9 ms·

Microsoft is employing dark patterns to goad users into paying for storage?

395 points by jpmitchell 6mo ago

selectively 6mo ago
[flagged]
- Forgeties79 6mo ago
  >uninstall it Go tell all our parents to navigate that process. Microsoft is very insistent on their using onedrive.
  - selectively 6mo ago
    Open the screen where you remove apps and click the uninstall button.
    - Forgeties79 6mo ago
      You’d be terrible at IT support lol but jokes aside, the other part of the issue is by the time “the average user” would determine they don’t want it their data is so intertwined with it they struggle to figure out what is “on the cloud” and what is “local,” as well as what is at risk of being lost. [Older family member] has gdrive AND onedrive running, she has no clue which is which and is terrified of removing either for fear of losing years of stuff. I have tried to break it down for her but she doesn’t know all her passwords, doesn’t know what is a duplicate, etc. For me to fix this it would take days easily. Because for years onedrive was humming along and demanding more money to store more. I take a few cracks at it every year and make it better, but we’re so far from solved because it’s just so damn messy by design. And because I don’t know what matters and doesn’t, what is on which service, what she has backed up on random HDD’s, I can’t just start purging things. All of that is complicated enough without onedrive mucking it up further and constantly trying to scare her into buying more space. Transferring to a new computer is always a whole thing.
    - Forgeties79 6mo ago
      Follow up since I decided to look at their actual support/policy around OneDrive From M$: >Hide OneDrive in Windows 10/11 >OneDrive is built in to some versions of Windows and can't be uninstalled. But you can hide it and stop the sync process, so it stays hidden. Source: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/turn-off-disable-or-uninstall-onedrive-f32a17ce-3336-40fe-9c38-6efb09f944b0 https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/turn-off-disable-...
  - ijk 6mo ago
    Show me how to uninstall it, because I've tried and failed.
    - selectively 6mo ago
      Open Control Panel. OneDrive is in it. Click the 'Uninstall' button. Then click yes.
      - ijk 6mo ago
        And this keeps it from reinstalling?
        selectively 6mo ago
        Yes.
        Forgeties79 6mo ago
        No. From M$: >Hide OneDrive in Windows 10/11 >OneDrive is built in to some versions of Windows and can't be uninstalled. But you can hide it and stop the sync process, so it stays hidden. They essentially integrated it into the OS. It’s their file manager. This is easy info to verify. Source: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/turn-off-disable-or-uninstall-onedrive-f32a17ce-3336-40fe-9c38-6efb09f944b0 https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/turn-off-disable-...
- dev_l1x_be 6mo ago
  p99.999 user meets p50 users reality. If you don’t like this post on HN close the tab.
  - selectively 6mo ago
    When an awful post gets botted to the top of HN and I see it, I will call out the awful post if I so feel like it.
- asdefghyk 6mo ago
  RE "...Cloud Storage not enabled by Default ..." The issue is that Microsoft is moving users files to its cloud with out explaining to people CLEARLY what is happening. And getting their customers agreement. And this deception, in MY OPINION is obviously by design , meant to grow their cloud storage revenue thru upgrade offers If Microsoft was doing it properly, it would be CLEARLY explained to customer what was to happen and getting their agreement. to store files in cloud. Having used computers , since late 70s, Microsoft has a very long history of dodgy actions for their own benefit and at detriment to customer
  - selectively 6mo ago
    OneDrive seems pretty clear to me. It works identically to the way the same functionality works under macOS.
    - Fabricio20 6mo ago
      I dont know if it works like macOS since I dont use macOS - but it's not a simple copy-to-cloud. It actively replaces file handling in those folders, which breaks a bunch of applications like games that save stuff in Documents/My Games..
      - selectively 6mo ago
        The way iCloud Desktop works is that it uploads your stuff to the cloud, using your iCloud Storage quota. The way that OneDrive works is that it uploads stuff to OneDrive, using your Microsoft 365 storage quota.
        wtallis 6mo ago
        Is the "Desktop & Documents Folders" sync option in iCloud on by default? I've never used that feature, and it's a bit buried so it's hard to enable accidentally, but I haven't set up a new Mac from scratch in a long time so I don't know if it is a trap for new users the way OneDrive is.
- Fabricio20 6mo ago
  Somewhat related but I was talking about the OneDrive thing yesterday with a few non-tech friends and it has backfired so many times it's insane. OneDrive seems to take over the folder handling in windows for some reason, instead of just copying the data to the cloud. Any game you play puts stuff in My Games under Documents and you just installed windows? Yep, its gonna sync your entire FFXIV patch files into the cloud, that's 180gb of patches as the launcher downloads the game. tmodloader? Yep and then it's going to fail to launch the game. Skyrim and Starfield save data? Yep. Literally had to help someone troubleshoot that yesterday and the fix is just to uninstall OneDrive so the folder becomes a normal folder again. Had the ffxiv issue myself and the funniest part was getting a notification from microsoft to update my storage plan because it was full... I dont think people would be so much annoyed by OneDrive if it worked like other sync apps that just.. copied your file to the cloud. And maybe if it wasn't an annoying pop-up when you installed windows and didn't set it up (if we logged in, just set it up automatically and dont bother the user), etc..
- asdefghyk 6mo ago
  RE Uninstalling Edge. There will likely be some unintended side effect - is my experience
  - selectively 6mo ago
    Nope. This is an officially supported function, required under law. Edge WebView remains present for functionality that requires it.
- sonzohan 6mo ago
  Your ad hominem attacks aside, The point the author is trying to make is that Microsoft is actively using dark patterns in an operating system to get them to buy things. If you simply disable OneDrive without correctly uninstalling, the system will blast notifications at you with an ominous warning "You could lose data your system isn't backed up!" PowerShell and most CLIs are terrifying to non-technical people. Literally Here Be Dragons. The layperson might be skeptical of a YouTuber telling them to run a dodgy script, but in the age of "delete system32" people sure as hell aren't going to run a command as admin that a user on a random forum recommends they run. Stuff like this is why I have moved all of my systems except my gaming PC to Linux. Edit: no seriously look at this notification https://learn-attachment.microsoft.com/api/attachments/f5907ac4-1506-48dc-afc7-d48d136ecc52?platform=QnA https://learn-attachment.microsoft.com/api/attachments/f5907... Grandma absolutely does not understand what that means, She just knows she doesn't want to lose photos of her grandchildren.
  - asdefghyk 6mo ago
    RE "....If you simply disable OneDrive without correctly uninstalling, the system will blast notifications at you with an ominous warning "You could lose data your system isn't backed up!"....." The implication here is, OneDrive is backup . It is NOT. Moe Microsoft dodgyness ....
  - ycombinator_acc 6mo ago
    [dead]
- jmclnx 6mo ago
  >Cloud Storage being enabled by default is not abuse, I disagree, taking my data without explicit permission is stealing and abuse. >If you don't want OneDrive, uninstall it I heard if you do that, it gets reinstalled. Is that true ? > you are seeking to be able to uninstall Edge without hackery Per people I know. using Firefox you will be constantly nagged to use Edge. I never used Windows so I do not know if that is true. Taking my data sounds to me Microsoft is abusive. I liked M/S in the early DOS Days, but left when they started doing border line illegal things to grab market share. I say people using Windows should move elsewhere too.
