling, damned corporate villain who will sell data about anyone including his own grandmother to make a buck.
This doesn't annoy me but the movement of using this image feels extremely confusing and uneventful. Like wearing a ribbon, but with some weird attachment to an enterprise?
What events did you expect?
It's not a revolution, we can't just go with pichforks to Microsoft offices and demand de-enshittification of Windows.
It's a movement of "we are fed up with this shit".And our only tools are:
making people aware of how awful Windows, Mac and rest of Big Tech world are and to make people switch to Linux, because it's the only platform that is free from this bullshit and gives you some freedom.
Yes. As opposed to sleazy and exploitative.
Yep. And nearly impossible to get rid of.
Touche lmao
The assistant's name is Clippit, not Clippy.
Clippy was the nickname people gave it.
This fight was lost long ago unfortunately.
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
I liked Clippit and all the other assistants. I found them really useful when I was 11-12 years old and learning Office 97.
Basically, this. My first tech job was IT support at the time and ordinary people using their computers for actual work liked them too. I remember the dog/puppy being particular popular. At worst the assistants were seen as charmingly naff, not actively hostile. They were simple for power users to disable and this weird retroactive hatred for them feels more like some kind of nerd bitterness over the fact that normies ever started using computers in the first place. There was plenty of reason to be critical of Microsoft in those days that wasn't their office assistant.
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).
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)
Scale: 30 columns; '#' ≈ 2–3 % of clearly opinionated commentsMake 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.
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.
Clippy was the Copilot from the late 90s: A pointless annoying gimmick that disrupted everyone's workflow.
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.
I suppose changing one's profile picture is a start, but I'm much more interested in the development and distribution of countermeasures.
This feels like making horse armor a mascot for less exploitative DLC...
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.
Yeah, to me is always weird how people use nostalgia-lens to make things positive.
To me clippy is, and always was, a very corporate icon (literally), that - if they had AI at the time - would be used for that without any hesitation.
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.
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.
is this an example of retro-cultural misappropriation?
Cool they have NFTs
A most forward thinking Bayesian network consumer product ever.
What makes them think they can license Clippy out under the GPL?
Parody should be protected. But what makes it parody?
To graphically trivial to be copyrightable, at least in the US.
Random website claims:
>In June 2021, Microsoft applied for a Clippy image trademark.
Familiar with that at all?
There's trademark 90782739, which covers Clippy. It's trademark status is 641, "Non-Final Action".
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.
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.
Clippy really ... wasn't bad? It mostly stayed out of your way, occasionally showed a button to perform a useful task, and could interact with the help system without having to click through 3 menus.
It wasn't a panacea but it was at least positive-value, unlike most current AI.
the meme of "omg, clippy sucked and was sooo annoying" has overshadowed the actual level of annoyance from back in the day.
nobody used clippy, but nobody expressed vitriol. you just easily dismissed it and went on with your business.
I never got value from him
May have forgotten to change the avatar to the wizard
Maybe it's the generation gap? As a kid, I loved that I could "play" on the PC with Clippy, which mostly consisted on trying it to appear and make it do something. I get that if you were trying to get some work done, it might have been annoying.
I think we have our hacker/power-user blinders on. It was cool to hate Clippy.
But many non-tech-savvy users felt differently, and were accepting of the attempt to provide help.
what if clippy's true purpose was sales/marketing and not productivity?
back in the day people needed to be convinced that they needed a computer and that they'd be able to figure it out.
if you see clippy on a showroom floor or on your friends pc, you might think "oh yeah, i suppose I could use a computer to do that!".
yes obviously it's clippy because everyone hated clippy that is the point
the idea is that when your CEO goes on slack or teams or whatever and see 100 clippies they'll be "oh wow, nobody likes how we earn our dollar."
or the very least people who are concerned about surveillance will know who is on their team!
so just do it
I'm serious
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.
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.
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.
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.
It is not just you. This is sad. Not one mention of right to repair, right to own, privacy etc.
I think HN users are mostly in support of right to repair, there isn't much to discuss there. Criticism of a bizarre branding choice is not a criticism of the movement as a whole.
HN users are predominantly loyal Apple users and most of them are pro-gatekeeping and for walled garden approach.
So, I am not so sure that they're fully aligned with Clippy movement at whole, which is much more than just "right to repair".
I think it's (partially) because the link is mainly a video; there isn't a mention of those things in the site text either. Perhaps the submission should have [video] so as to be clear about what the main content is.
The two are utterly confounded for many who'd otherwise be a receptive audience to the message. It's a case of utterly unnecessary self-sabotage.
HN itself frequently has to address distractions within a story or discussion of it to surface significant or substantive themes. That the campaign here is blundering so hard out of the gate bodes poorly.
It's like picking Reaganism as a mascot for a democratic socialism movement. Doesn't make any sense and is a major factor why we moved in the direction we did. It's shooting yourself in the foot right out of the gate. Bad decision and isn't going to do their movement any favors. I'm not going to take them seriously if that's the kind of decisions they make.
>"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.
No? Clippy was an attempt at an assistant for average joes who didn't really know how to use a computer, and got out of your way when you hit the go away forever button. It could've been link bonzi buddy, same era, except clippy genuinely wasn't malicious. All the tech was there for clippy to embed itself into your computer and steal your data, but it didn't. A genuine winner of the yellow paper star of you tried.
Nowadays a lot of people still need computer use help, but every assistant is a bonzi buddy that wants to hijack your computer. Clippy was the last big non-malicious computer assistant.
People love free things and despise things that come with a cost. Tale as old as time.
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.
Usually i am against these kinds of comments throwing a bit of shade at the community, but if ever it was justified, it's this comment right here. And honestly it's not just this post and the resulting senseless debate over whether Clippy is good or relevant. The degradation has really been noticeable for the past year at least.
There's still good content but i increasingly feel like i need curation for a curated feed. I find myself remembering moments like this more and more and consciously redirecting my attention to other things because it's starting to feel as dumb as social media.
People positive about Clippy never lived the terror that was Clippy. SMH
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Clippy was Microsoft was absolutely DO sell your data.