Be Like Clippy
be-clippy.com355 points by Aloha 3 days ago
355 points by Aloha 3 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
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.
The “Clippy OS” was Microsoft Bob. The dog in the search dialog, Rover, was also from Microsoft Bob.
GOD THANKS THIS SHIT NEVER TOOK OFF AND WASNT ESTABLISHED, JESUS!!!!!!!!!!!!!
personally i found it just a tiny annoyance, like a cartoonish popup that didn't understand context enough to be useful.
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.
In what way could it be ad hominem? Where did I attack the poster? I did make an assumption of why they were arguing against it in such strong terms, but how does an assumption make for a personal insult on the author?
I realize they also brought up points about why they thought this was bad. The rest of my comment was spent replying to those points.
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).
I think it's a good choice precisely because it's so bad. It's like "Remember how this thing seemed like the worst thing imaginable? Now it seems utterly harmless."
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.
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 reckon it would be more like "Pay subscription to see slightly less of Clippy" with some small print explaining that "less" is relative to other people's future experience, not your current one.
[Remind me again in an hour] [Remind me again in 15 minutes] [Changed my mind, keep him]
May everyone who makes such dialogues be afflicted with severe depression and be forced to ruminate at night about how empty they feel despite their "good" job and high salary.
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.
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
I think the argument is that clippy would totally have done that if it was an option back then.
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.
I think it's more like thinking about clippy reminds me of simpler times in general.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
At the time, that sort of behavior was expected in almost anything you downloaded, it really was perhaps even more invasive than today. Java was infamous for installing a search bar on your browser and making it hard to not “accept” it.
Amusingly, it still seems to be available for download (and requires a whopping 16 MB of RAM): https://bonzibuddy.org/download.html
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
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.
yeah clippy absolutely would have sold your data if he'd been clever enough to do that.
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
The point is that the internet brought us a lot of bad things.
Clippy refers to a time before the internet.
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* Are you sure you don’t want to name any friends? Only a communist traitor wants to die
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?
>Interesting how many people in a hacker forum
I learned to accept the fact that HN reached a critical mass point that made it fill up with people who market themselves as "product-oriented engineers", which is a way to say "I only build things when they lead to products".
People commiting to the hacker ethos that consists of, among many other things, resistance to the established tools, embracing knowledge and code sharing, and exploration for its own sake are the minority.
The fact that there are many commenters who will claim that they finally build something they weren't able to build before and it's all thanks to LLM's is evidence that we already sacrificed the pursuit of personal competence, softly reframing it as "LLM competence", without caring about the implications.
Because obviously, every kid that dreamt of becoming a software engineer thought about orchestrating multiple agentic models that talk to each other and was excited about reviewing their output over and over again while editing markdown files.
The hackers are dead. Long live the hackers.
> I learned to accept the fact that HN reached a critical mass point that made it fill up with people who market themselves as "product-oriented engineers", which is a way to say "I only build things when they lead to products".
This is a mentality I am working extremely hard to get rid of, and I blame HN for indoctrinating me this way.
That said, these days I don't view this place as filled with "product-oriented engineers", but it's become like any other internet forum where naysayers and criticism always rises to the top. You could solve world hunger and the top comment would be someone going "well, actually..."
It's not HN that killed the hackers, it's the Internet snark that put the final nail in the coffin.
I consider myself a hacker as I spend many evenings and weekends writing code for no commercial purpose but to create cool stuff and sometimes even useful stuff all in the open. I have no idea why I should be against using LLM. Just like I use an IDE and wouldn’t want to write code without one, sometimes an LLM can quickly write some drudgery that if I had to write completely myself would likely stop me from continuing. It’s just another tool in the toolbox, stop regarding it as some sort of evil that replaces us! It doesn’t and probably never will, we will always have more important things to do that will still require a human, even if that does not include a whole lot of coding .
> I have no idea why I should be against using LLM
It highly depends on your own perspective and goals, but one of the arguments I agree with is that habitually using it will effectively prevent you building any skill or insight into the code you've produced. That in turn leads to unintended consequences as implementation details become opaque and layers of abstraction build up. It's like hyper-accelerating tech-debt for an immediate result, if it's a simple project with no security requirements there would be little reason to not use the tool.
> 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.
> Incorrect. Nobody is denigrating the goals of the initiative. All criticism I see is directed at the choice of the mascot only.
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
Nothing like the wasted time while Clippie loads animations from disk because someone in the workgroup turned it back on while searching for help in Word. Word 6 was already bringing out Macs to their knees, Clippie just added extra pain.
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.
> I must have been a target audience, as a kid learning windows it made the computer feel less threatening
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.