- fhn 6mo ago
  Yes it is. You start your brand new computer and put files into it only to find out all that is stored on their Cloud without your consent. That's literal digital theft and fraud.
Bratmon 6mo ago
Email scammers often make their initial emails intentionally full of red flags to automatically filter out anyone smart enough to avoid the scam, and leave them with a pool of people willing to accept any amount of scummyness and abuse. Windows is the exact same thing but for operating systems. If you're still using it in 2026, it's because you want to be a mark.
- dijit 6mo ago
  99% of people don't choose their OS. They buy "a laptop" and it has an OS on it. Or they go to work and are provided "a computer" and have very little say (or ability to change) what it's running, even if they had the impetus, know-how and knowledge that other things even exist.. you're always running the risk that things will break for you. This is the moat Windows has. Not Games like people think, that's a stronghold for sure, but Gamers are inconsequential when compared to the amount of business computers and consumer systems people buy. Chromebooks were the answer for most consumers, but damn, that business moat is basically damn-near unkillable, especially in Scandinavia. (I'm currently subject to it myself).
  - Bratmon 6mo ago
    Exactly! They've gotten very good at mark-identification over the years.
  - Herring 6mo ago
    [dead]
  - fl4regun 6mo ago
    For real, the tools at my workplace either all work on linux already, or we just do most of our work on AWS linux VMs over VNC anyways, but our laptops are all windows. I'd rather have debian or fedora or whatever on my laptop but IT doesn't care, and they already have everything set up on windows. My laptop doesn't even matter, it basically only needs access to a web browser and it would be fine. The gaming moat is ever shrinking, at this point it's really only for games that explicitly choose not to support linux (very few in number), or have decided that kernel based anti cheat is the ONLY one worth using (few in number but some can be quite popular). Single player games have been working great for me for many years now, but I don't play stuff like apex legends, league, valorant etc.
mehdibl 6mo ago
So to free up space you delete folders instead of moving your familyvphotos that you don't have backup. Can we stop a bit this all evil Microsoft fault? And the author have a solution. Yeah those headline are buzzing.
- dpark 6mo ago
  Lots of people are not tech savvy. It’s entirely believable that someone who doesn’t understand why their stuff is in OneDrive in the first place also wouldn’t understand that they could move data somewhere else to fix the issue. Most people I know who don’t work in tech have 90% of their stuff sitting in their Desktop and the other 10% in Documents. These people don’t know how to create a folder named “c:\stuffidontwantinonedrive”.
TheOtherHobbes 6mo ago
I had a similar issue. I ended my O365 subscription. Outlook kept complaining I had exceeded my free storage, which surprised me because I've never used OneDrive for anything, and my email storage was well under the limit. I deleted a ton of useless emails anyway, but that didn't fix the problem. Somehow I had more than 25 gigs of space being used on a cloud system I'd never used, tied to an email account which supposedly needed less than 500 Mb of storage. Eventually after a lot of searching I discovered the magic page that gave me direct access to OneDrive's actual storage - which was not, somehow, the page that gave access to the files. OneDrive was storing a lot of attachments, and deleting emails and clearing the trash didn't delete them. Or something like that. Whatever the magic words were, I did eventually find them and fix the problem. But it took a while, I had to resubscribe for free for a month to make it happen, there was a lot of confusing side information online suggesting I should open a ticket (good luck with that on a consumer account) and generally it Just Didn't Work. I can imagine people resubscribing for another year just to make it all go away. This has been my lifelong experience of Microsoft - shockingly poor, contemptuous, or downright stupid interface design, Kafka-esque indifference to the user experience, and constant unwanted friction and complication, around a suite of core consumer products that are mediocre to start with.
- asdefghyk 6mo ago
  My Suspicion - Microsoft would have put lots effort into their cloud storage trickery - it would be an enormous revenue item . ....
asdefghyk 6mo ago
I'm surprised their has not been a class action here, about how ( unskilled , mainly ) people are tricked? / Forced ? into using cloud storage.
- fhn 6mo ago
  I'm all for suing MS but you're suggesting suing because of personal ignorance? The forced use of email for setup is probably sue worthy but I'd rather people just stop using MS.
  - pixl97 6mo ago
    >but you're suggesting suing because of personal ignorance Yes, because companies design products with dark patterns to ensnare users, it's not uncommon for people to win these kind of lawsuit. > I'd rather people just stop using MS. Ah yes, just like we're all going to stop using Apple and Google too. How about we have organizations that have teeth and protect the consumer
  - rcxdude 6mo ago
    I talk to a lot of users who are not utterly incompetent with computers but really don't want to focus on them any more than they have to. Almost all of them have enabled this kind of thing without understanding it at all because microsoft pops up nags for this kind of thing constantly and specifically designs them so that the easiest way to get them out of the way is to enable whatever thing they want you to enable (at which point, they will never mention it again, precisely the opposite, I would suggest, that you should do when you have fundamentally changed how the user's files are stored, and in stark contrast to if you refuse, which will result in you being nagged again and again).
kn100 6mo ago
I got caught out by exactly this, and I'm not exactly tech illiterate. what made it even more annoying is by the time I'd realised what had happened, it was practically impossible to get the files back out of OneDrive (since I decided that this was enough Windows for me, and went back to Linux), since the webui does NOT handle downloading lots of small files well, and you just end up getting a partially complete zip file. I gave up in the end as nothing in there was particularly important. This is an incredibly annoying default.
- Morromist 6mo ago
  I too have seen onedrive do this to people who aren't super-heavy computer users. Onedrive is a menace.
  - fhn 6mo ago
    you mean Microsoft is a menace. Microsoft has been tricking generations of people into using OneDrive. I hope nobody is dumb enough to pay for it and I'd create a ton of fake emails and fill it up with junk.
    - ryandrake 6mo ago
      Microsoft constantly tries to trick[1], annoy[2] and coerce[3] users into using their software. 1: https://www.theverge.com/23935029/microsoft-edge-forced-windows-10-google-chrome-fight https://www.theverge.com/23935029/microsoft-edge-forced-wind... 2: https://www.cloudcomputing-news.net/news/microsoft-tries-to-woo-google-chrome-users-with-persistent-pop-ups https://www.cloudcomputing-news.net/news/microsoft-tries-to-... 3: https://www.ctrl.blog/entry/windows-system-components-default-edge.html https://www.ctrl.blog/entry/windows-system-components-defaul...
- kn100 6mo ago
  Oh and another fun thing! I eventually just emptied the OneDrive so Microsoft would stop bothering me. This was maybe six months ago or so. Microsoft confirms I am storing nothing there. Just a week or two ago I got yet another email begging for money because my OneDrive was apparently full. It was a genuine email, I went as far as checking the headers for SPF/DKIM. When I signed into onedrive, still empty!
jmcphers 6mo ago
