It's a cute nostalgic way to say "the bar was on the floor and you blew it anyway."
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.
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.
Or dare i say…ad clippynem?
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.
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).
I didn't care for it, but it was easy to turn off.
EDIT: It just occurred to me this is why `cargo clippy` is named as such. Crazy that I never questioned that.
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.
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.
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 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.
This is a difference of degree, not of kind.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
Not to take away from the movement, though. I think it's great.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Clippy refers to a time before the internet.
It looks like you're a communist traitor.
Would you like help?
* Here are the names of my co-conspirators
* Just terminate me nowSure, 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?
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.
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.
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.
here is the comment posted before your comment that denigrates whole movement with it
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46090463
> 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.
It would but funnily enough new MS mascot for that, Mico, perfectly encompasses the AI movement with being amorphous, soulless blob
* 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.
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.
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.
I don't think we, as kids, were the core audience for Clippy. I think Microsoft just wanted to make home users feel like their computer was some kind of friend, and not a cold machine.
But I agree, using Clippy as a kid was fun and I loved seeing all the animations.
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?
You seem to think that people should approve of an advertisement if they approve of the product.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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
Yes! It was called Clippit! Why is everybody calling it Clippy these days?
I feel like it's a Mandela Effect [1].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_memory#Mandela_effect
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).
I remember towards the end of his tenure, MS basically acknowledged his unpopularity, by having Gilbert Gottfried voice him.
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.
Clippy must die. That's my movement.
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.
Sentiment toward Clippy-as-software (approximate, opinionated comments only)
Clippy hostile |######################......| ~70 %
Clippy not hostile |########....................| ~30 %
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.
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.
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.
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".
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 wasn't a panacea but it was at least positive-value, unlike most current AI.
nobody used clippy, but nobody expressed vitriol. you just easily dismissed it and went on with your business.
But many non-tech-savvy users felt differently, and were accepting of the attempt to provide help.
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!".
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 there to demonstrate to you that it's now the computer "who" is in control.
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.
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.
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.