You could easily disable it permanently, unlike AI buttons in software today.
Seems possible to say Clippy is a poor mascot for this and also not be shilling for the establishment.
I am still surprised to see people making any connections between HN to actual hacker culture. While this message board has great content and moderation, it is sponsored and operated by one of the largest VCs in silicone valley. This is not your underground garage BBS running on a borrowed landline. HN is about making it in the tech industry and making money for shareholders.
Do you have any links to places which would better fit that?
it's perhaps telling of another flaw in this community that I find I need some way to clarify this isn't snark or sarcasm.
None of the comments I've read thus far are criticising the goals, just the figurehead.
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.
> Sure, if it had been today, Clippy would have been evil but that's the point, it wasn't back then.
I think that's the exact opposite of the point. Back in the day, clippy was hated for being annoying and evil. In today's context, however, it looks positively benign.
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.
Sorry to be the one breaking the news to you, but I don't think this site has been a "hacker forum" since at least a decade.
This is a "hacker" (startup founder who aims to enrich billionaire angel investors) forum, not a "hacker" (person who makes acoustic modem out of toilet plunger cups because it's illegal to plug into the phone line) forum.
> 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?
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.
Realism, not idealism, is generally what makes good products and movements.
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.
> 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.
It's not that deep lol.
Half the readers here work for the FANGS.
"Don't talk shit about the hand that feeds you" and all that.
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.
Wait is whitewashing now synonymous with “washing something bad to make it look good”?? Seems pretty racist to me to use it that way.
Whitewashing isn’t limited to the context you think it is: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/whitewash
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.
How are they annoying? I use YouTube and tend to have better interactions with clippies than I do non-clippies.
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.
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.
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.
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."
For those that don't get the reference, this is referring to the "Universal Paperclips" clicker game (inspired by Cookie Clicker) where you try to make as many paperclips as possible.
If you're reading this far down this comment chain, you might find this interesting:
The paperclip maximizer is a thought experiment described by Swedish philosopher Nick Bostrom in 2003. It illustrates the existential risk that an artificial general intelligence may pose to human beings were it to be successfully designed to pursue even seemingly harmless goals and the necessity of incorporating machine ethics into artificial intelligence design. The scenario describes an advanced artificial intelligence tasked with manufacturing paperclips. If such a machine were not programmed to value living beings, then given enough power over its environment, it would try to turn all matter in the universe, including living beings, into paperclips or machines that manufacture further paperclips.
Universal Paperclips (2017) - https://www.decisionproblem.com/paperclips/
Clippy would have absolutely having sold your data if Microsoft were forethinking enough.
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!"
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.
They already had the Microsoft Office Survey usage reporting thing as far back as Office 2003 (which still had Clippy). Perhaps even in Office XP (can't say for sure as I never used that one).
Looking forward to the "Be Like ChatGPT" site 20 years from now.
probably once ads are deeply ingrained into every llm interaction we'll look back at this period as the golden age of chatgpt
I'm amazed that so many people here completely miss the point. Clippy being annoying/horrible UX or not has absolutely nothing to do with the validity of the reasoning for it being compared to modern software trends.
The point is that microsoft got _nothing_ regardless if you were using or not using clippy. So clippy being bad could only be because they sucked at making something good for their users. It was not because they chose maliciously to make the user experience bad for an ulterior motive like collecting and selling user data or pumping up telemetry numbers for a promotion. They genuinely thought clippy would be a net benefit to their users in some way even though they were clearly wrong.
The point Louis is trying to highlight is the difference in intent, not in execution so that is why clippy is being used as the moral backdrop to compare modern software against. Saying clippy itself is "user hostile UX" is besides the point, and either shows a lack of comprehension or intentional feigned ignorance so that you can complain about a badly thought out feature you didn't like that hasn't existed for over 20 years.
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.
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
Yeah, its like, we all hated the useless Clippy, but at least it wasnt intentionally made to make the product worse and steal your data better
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.
> I liked Clippit
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
Even Microsoft used the Clippy nickname in their 2001 campaign about getting rid of him: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_Assistant#History
Be like clippy, entirely useless and annoying?
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.
Be like clippy, a smiling, damned corporate villain who will sell data about anyone including his own grandmother to make a buck.
Clippy was the Copilot from the late 90s: A pointless annoying gimmick that disrupted everyone's workflow.
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.
The assistant's name is Clippit, not Clippy.
Absolutely wild to use a bunch of elite slavers as your example of the good guys.
Surely the less bad example is guy fawkes masks, where the underlying media (V for Vendetta) has a character who isn't unambiguously evil and the masks have actually been used at protests in real life (and banned in at least a couple of countries as a result).