Google is no better. My family mostly uses iPhones, and on a big extended family vacation, I suggested we use Google Photos to create a shared album to document the trip. Everyone installed the Google Photos app on their iPhone so they could contribute... which resulted in all of them having their email accounts disabled. What happened? Google Photos on the iPhone backs up all your photos by default, and, like Microsoft, Google "shares storage" between email and photos. The minute Google Photos was installed, it started backing up photos until the paltry free tier was reached, at which point it disabled the associated gmail account since it was "out of storage". Talk about an anti-pattern; I spent a good chunk of time on that trip helping people get their storage back so they could send email again. I'll never recommend Google Photos to anyone ever again.
- dwayne_dibley 6mo ago
  Drives me insane that to see my existing Google library and shared albums I must allow Google photos access to my phones photos - at which point it turns auto back on.
- antisthenes 6mo ago
  It also doesn't help that Google's free tier (15GB) is laughably small in 2026. HDD capacity and Google's profits grew many-fold since that was last increased (in 2012-ish?).
  - eterm 6mo ago
    It does seem ridiculous that over 20 years ago, gmail was advertised with a real-time allowance ticking away increasing, which started at an incredibly generous 1GB allowance and you could watch it tick up in real time faster than you could fill it with mail. People designed "gmail-as-storage" apps to take advantage of this. 20 years later and we get a pathetic 15GB for mail, photos and everything else combined.
    - Terr_ 6mo ago
      TBF that's a little bit apples-to-orchards, since publicly routed e-mails have certain expectable size/frequency characteristics compared to, say, all the videos someone possesses.
liendolucas 6mo ago
From the WinUtil screenshots presented in the article I'm absolutely shocked about all the things that you presumably want to turn off or delete to have a "clean" Windows (to some extent if that's possible at all). It's also ridiculous that you need an external tool to easily disable/remove/uninstall every single thing you don't want . I haven't used Windows since many many years ago and the few times I sit down to interact with someone else's computer I suffer so much that after a few seconds I simply give up, I can't stand anything about it. If someone were to use Windows, besides WinUtil, are there a set of recommended open source scripts to clean up all the shit out of a fresh Windows installation? Just to be aware in case of emergency or extreme need...
- BLKNSLVR 6mo ago
  It was the need to do increasingly more post-setup configuration with each iteration of Windows after Win7 that finally pushed me to using Linux as my daily driver a few years ago. Especially when a few of these settings would get switched back to defaults after a Windows Update. These days, the amount of background services that Windows runs just makes it feel as if Windows itself is increasingly malware. You don't need a virus present for modern day machines, with massive compute resources, to be bogged down and running like a 486 back in the day.
- Esn024 6mo ago
  Winhance for removing things like OneDrive and the option to KEEP them removed even if a future Windows Update tries to reinstall them. You can also save your configuration to easily get all your preferences back on a fresh Windows install. I use this instead of WinUtil (which I haven't tried yet... is there any way in which it is better?). Windhawk for quality of life improvements if you don't like some of Windows's defaults. For example, I use it to have two rows on my taskbar and smaller icons (which was disabled in Windows 11), always open Classic Notepad instead of the new one (it loads much faster), and add multi-step "undo" to the Classic Notepad (the only thing I didn't like about it), among other things.
  - ripharamberip 6mo ago
    It's just so crazy that we are living in times where a notepad can be too slow. Wtf has happened?? How can they mess up a fucking Notepad App? Luckily I switched to MacOS mostly some time ago. Also has its issue but nothing compared to winslop
geophile 6mo ago
From perusing reddit, I see some Windows users tempted to consider Linux, often because of Windows 11. But then, many of them won't move because: it doesn't work just like Windows; there is some Windows application they must have, or maybe they just don't want to learn the alternatives. Or they use word/excel/powerpoint and have to interact with others who do also. The brainwashing, high tolerance for pain and misery (and expense!), and lock-in makes it close to impossible for ordinary computer users to escape.
- bsder 6mo ago
  > maybe they just don't want to learn the alternatives. Or they use word/excel/powerpoint and have to interact with others who do also. If they're on Office 365, they could be on Linux.
  - knollimar 6mo ago
    The browser version of excel is vastly inferior for power users
  - duskdozer 6mo ago
    Or winapps/cassowary/<latest tool> I try to use libreoffice when possible but sometimes the performance takes a nosedive for opaque reasons when excel is ok
    - subscribed 6mo ago
      Every time I try to edit my cv containing many disconnected tables I want to scream from the frustration. In Ms Office it's always the breeze and 2 minute job. In Libre office it's 15 at least, multiple fights with pages suddenly breaking, cells and rows refusing to stick to my dimensions or something perfectly fine in the print preview lose edges of the cells (ie missing letter, etc) when actually on paper/pdf. Infuriating. And I didn't even started about printing in Linux. What works in android ootb didn't consistently work for me across two distributions, several years and many versions. Papercut is the worst but cups is close second.
- 6mo ago
deleted 6mo ago
[deleted]
ImPostingOnHN 6mo ago
This is part of a broader, financialization-related push across the entire economy to convert one-time-purchase revenue into steady, predictable, ratchet-able recurring revenue. As an added bonus for them, they can sell laptops with less storage (= fewer chips in this tight market) with the expectation that the customer will store everything in the cloud, with plenty of overage fees.
carodgers 6mo ago
I don't use Windows at home. What happens if you don't have Outlook but your personal local files still fill up OneDrive storage? Do you get error messages that files aren't being backed up? Are you unable to save files?
cute_boi 6mo ago
even if you remove one drive in next update it will be installed automatically.
aucisson_masque 6mo ago
> Microsoft is actively hostile towards its users. No shit. And I see some of the same pattern with Apple now, for instance by default files on iOS get downloaded to the iCloud. And phone get backed up too, same as photos. It just happens that the free 5gb of iCloud storage is slightly not enough for all this shit, and you quickly get a pop up showing you that you must purchase an iCloud subscription. I know that work because my mother almost fall for it.
to11mtm 6mo ago
I long ago learned to pay the 2$ a month or whatever the hell to just have 1TB of storage and remember to keep my user account drive small enough where I never hit the amount.
_wire_ 6mo ago
Anytime any device in any context greets you with "Hello" or "Welcome", it is announcing that it doesn't belong to you, and that you must be vigilant to its exploitation of you. Windows is remarkable in that it is constantly editing itself, revising terms of service without notice, nudging, cajoling, and end-running you and at every turn. Update cannot be stopped, yet updater messages make it seem like you are initiating work and responsible for its successful completion: "You're 90% there...", "Don't turn off your PC", "Something didn't go as planned, don't worry your data is safe", which is eternally followed by "Welcome" lets arrange a few things... Apple's dark patterns are far lower key as they supply the total stack, it's feels more custodial. Linux if it says anything-- which it usually doesn't say much-- will say these changes are well-known to wreck things but you're at our mercy, them your system is put into some polluted state associated with a bygone era and all your config and data is your problem hope you're skilled at IT.
legitster 6mo ago
We've really got to stop calling every bad UI a dark pattern. "Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by incompetence." Having worked at MSFT I can tell you there's a LOT more incompetence than malice.
