10 ms·
Be Like Clippy
- pmdr 10mo agoI liked Clippit and all the other assistants. I found them really useful when I was 11-12 years old and learning Office 97.
- alisonatwork 10mo agoBasically, 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.
- reddalo 10mo ago> 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_memory#Mandela_effect
- Kwpolska 10mo agoEven Microsoft used the Clippy nickname in their 2001 campaign about getting rid of him: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_Assistant#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_Assistant#History
- cowsandmilk 10mo agoWhat makes them think they can license Clippy out under the GPL?
- hyperhello 10mo agoParody should be protected. But what makes it parody?
- poly2it 10mo agoTo graphically trivial to be copyrightable, at least in the US.
- hfsh 10mo agoThis clippy white-washing is annoying as hell. Just like clipppy was.
- 1970-01-01 10mo ago100% this. Clippy was killed by Microsoft for a reason: it was a UI gimmick. The team that made it just wanted to show actions were in-progress. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YObNc2jbD0k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YObNc2jbD0k
- brabel 10mo agoWait is whitewashing now synonymous with “washing something bad to make it look good”?? Seems pretty racist to me to use it that way.
- willio58 10mo agoWhitewashing isn’t limited to the context you think it is: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/whitewash https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/whitewash
- windowshopping 10mo agoLiterally 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.
- o11c 10mo agoClippy 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.
- brokensegue 10mo agoI never got value from him
- Barbing 10mo agoMay have forgotten to change the avatar to the wizard
- parpfish 10mo agothe 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.
- gitaarik 10mo agoI guess his appearance appeals to SOME people..
- rijoja 10mo agoyes 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
- balamatom 10mo ago>"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.
- J37T3R 10mo agoNo? 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.
- NietTim 10mo agoClippy 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
- smallmancontrov 10mo agoQuite 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."
- vanschelven 10mo agomore like choosing an assault rifle as your logo if your movement is to ban nuclear weapons.
- throwaway150 10mo agoClippy 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.
- macintux 10mo agoI 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.
- throwaway150 10mo agoIt 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.
- lillecarl 10mo agoBe like clippy, entirely useless and annoying?
- ImHereToVote 10mo agoYes. As opposed to sleazy and exploitative.
- fallat 10mo agoThis 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?
- archargelod 10mo agoWhat 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.
- MarkusQ 10mo agoYep. And nearly impossible to get rid of.
- Anamon 10mo agoClippy was very easy to get rid of, and once disabled, it stayed that way. I'm no longer counting how many places I have to disable Copilot in (or find I'm unable to do so) every time there is a new update to Windows, or Edge, or VS Code, or Paint, or Notepad, or...
- moffkalast 10mo agoTouche lmao
- 10mo ago
- yosito 10mo agoClippy was Microsoft was absolutely DO sell your data.
- 0xbadcafebee 10mo agoApparently this is a movement started by Louis Rossman (Clippy meme explanation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0xAGUrkDsj4 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 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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WPeKsBmqlZs
- javier2 10mo agoYeah, 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
- Lammy 10mo agoThe assistant's name is Clippit, not Clippy.
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- ghm2180 10mo agoA most forward thinking Bayesian network consumer product ever.
- SteveJS 10mo agoMy 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-microsoft-clippy-paper-clip-loved-hate https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-life-death-mic...
- parpfish 10mo agoi 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.
- prism56 10mo agoClippy would have absolutely having sold your data if Microsoft were forethinking enough.
- chemotaxis 10mo agoMost 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.
- gosub100 10mo agoI 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!"
- trinix912 10mo agoThey 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).
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- shayway 10mo agoLooking forward to the "Be Like ChatGPT" site 20 years from now.
- what_for 10mo agoRegarding 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.
- xandrius 10mo agoInteresting 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?
- amarant 10mo agoClippy 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.
- xandrius 10mo agoI 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.
- reddalo 10mo ago> 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.
- trinix912 10mo agoYou could easily disable it permanently, unlike AI buttons in software today.
- tyre 10mo agoSeems possible to say Clippy is a poor mascot for this and also not be shilling for the establishment.
- poly2it 10mo agoIs 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.
- gdelfino01 10mo agoIt is not just you. This is sad. Not one mention of right to repair, right to own, privacy etc.
- shayway 10mo agoI 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.
- Retr0id 10mo agoI 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.
- archargelod 10mo agoHN 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".
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- bongodongobob 10mo agoIt'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.
- ryandrake 10mo agoClippy 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.
- sieep 10mo agoWell 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.
- ineedasername 10mo agoThis 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."
- gradientsrneat 10mo agoFor 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.
