Comment by NietTim 4 days ago
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.
The “Clippy OS” was Microsoft Bob. The dog in the search dialog, Rover, was also from Microsoft Bob.
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.
Telemetry is a lot harder of a sell if you're talking about "improving the user experience". Whereas Clippy was a case of "we assume this will help UX for new users -> it seems pretty harmless -> include it in our product", something like telemetry can only be simplified to "having mountains of telemetry data will help us because 0.0001% of it may be useful in resolving an issue -> this 0.0001% is so useful that every user should by default uplink their actions to Microsoft, regardless of any privacy concerns (which we know of ahead of time) -> enable it for everyone, they need to sacrifice a bit for the greater good". The intentions behind the two are similar only if you look at them in broadest possible terms.
lol no he had more lives than the Terminator you just ended Up accepting him because he was very unkillable
> 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.
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?
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.
It's not the same logic. They legitimately thought they are making helpful assistant for new users, not veneer to siphon user behavior data and sell it to highest bidder. They still competed with competition at that point, not tried to monetize same user base more and more
That was later admitted in an interview:
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?
Somehow it seems everyone has forgotten the headache of clippy popping up whenever you didn't want it to. I don't remember clippy fondly other than the art I suppose.
EDIT: It just occurred to me this is why `cargo clippy` is named as such. Crazy that I never questioned that.
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 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.
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.
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.
more like choosing an assault rifle as your logo if your movement is to ban nuclear weapons.
You have a very revisionistic take. Clippy was pure terror and it still angers me to see that smug paper clip.
Learned a bit more about this initiative since then. I guess this is a great example of why I heavily dislike creator initiatives like this. In their world getting more people to comment is a good thing, no matter what the comment says. In the real world this mostly benefits the creator and harms the initiative, since the first interaction people have with it is about the initiative being dishonest.
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.
Digital Convergence tried to do similar with the CueCat, a low-cost barcode reader that had a hardware serial number and for which the official software to drive it required you sign up for an account with them, giving them PII. When people figured out how to neuter the serial number and encryption in hardware, DC invoked the DMCA.
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.
I found a project ClippyJS: https://github.com/pi0/clippyjs
That adds clippy and all the other agents to a webpage. There is a PR on the repo that adds an example that hooks clippy up to a local ollama agent: https://github.com/pi0/clippyjs/pull/17
He knows. We know. The joke is that even the cute but useless failure at UI/UX design is better than the things we have to tolerate now
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.
reminds me of the Taleb quote "Many are virtuous for lack of opportunity"
this clippywashing is paid by Bill gates? remember when everyone hated him for Windows 95 crashing every 10 minutes and he had to donate his whole Fortune to compensate
very 1 dimensional thinking: open-source good, closed-source bad
A modern day Clippy would no doubt be like Friend Computer.
It looks like you're a communist traitor.
Would you like help?
* Here are the names of my co-conspirators
* Just terminate me now
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."