- raincole 6mo ago
  This particular case isn't a dark pattern, but the fact OSes are written under the assumption that users want to create an account for cloud services is. (Yes, by this definition Google, Microsoft and Apple are all dark patterners.)
  - deleted 6mo ago
    [deleted]
- rectang 6mo ago
  Selective incompetence for fun and profit: Pricing mistakes which make the supermarket money are unfortunate but low priority. Pricing mistakes which cost the supermarket money must be fixed immediately.
- xzjis 6mo ago
  The problem is that this incompetence is the result of (bad) choices by Microsoft's management. I'm not even talking about middle managers but the C-suite, who only care about satisfying shareholders, not about creating good working conditions or making sure the product is good.
- Arainach 6mo ago
  Forcing a cloud login for a desktop operating system is arguably a dark pattern. Defaulting to uploading all locally saved documents to cloud storage is ABSOLUTELY a dark pattern. The prompts every few months to "change back to recommended defaults" that make it easy to accidentally get into this state even if you made the correct decision previously to turn it off is a hellish black hole of a pattern. All three are intentional, not incompetent.
  - 6mo ago
stogot 6mo ago
My tech illiterate family members fell for this Microsoft dark pattern. Revolting
brailsafe 6mo ago
Apple also does this with iCloud storage and it's maddening, not easy to reconcile, and threatening to turn off.
tim-tday 6mo ago
If you want to experience Microsoft dark patterns just install a fresh copy of windows. Last a checked there were seven adversarial prompts where they try to trick you into doing something they want but you don’t. Send us your usage data! (No) Sign in with an online account (I want a local account) And on and on. Fuck those guys.
- jpmitchell 6mo ago
  I still have the old Win11 ISO that I used during my previous job. It still supported the 'oobe\bypassnro' command. I've read that Microsoft is phasing that one out in newer builds. I'll have to cling to that file with a death grip, lol. I remember so many times offering to my customers a clean setup with a local account and automatic login. I can't remember a single instance of anyone preferring to log in with an MS account.
rcxdude 6mo ago
What's also irritating is that onedrive will use some kind of 'smart' caching system to delete the local copy of a file. Which is all fine and dandy until you need said file when you don't have an internet connection. Explaining this to users is very difficult, they just know that something broke and usually when it was very important. (OK, what's even more stupid is IT departments who don't understand that onedrive has any problems at all, and insist on it and refuse to set up an actual backup system for user devices because 'onedrive will back everything up')
- trinsic2 6mo ago
  After Onedrive uploads all of your data to the cloud without your consent it sets all files as online only. Meaning the file will not live on your computer unless you click on it, then it will download a copy of that specific file to your system. If we didn't have criminals in our government right now I would think that this would be a huge anti-trust violation worth perusing.
  - TitaRusell 6mo ago
    I had to completely nuke OneDrive from windows. With a 2 terabyte SSD I'm unlikely to ever run out of space. Automatically opt in and make the settings deliberately vague and obtuse- companies that have FAITH in their product don't need to do this.
    - trinsic2 6mo ago
      And pray it doesnt get reinstalled and it automatically moves your data back to the cloud again. I had this happened to one customer of mine, not quite sure of the circumstances.
    - onemoresoop 6mo ago
      Why bother with windows though?
      - subscribed 6mo ago
albedoa 6mo ago
This is some real title gore, and I don't know who is to blame. As it appears: > Microsoft is employing dark patterns to goad users into paying for storage? That Microsoft is employing dark patterns is neither surprising nor a question. Can you explain this gross departure from the actual title jpmitchell[1]? Here is the original for reference: > How Microsoft abuses its users This is much more interesting and accurate. 1. https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=jpmitchell https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=jpmitchell
- jpmitchell 6mo ago
  I have no idea what happened. I literally just copy and pasted my post title for the submission. I assume there's some form of active curation going on. I've only recently started posting my content to Hacker News so I'm not sure yet.
  - albedoa 6mo ago
    [flagged]
  - slater 6mo ago
    It's well-known that HN mods will edit submission titles to reduce chances of flamewars/axe-grindiness in the discussions. Not saying that's what happened here, but not a new thing.
    - albedoa 6mo ago
      I would love to hear the excuse that the mods have for this title change. Good luck to them!
      - slater 6mo ago
        Excuse? They don't need an excuse, "How Microsoft abuses its users" isn't very descriptive. The edited title reduces the heat and gives more info.
0x_rs 6mo ago
Google Photos does the same thing, aggressively prompting the user endlessly until they give in. A solution to that is disabling the malicious application and installing Google's Gallery app instead, that possesses no ransomware capability from what I've last heard of it. Make no mistake: Google and Microsoft know very well this behaviour will lead to people subscribing to services they have, for the most part, no use for. It is therefore explicitly by design, deceiving tech-illiterate people threatening to delete files they never meant to upload.
- rk06 6mo ago
  my wife had here google account storage full because photos does auto backup and even after i deleted the photos from google photos. Auto backup kicked in and re-added them. Also, there is no good way to download all photos and videos for backup. they have to be manually selected. the ui is super frustating. and since the storage is shared with email, emails are blocked due to this
- tredre3 6mo ago
  You can log out from Google Photos on Android and it will stop prompting you (tap the icon upper right). This is useful if you wish to maintain access to the editing tools (Google Gallery and most third party galleries I've tried lack simple things like adding text on a photo, and they often can't edit videos at all). If you don't care about those tools then disabling Google Photos is indeed the best!
rconti 6mo ago
Office in the Mac is AWFUL about this. By default, it saves to a OneDrive you never asked for and can never find. You can't permanently change the location of your saved documents-- just change it once, and the setting stays "forever", maybe, until a software update fucks it up for you again. Auto-save is disabled if you're not using OneDrive. Nobody asked for OneDrive. It makes it a goddamned nightmare to find your files. I was trying to make it easy for my partner to save their files to the same location every time, make it easy to find in the Finder, make it easy for mailing attachments. No such luck.
- ValentineC 6mo ago
  > Office in the Mac is AWFUL about this. > By default, it saves to a OneDrive you never asked for and can never find. You can't permanently change the location of your saved documents-- just change it once, and the setting stays "forever", maybe, until a software update fucks it up for you again. I don't remember ever encountering this problem, and I just checked that I am definitely logged into my Microsoft account for whatever reason.
  - rconti 6mo ago
    I'm guessing you picked a location you wanted (outside of OneDrive) and the location has stayed, as I mentioned? I don't trust that it won't be reverted some day, but it hasn't in the past few weeks.
worik 6mo ago
Just replying to the headline: Well, duh! What do we expect? Reading the article, I still feel the same way.
zb3 6mo ago
Thanks to obsession over KPI and metrics in general, we can no longer trust big tech corporations. It seems they've forgotten WHY you actually want to play fair, they can no longer be trusted. We need to teach non-technical people that in this reality, a scam might come directly from the real seemingly "reputable" company.