- robotguy 10mo agoIf 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. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instrumental_convergence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instrumental_convergence Universal Paperclips (2017) - https://www.decisionproblem.com/paperclips/ https://www.decisionproblem.com/paperclips/
- globalnode 10mo agoIn 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.
- evacchi 10mo agoCool they have NFTs
- pengaru 10mo agoSo 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.
- geoffmanning 10mo agoUsually 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.
- gpm 10mo agoAbsolutely 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).
- josfredo 10mo agoPeople love free things and despise things that come with a cost. Tale as old as time.
- raggi 10mo agoBack 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.
- 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 10mo agoI 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.
- trinix912 10mo agoNot Clippy itself, but Office already had usage telemetry in 2003. Whether that's spyware or not is debatable.
- Retr0id 10mo agoClippy 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.
- ares623 10mo agoThat’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.
- Retr0id 10mo agoFortunately, the right to repair doesn't need to be cool for me to support it.
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- birksherty 10mo agoBut you will associate maskot or picture of any movement to annoying people when more people used it.
- archargelod 10mo ago> 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.
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- ChrisMarshallNY 10mo agoMake 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.
- stevenalowe 10mo agois this an example of retro-cultural misappropriation?
- bdhcuidbebe 10mo agoPeople positive about Clippy never lived the terror that was Clippy. SMH
- geoffmanning 10mo agoUh.... 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.
- Anamon 10mo agoYou should watch Louis Rossman's original video instead of reading this strange page. It very much is about actively doing something to change the status quo. But it's also recognising that people are more likely to do so if they're reminded that they're not the only ones aligned with the cause.
- bitwize 10mo agoClippy 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.
- Anamon 10mo agoIt still left the choice of whether we wanted that guidance up to us users, though. It was auto-enabled to make users aware of the feature (and because it mainly targetted the more tech-illiterate). But if we didn't want it, we could turn it off, and if we did, we could ask for those suggestions. To me, that's a qualitative difference to the M.O. of big tech today. Google doesn't care whether I want an AI summary or not. In fact, they work hard to remove any option for me to express that I don't want it.
- __MatrixMan__ 10mo agoI suppose changing one's profile picture is a start, but I'm much more interested in the development and distribution of countermeasures.
- LuckiestVenus 10mo agoThis 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.
- shevy-java 10mo agoI 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.
- jeanlucas 10mo agoYeah, 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.
- gtsop 10mo ago[dead]
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- urbandw311er 10mo agoWhat 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.
- Anamon 10mo agoThe person who started the movement (Louis Rossman) was and does. The person who made this website maybe wasn't and does not. The phrase "be like Clippy" really doesn't fit what the "movement" is about and seems to be the source of the confusion on this thread. The choice of Clippy makes sense if you watch the original video. It's not suggesting that Clippy is something we should strive for again. It's meant to show that while we thought Clippy was horrible and anti-user then, just compare it to what we have now. Clippy wasn't "good", but infinitely more harmless in comparison.
- bilekas 10mo agofor 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.
- lkramer 10mo agoThis feels like making horse armor a mascot for less exploitative DLC...
- jackyard86 10mo agoClippy was the Copilot from the late 90s: A pointless annoying gimmick that disrupted everyone's workflow.
- jamiequint 10mo agoThe 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.
- dzhar11 10mo agoPeople! 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 % Scale: 30 columns; '#' ≈ 2–3 % of clearly opinionated comments
- zzo38computer 10mo agoClippy is not good, but maybe it is good in comparison to many modern computers, in some ways.
- nrhrjrjrjtntbt 10mo agoSo, be a clippy-maxxer?
- jijji 10mo agoclippy 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.
- iwontberude 10mo agoFuck clippy
- spankibalt 10mo agoIt's fucking Clippy, an annoying but easily avoidable gimmick. Some people here talk like Microsoft birthed some sort of energy-leeching digital terrorist.
- SpaceNugget 10mo agoI'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.
- nopechief 10mo ago[dead]
- victorbuilds 10mo agoBuilding 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.
- puskavi 10mo agowhoa, what a load of negative nancies
- willywanker 10mo agoPeople are overreacting to Clippy's intrusiveness - firstly you could replace Clippy with other characters like the red ball Dot, or a dog and cat (the latter would curl up and snooze on the screen). And being introduced in Office '97, later versions allowed you to turn off the Agent feature altogether. So it's a case of looking back with shit tinted glasses. The current environment is far more user hostile. Arrogant devs deciding they know best what the user should be allowed to do (starting with Firefox post version 4 and Windows post version 8). Design solely for mobile and then stretch it to the desktop. Or create a gigantic bloated mess of an Electron app which is just the webpage bundled with a Chrome instance and call it a day. Any day far worse in terms of resource consumption to end up offering less capabilities and worse UX than similar software running on a much slower computer from 25 years ago.