Clippy was the beginning of today's dark era, not a relic of some past golden age. With Clippy, users were conditioned to accept computers attempting to anticipate, guide, and shape the user's actions rather than responding to user commands.
For close to 3 decades we've been locked in a philosophical war with Microsoft (vendors in general) over what these stupid machines should really be doing for us, that parallels the exchange between Dr. Gibbs and Ed Dillinger in Tron (1982):
Us: User requests are what computers are for.
Microsoft: Doing our [specifically Microsoft's] business is what computers are for!
If I had a YouTube pfp, I'd change it to Tron—not Clippy.
Make Clippy cool again (given the assumption that he was, once, cool)!
I remember towards the end of his tenure, MS basically acknowledged his unpopularity, by having Gilbert Gottfried voice him.
for me personally, growing up from the MS-DOS era.. When clippy first came on the scene, it wasn't that I was concerned he was stealing my data or my school essays and projects, it was he was ridiculously annoying and on my relatively good PC for the time (Gateway nostalgia) it actually had a performance impact, at least it felt that way.
So while I get the sentiment of "Be like clippy" it just makes me thing that copilot is clippy v2.
Regarding other comments; It’s not about how successful Clippy was, it was the intention behind it. A facility to serve, to enable users to better use their computers. A highlight of the pivot to a world where you serve the computers, through the use of stripped back functionality, a lack of right to repair, the dissolution of the power user and a landscape of constant and deep data harvesting.
Building an AI product for kids taught me a lot about this. The assistant can't be annoying or condescending. Kids will just ignore it. But they love it when it feels like a collaborator, not a helper. Clippy failed because it interrupted. Good AI assists without getting in the way.
People! What are you talking about? Who said Clippy was hostile? How? Clippy was always there when I had to write an annoying essay, a long letter, or something else for school. It reassured me that everything was saving correctly on my 1.44" diskette. The real nightmare back then was bad blocks on your HDD or diskette -- not Clippy. Clippy is my friend.
Sentiment toward Clippy-as-software (approximate, opinionated comments only)
Clippy hostile |######################......| ~70 %
Clippy not hostile |########....................| ~30 %
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.
Not Clippy itself, but Office already had usage telemetry in 2003. Whether that's spyware or not is debatable.
This feels like making horse armor a mascot for less exploitative DLC...
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.
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.
It's fucking Clippy, an annoying but easily avoidable gimmick. Some people here talk like Microsoft birthed some sort of energy-leeching digital terrorist.
I suppose changing one's profile picture is a start, but I'm much more interested in the development and distribution of countermeasures.
Cool they have NFTs
clippy was a windows based closed source program that didnt have access to the internet. For the people who never grew up on windows, it makes no sense to what you're writing. We were using Linux, and before that *BSD or Solaris/SVR4/Sunos4/AIX/HP-UX/Ultrix/VAX/VMS, etc.
Clippy is not good, but maybe it is good in comparison to many modern computers, in some ways.
What makes them think they can license Clippy out under the GPL?
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".
A most forward thinking Bayesian network consumer product ever.
is this an example of retro-cultural misappropriation?
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.
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.
So, be a clippy-maxxer?
whoa, what a load of negative nancies
Is it just me, or does something feel wrong about the comments on this post? Where is the intellectual commentary? Clippy, the movement, is obviously not the same as the assistant.
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 HN audience is overwhelmingly aware of the issues around right to repair and data collection, so there isn't much reacting to do there - I assume there's already near-unanimous agreement that it's a good thing to educate people on, but we will have opinions on how to do it (or not do it) effectively.
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.
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.
People love free things and despise things that come with a cost. Tale as old as time.
People positive about Clippy never lived the terror that was Clippy. SMH
[dead]
Fuck clippy
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 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
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.
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.
Uh.... Ok. I don't disagree with the contentions that the author has, but making some clippy profile pictures and telling people to use it isn't a "movement" and the fact that so many comments here recognize it as one says a lot about how far culture has fallen.
If you want to make a difference, then absolutely refuse to use anything from any big tech company that is mining data and go 100% open source no matter how inconvenient it makes your life. No C levels or stakeholders give a flying fuck that you set your profile picture to a goofy symbol of simpler days.
Real movements involve serious sacrifice. I actually like those goofy clippy pics and would use one if it didn't signal to me that the person using it is likely a hypocritical chump who isn't willing to make any real sacrifices for the change they wish to see.
I don't know whether to laugh or cry right now.
Clippy was Microsoft was absolutely DO sell your data.
>"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.