mdavidn 6mo ago
I recently helped my mother-in-law configure a new Windows 11 laptop. I knew Microsoft did this, I was deliberately looking to avoid OneDrive, and it _still_ burned me. It silently uploaded all of her personal documents that I had transferred from an older computer. I was livid. Microsoft has permanently lost me as a customer. Every friend and family member who listens will upgrade to something else.
- jpmitchell 6mo ago
  Same for me. It was slow but now I've fully joined the hate parade. I only use MS products as necessary to support my business.
fhn 6mo ago
you should see Outlook 365. constant nagging about adding the url as the default mailto. Constant nagging for feedback. Mail doesn't load at consistently. OneDrive is just as bad.
hsbauauvhabzb 6mo ago
Recently I noticed autosave is not enabled by default on word, I clicked to enable and it prompted me to save to one drive as apparently that’s the only way to enable autosave, a feature which has been around since ~Word 2000.
1116574 6mo ago
This has been default experience for "normies" for quite some time now. Same for Google gallery which syncs to gdrive. Just today we had a guy who got similar messages from one drive as one in the blogpost, and made the mistake of asking chatgpt about it. After renaming, moving, deleting and even doing regedit as llm instructef, some of the files went missing, some we managed to find. Few weeks ago I had to explain over the phone how to setup windows without ms account, and we had to resort to turning off WiFi in the house lmao
seemaze 6mo ago
So I never saw the 2020 series Space Force. But this clip[0] about Windows updates just happened into one of my feeds today and I was physically bowled over laughing. I must have watched it a half dozen times in rapid succession. I suspect I'm just one of today's lucky 10,000 and everyone else here is already in on the joke, but I can't not share. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k899IiwP-iw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k899IiwP-iw
sakesun 6mo ago
Not just storage expense. Recently I work extensively for a very large financial institute. They provide me with Windows terminal to work on the project. I initially expected to myself to work on a very institutional security constrained environment. Instead, the workspace keep popping up with annoying msn Ads inadvertently, out of any context. The default browser, Edge, was default to msn, which is full of more distracting Ads. They trick corporate users to be their Ads viewers using their trustworthy image in enterprise IT. No idea why they think that revenue would worth the downsides.
- greazy 6mo ago
  I liked Win10, once you use ShutUp10 it was a solid OS minus a few annoyances. But Win11 is horrendous. Watching the right click menu dynamocally and slowly populate with "open with" options is jaring. Now add two right click menus is wild.
  - subscribed 6mo ago
    My choice was win10privacy, pretty quick and brutal, gutting and disabling most intrusive things. Now I'm moving to Linux (once I finally found one that supports nvidia and mux really well).
- sakesun 6mo ago
  Just a moment ago while I'm working on the previously mentioned workstation provided by the financial institute, at the bottom left corner there a new notification read: "News for you: 'New girls clubs...'" Meh. Turns out it's a news that has nothing to do with me nor my work at all. https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2026/04/15/trump-dei-crackdown-targets-women-networking/89426934007/ https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2026/04/15/trump-dei-cr... Similar notifications keep poping up all days.
deleted 6mo ago
[deleted]
vachina 6mo ago
If you think this is egregious wait till you experience Apple products.
- vaylian 6mo ago
  Can you elaborate?
  - vachina 6mo ago
    -iOS by default uploads your entire Photo album to iCloud. -iOS by default backs up all app resources to iCloud (so cloud native apps like Google Drive also gets backed up). You have to explicitly disable this backup app by app. -Save to.. dialog on iOS defaults and resets to saving to iCloud’s “Downloads” directory. -On MacOS, everything on the Desktop directory is synced to iCloud. You cannot delete the iCloud copy of files without also (it automatically) deleting the local copy. -When you (very very easily) run out of iCloud storage (paltry 5GB), they made sure you know via nagging notifications, a dedicated header in Settings. Then they start warning you your iPhone is not getting backed up every now and then. -They also don’t provide a way to use the same backup interface to make backups locally. You MUST use iCloud for backups. I tolerate Apple products because the alternatives are worse (for now)
    - deafpolygon 6mo ago
      - false (you have to opt in) - false (it depends on the app) - depends on your cloud settings - if you opt in, yes - well if your storage is full, you kind of need to know - they do, it's called time machine. you need a local disk for that.
      - vachina 6mo ago
        I'm not sure if you even use any Apple products. I recently reset my iPhone and started from scratch (because of another system storage bloat issue) and THOSE WERE THE DEFAULTS, I HAD TO TURN EVERYTHING OFF MANUALLY. It didn't even ask. > time machine Oh great, let's get a dedicated, proprietary device just to store MY binary blobs. I'm not even sure if Timemachine supports exactly the features offered by iCloud. I cannot for example, browse photos backed up in Timemachine in the Photos app just like with iCloud.
JumpCrisscross 6mo ago
Are the number of computers running Windows rising or falling? (Most curious for the U.S. and Europe.)
- tonyedgecombe 6mo ago
  Windows share of the desktop market has been falling for a long time. https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/worldwide/#monthly-200901-202603 https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/worldwide...
  - JumpCrisscross 6mo ago
    What's unknown?
    - tonyedgecombe 6mo ago
      I don’t know.
    - shmeeed 6mo ago
      A sure sign of garbage stats. Edit: https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/india#monthly-200901-202603 https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/india#mon...
VerifiedReports 6mo ago
To be fair (and I hate Microsoft, so it's painful), Microsoft is not alone here. Google and Apple perpetrate similar BS, with Google Drive being a major offender.
deckar01 6mo ago
Microsoft used to have an app called Office Lens. It helped color correct and keystone adjust documents scanned with a phone camera. They pushed an update that gutted the app and said this app has been replaced by OneDrive. After installing OneDrive and dodging multiple dark pattern storage upsells, I discovered the OneDrive app doesn’t have any of the document scanning tools. I’m sure someone got a bonus for increasing OneDrive installs though.
- sjs7007 6mo ago
  I got caught up in that too. Install OneDrive and saw you can't use it without signing up. I bailed right that. Now admittedly my workaround ended up being uh... Google Drive.
- laserlight 6mo ago
  Wow. This is news to me. Office Lens had been my trusted scanning app for ten years. It was years ahead of Cam Scanner bullshit, which many people used, likely because of marketing.
- Frieren 6mo ago
  Unregulated capitalism descents into scams and fraud. Why better your products and services when it is possible to buy competitors, increase prices and lie? We need judges and policymakers that punish harshly this behavior and force companies to compete in quality and price instead of lies and competition elimination.
- thombles 6mo ago
  It doesn’t? I use the OneDrive app for scanning documents all the time. + button then “Capture”
  - deckar01 6mo ago
    Oh, I have to use their app to take the pic. I can’t use my existing photos anymore.
- ahartmetz 6mo ago
ddtaylor 6mo ago
Microsoft has been disrespecting their user base for a very long time now. This is not news. Stop giving them your money.
- bloomingeek 6mo ago
  I like/love your statement. The problem is, to their detriment, most users don't have the chops to switch to Linux/Apple.(Or the patience.) Since I couldn't afford Apple at the time, I jumped into Red Hat years age. What a nightmare! But I didn't give up because it was kind of fun. A lot of folks didn't think so. Linux and Apple have made tremendous strides, of course, but if tech stuff is not your thing, you keep financing MS. On this great site, there's a lot of complicated things discussed, some of which I admit I don't grasp. Many outside this sphere are mostly lost on any tech that is slightly complex, sometimes even if they are helped. One could argue, correctly, that they learn their smartphones and smart TVs just fine. These devises are computer like, but still not a computer. Changing people's minds on operating systems is as hard as politics and religion I've found.
  - ddtaylor 6mo ago
    Desktop Linux has been a little bit of a fragmented landscape over time, but I think that what keeps most organizations using Microsoft is that they have someone on staff dedicated to resolving all of these problems for all their users. Most organizations don't ask their regular employees to do things related to setting up software, making sure that they have access to network shares, etc, that's done by a dedicated IT staff that just happens to only be Windows right now for some reason. Over time the web browser is becoming the only real software that is needed and that has simplified things. Gaming has helped improve the Desktop Linux space, and Valve is a great force for change there. KDE has decent funding and adoption now.
vaughands 6mo ago
I see a lot of hate for Google in this thread but at least one thing they do well: it's really easy to fix. Takeout actually works. You can just download your photos and leave. As the top post identified here, Microsoft makes this a REAL pain to leave after they snared you.
themafia 6mo ago
Onedrive: "How would you like your files sorted?" Me: "Can I do alphabetical and perhaps by creation time?" Onedrive: "NO! Absolutely not! I will sort everything based on the last time you opened the document." :|
thombles 6mo ago
Microsoft could tone it down a bit (especially all the full screen harassment after windows updates) but I wonder how many casual users have had their bacon saved precisely because their documents and desktop got pushed to the cloud?
hansmayer 6mo ago
Well, colour me surprised :)
Gazoche 6mo ago
Not that it's any excuse, but Apple does something similar by saving your photos to iCloud and deleting them from your local storage without telling you. I have seen the following scenario play out twice already: - The free iCloud tier runs out of storage because of the photo backups - Apple spams the user with warning notifications and emails and incentives to upgrade - User sees that nonsense and decides they don't really need iCloud backups (sometimes they didn't even know it was on) and turn it off - But oops, turns out iOS had "helpfully" removed the original photos from the local device to "save space", and now the photos are inaccessible - User tries to turn iCloud back on to access their photos but iOS now refuses to do it because the account is out of storage space (but don't worry, you can still upgrade to a paid plan!) - The photos are now held hostage by Apple You can access the photos from the iCloud website, but the download interface is clunky because it is not made for mass exports. And in this age of smartphones and apps, how many people know this is even an option? When this happened to an elderly family member of mine, it was only sheer luck that he had his iCloud password written down somewhere and I was able to rescue his photos from Apple's jaws.
- ValentineC 6mo ago
  > Not that it's any excuse, but Apple does something similar by saving your photos to iCloud and deleting them from your local storage without telling you. Photos > Download and Keep Originals.
  - Gazoche 6mo ago
    I know how to disable it. I should not have to. The setting is (intentionally) confusing too: "download and keep" implies that photos always have to transit via iCloud first, and the default is ambiguously named "optimise storage" rather than something more explicit like "move photos to iCloud".
bentobean 6mo ago
MacOS does this as well, and it drives me nuts. No, I do not want files on my desktop to be synced to iCloud.
boh 6mo ago
When you use your highly restricted/infosec encrusted enterprise Windows laptop and still see the Xbox App, you know Microsoft have lost all respect for their customers. Consumer laptops are just a pure sales distribution channel on top of an OS that can now barely handle spying on you, selling you things AND actually doing the thing you bought it for. The most eye-opening moment when you switch to Linux is that it takes as fast as you typing your password in to start using it. You realize just how much Microsoft has fundamentally compromised software and people are too used to it to assume computers aren't just slow by default.
joshstrange 6mo ago
I'm shocked that I can't find a single top-level comment that understands that the general public does not back up their data. We can call OneDrive a dark pattern or saving customer's butts from themselves. If it wasn't the default: "What do you mean all my pictures are gone forever because I never turned on OneDrive?". I have no love for Microsoft but I'm having a really hard time seeing how it isn't the smart default to backup the user's files/photos to the cloud. Sure, if you are here on HN then maybe you have NextCloud, Immich, Dropbox, Google Drive/Photos, etc, that you make sure to backup your pictures to. I can assure you the general public does no such thing unless it's the default in the OS. Try consoling a few people about how the pictures or files they hold dear are gone forever and then come back and talk about this "dark pattern". This blog post is somehow a success story? No, it's a ticking time bomb. Great, you free'd up space for email at the expense of un-protecting all his pictures/files. That's not a win. The author gets _so close_ to the point but manages to miss it completely: > but I suspect that he deleted files (including family photos) for which he had no other backup. > I’m a computer nerd, and if you are reading this you probably are as well. We can change that setting ourselves without much thought, and we probably have backups of our important data in case recovery is necessary. But they couldn't make 1 more tiny hop to "my neighbor will not manage backups and so these files are now at risk".
- WhyNotHugo 6mo ago
  Synchronisation is not back-up. Dropbox is not a back-up mechanism. If files get deleted on the local host, they get deleted from OneDrive/Dropbox too.
  - joshstrange 6mo ago
    > If files get deleted on the local host, they get deleted from OneDrive/Dropbox too. Dropbox, at least, does offer file history but I'm talking about protecting against hardware failure here more than a user deleting their own files. That's the use-case I've personally dealt with more often than not. "I dropped my phone in the pool, how do I get my pictures back", "My laptop won't turn on anymore, just shows a folder with a question mark on it when I try to boot", etc. Self-inflicted or just general hardware failure is the main issue people deal with in my experience.
jcalvinowens 6mo ago
I've been replacing old windows machines with raspberry pi fives for my extended family. They all love them! The cost makes the biggest difference: everybody is resistant, but caves and tries it when I say it only costs $100.
- prism56 6mo ago
  I setup my mum one of those cheap four core atom boxes with Linux. Was about £120 (before the current situation). They browse the internet on chrome for 99% of their PC usage. Edit the very odd letter. For a lot of people its perfect.
rng-concern 6mo ago
My wife ran into something similar to this. Microsoft changed the bucket that email attachments went into for quota purposes. She had a lot of emails with pictures attached, so was immediately above the new quota, and she stopped receiving emails. This definitely puts a fire under one, as she had to quickly under pressure (as each day was missed emails), figure out which emails to keep/backup. We signed her up for a new gmail immediately. The experience was stressful. Very poor.
1vuio0pswjnm7 6mo ago
Actual title: How Microsoft abuses its users

395 points by jpmitchell 6mo ago

selectively 6mo ago

[flagged]

Forgeties79 6mo ago
>uninstall it Go tell all our parents to navigate that process. Microsoft is very insistent on their using onedrive.
- selectively 6mo ago
  Open the screen where you remove apps and click the uninstall button.
  - Forgeties79 6mo ago
    You’d be terrible at IT support lol but jokes aside, the other part of the issue is by the time “the average user” would determine they don’t want it their data is so intertwined with it they struggle to figure out what is “on the cloud” and what is “local,” as well as what is at risk of being lost. [Older family member] has gdrive AND onedrive running, she has no clue which is which and is terrified of removing either for fear of losing years of stuff. I have tried to break it down for her but she doesn’t know all her passwords, doesn’t know what is a duplicate, etc. For me to fix this it would take days easily. Because for years onedrive was humming along and demanding more money to store more. I take a few cracks at it every year and make it better, but we’re so far from solved because it’s just so damn messy by design. And because I don’t know what matters and doesn’t, what is on which service, what she has backed up on random HDD’s, I can’t just start purging things. All of that is complicated enough without onedrive mucking it up further and constantly trying to scare her into buying more space. Transferring to a new computer is always a whole thing.
  - Forgeties79 6mo ago
    Follow up since I decided to look at their actual support/policy around OneDrive From M$: >Hide OneDrive in Windows 10/11 >OneDrive is built in to some versions of Windows and can't be uninstalled. But you can hide it and stop the sync process, so it stays hidden. Source: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/turn-off-disable-or-uninstall-onedrive-f32a17ce-3336-40fe-9c38-6efb09f944b0 https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/turn-off-disable-...
- ijk 6mo ago
  Show me how to uninstall it, because I've tried and failed.
  - selectively 6mo ago
    Open Control Panel. OneDrive is in it. Click the 'Uninstall' button. Then click yes.
    - ijk 6mo ago
      And this keeps it from reinstalling?
      - selectively 6mo ago
        Yes.
        Forgeties79 6mo ago
        No. From M$: >Hide OneDrive in Windows 10/11 >OneDrive is built in to some versions of Windows and can't be uninstalled. But you can hide it and stop the sync process, so it stays hidden. They essentially integrated it into the OS. It’s their file manager. This is easy info to verify. Source: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/turn-off-disable-or-uninstall-onedrive-f32a17ce-3336-40fe-9c38-6efb09f944b0 https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/turn-off-disable-...
dev_l1x_be 6mo ago
p99.999 user meets p50 users reality. If you don’t like this post on HN close the tab.
- selectively 6mo ago
  When an awful post gets botted to the top of HN and I see it, I will call out the awful post if I so feel like it.
asdefghyk 6mo ago
RE "...Cloud Storage not enabled by Default ..." The issue is that Microsoft is moving users files to its cloud with out explaining to people CLEARLY what is happening. And getting their customers agreement. And this deception, in MY OPINION is obviously by design , meant to grow their cloud storage revenue thru upgrade offers If Microsoft was doing it properly, it would be CLEARLY explained to customer what was to happen and getting their agreement. to store files in cloud. Having used computers , since late 70s, Microsoft has a very long history of dodgy actions for their own benefit and at detriment to customer
- selectively 6mo ago
  OneDrive seems pretty clear to me. It works identically to the way the same functionality works under macOS.
  - Fabricio20 6mo ago
    I dont know if it works like macOS since I dont use macOS - but it's not a simple copy-to-cloud. It actively replaces file handling in those folders, which breaks a bunch of applications like games that save stuff in Documents/My Games..
    - selectively 6mo ago
      The way iCloud Desktop works is that it uploads your stuff to the cloud, using your iCloud Storage quota. The way that OneDrive works is that it uploads stuff to OneDrive, using your Microsoft 365 storage quota.
      - wtallis 6mo ago
        Is the "Desktop & Documents Folders" sync option in iCloud on by default? I've never used that feature, and it's a bit buried so it's hard to enable accidentally, but I haven't set up a new Mac from scratch in a long time so I don't know if it is a trap for new users the way OneDrive is.
Fabricio20 6mo ago
Somewhat related but I was talking about the OneDrive thing yesterday with a few non-tech friends and it has backfired so many times it's insane. OneDrive seems to take over the folder handling in windows for some reason, instead of just copying the data to the cloud. Any game you play puts stuff in My Games under Documents and you just installed windows? Yep, its gonna sync your entire FFXIV patch files into the cloud, that's 180gb of patches as the launcher downloads the game. tmodloader? Yep and then it's going to fail to launch the game. Skyrim and Starfield save data? Yep. Literally had to help someone troubleshoot that yesterday and the fix is just to uninstall OneDrive so the folder becomes a normal folder again. Had the ffxiv issue myself and the funniest part was getting a notification from microsoft to update my storage plan because it was full... I dont think people would be so much annoyed by OneDrive if it worked like other sync apps that just.. copied your file to the cloud. And maybe if it wasn't an annoying pop-up when you installed windows and didn't set it up (if we logged in, just set it up automatically and dont bother the user), etc..
asdefghyk 6mo ago
RE Uninstalling Edge. There will likely be some unintended side effect - is my experience
- selectively 6mo ago
  Nope. This is an officially supported function, required under law. Edge WebView remains present for functionality that requires it.
sonzohan 6mo ago
Your ad hominem attacks aside, The point the author is trying to make is that Microsoft is actively using dark patterns in an operating system to get them to buy things. If you simply disable OneDrive without correctly uninstalling, the system will blast notifications at you with an ominous warning "You could lose data your system isn't backed up!" PowerShell and most CLIs are terrifying to non-technical people. Literally Here Be Dragons. The layperson might be skeptical of a YouTuber telling them to run a dodgy script, but in the age of "delete system32" people sure as hell aren't going to run a command as admin that a user on a random forum recommends they run. Stuff like this is why I have moved all of my systems except my gaming PC to Linux. Edit: no seriously look at this notification https://learn-attachment.microsoft.com/api/attachments/f5907ac4-1506-48dc-afc7-d48d136ecc52?platform=QnA https://learn-attachment.microsoft.com/api/attachments/f5907... Grandma absolutely does not understand what that means, She just knows she doesn't want to lose photos of her grandchildren.
- asdefghyk 6mo ago
  RE "....If you simply disable OneDrive without correctly uninstalling, the system will blast notifications at you with an ominous warning "You could lose data your system isn't backed up!"....." The implication here is, OneDrive is backup . It is NOT. Moe Microsoft dodgyness ....
- ycombinator_acc 6mo ago
  [dead]
jmclnx 6mo ago
>Cloud Storage being enabled by default is not abuse, I disagree, taking my data without explicit permission is stealing and abuse. >If you don't want OneDrive, uninstall it I heard if you do that, it gets reinstalled. Is that true ? > you are seeking to be able to uninstall Edge without hackery Per people I know. using Firefox you will be constantly nagged to use Edge. I never used Windows so I do not know if that is true. Taking my data sounds to me Microsoft is abusive. I liked M/S in the early DOS Days, but left when they started doing border line illegal things to grab market share. I say people using Windows should move elsewhere too.
fhn 6mo ago
Yes it is. You start your brand new computer and put files into it only to find out all that is stored on their Cloud without your consent. That's literal digital theft and fraud.

Bratmon 6mo ago

Email scammers often make their initial emails intentionally full of red flags to automatically filter out anyone smart enough to avoid the scam, and leave them with a pool of people willing to accept any amount of scummyness and abuse. Windows is the exact same thing but for operating systems. If you're still using it in 2026, it's because you want to be a mark.

dijit 6mo ago
99% of people don't choose their OS. They buy "a laptop" and it has an OS on it. Or they go to work and are provided "a computer" and have very little say (or ability to change) what it's running, even if they had the impetus, know-how and knowledge that other things even exist.. you're always running the risk that things will break for you. This is the moat Windows has. Not Games like people think, that's a stronghold for sure, but Gamers are inconsequential when compared to the amount of business computers and consumer systems people buy. Chromebooks were the answer for most consumers, but damn, that business moat is basically damn-near unkillable, especially in Scandinavia. (I'm currently subject to it myself).
- Bratmon 6mo ago
  Exactly! They've gotten very good at mark-identification over the years.
- Herring 6mo ago
  [dead]
- fl4regun 6mo ago
  For real, the tools at my workplace either all work on linux already, or we just do most of our work on AWS linux VMs over VNC anyways, but our laptops are all windows. I'd rather have debian or fedora or whatever on my laptop but IT doesn't care, and they already have everything set up on windows. My laptop doesn't even matter, it basically only needs access to a web browser and it would be fine. The gaming moat is ever shrinking, at this point it's really only for games that explicitly choose not to support linux (very few in number), or have decided that kernel based anti cheat is the ONLY one worth using (few in number but some can be quite popular). Single player games have been working great for me for many years now, but I don't play stuff like apex legends, league, valorant etc.

mehdibl 6mo ago

So to free up space you delete folders instead of moving your familyvphotos that you don't have backup. Can we stop a bit this all evil Microsoft fault? And the author have a solution. Yeah those headline are buzzing.

dpark 6mo ago
Lots of people are not tech savvy. It’s entirely believable that someone who doesn’t understand why their stuff is in OneDrive in the first place also wouldn’t understand that they could move data somewhere else to fix the issue. Most people I know who don’t work in tech have 90% of their stuff sitting in their Desktop and the other 10% in Documents. These people don’t know how to create a folder named “c:\stuffidontwantinonedrive”.

TheOtherHobbes 6mo ago

I had a similar issue. I ended my O365 subscription. Outlook kept complaining I had exceeded my free storage, which surprised me because I've never used OneDrive for anything, and my email storage was well under the limit. I deleted a ton of useless emails anyway, but that didn't fix the problem. Somehow I had more than 25 gigs of space being used on a cloud system I'd never used, tied to an email account which supposedly needed less than 500 Mb of storage. Eventually after a lot of searching I discovered the magic page that gave me direct access to OneDrive's actual storage - which was not, somehow, the page that gave access to the files. OneDrive was storing a lot of attachments, and deleting emails and clearing the trash didn't delete them. Or something like that. Whatever the magic words were, I did eventually find them and fix the problem. But it took a while, I had to resubscribe for free for a month to make it happen, there was a lot of confusing side information online suggesting I should open a ticket (good luck with that on a consumer account) and generally it Just Didn't Work. I can imagine people resubscribing for another year just to make it all go away. This has been my lifelong experience of Microsoft - shockingly poor, contemptuous, or downright stupid interface design, Kafka-esque indifference to the user experience, and constant unwanted friction and complication, around a suite of core consumer products that are mediocre to start with.

asdefghyk 6mo ago
My Suspicion - Microsoft would have put lots effort into their cloud storage trickery - it would be an enormous revenue item . ....

asdefghyk 6mo ago

I'm surprised their has not been a class action here, about how ( unskilled , mainly ) people are tricked? / Forced ? into using cloud storage.

fhn 6mo ago
I'm all for suing MS but you're suggesting suing because of personal ignorance? The forced use of email for setup is probably sue worthy but I'd rather people just stop using MS.
- pixl97 6mo ago
  >but you're suggesting suing because of personal ignorance Yes, because companies design products with dark patterns to ensnare users, it's not uncommon for people to win these kind of lawsuit. > I'd rather people just stop using MS. Ah yes, just like we're all going to stop using Apple and Google too. How about we have organizations that have teeth and protect the consumer
- rcxdude 6mo ago
  I talk to a lot of users who are not utterly incompetent with computers but really don't want to focus on them any more than they have to. Almost all of them have enabled this kind of thing without understanding it at all because microsoft pops up nags for this kind of thing constantly and specifically designs them so that the easiest way to get them out of the way is to enable whatever thing they want you to enable (at which point, they will never mention it again, precisely the opposite, I would suggest, that you should do when you have fundamentally changed how the user's files are stored, and in stark contrast to if you refuse, which will result in you being nagged again and again).

kn100 6mo ago

I got caught out by exactly this, and I'm not exactly tech illiterate. what made it even more annoying is by the time I'd realised what had happened, it was practically impossible to get the files back out of OneDrive (since I decided that this was enough Windows for me, and went back to Linux), since the webui does NOT handle downloading lots of small files well, and you just end up getting a partially complete zip file. I gave up in the end as nothing in there was particularly important. This is an incredibly annoying default.

Morromist 6mo ago
I too have seen onedrive do this to people who aren't super-heavy computer users. Onedrive is a menace.
- fhn 6mo ago
  you mean Microsoft is a menace. Microsoft has been tricking generations of people into using OneDrive. I hope nobody is dumb enough to pay for it and I'd create a ton of fake emails and fill it up with junk.
  - ryandrake 6mo ago
    Microsoft constantly tries to trick[1], annoy[2] and coerce[3] users into using their software. 1: https://www.theverge.com/23935029/microsoft-edge-forced-windows-10-google-chrome-fight https://www.theverge.com/23935029/microsoft-edge-forced-wind... 2: https://www.cloudcomputing-news.net/news/microsoft-tries-to-woo-google-chrome-users-with-persistent-pop-ups https://www.cloudcomputing-news.net/news/microsoft-tries-to-... 3: https://www.ctrl.blog/entry/windows-system-components-default-edge.html https://www.ctrl.blog/entry/windows-system-components-defaul...
kn100 6mo ago
Oh and another fun thing! I eventually just emptied the OneDrive so Microsoft would stop bothering me. This was maybe six months ago or so. Microsoft confirms I am storing nothing there. Just a week or two ago I got yet another email begging for money because my OneDrive was apparently full. It was a genuine email, I went as far as checking the headers for SPF/DKIM. When I signed into onedrive, still empty!

jmcphers 6mo ago

Google is no better. My family mostly uses iPhones, and on a big extended family vacation, I suggested we use Google Photos to create a shared album to document the trip. Everyone installed the Google Photos app on their iPhone so they could contribute... which resulted in all of them having their email accounts disabled. What happened? Google Photos on the iPhone backs up all your photos by default, and, like Microsoft, Google "shares storage" between email and photos. The minute Google Photos was installed, it started backing up photos until the paltry free tier was reached, at which point it disabled the associated gmail account since it was "out of storage". Talk about an anti-pattern; I spent a good chunk of time on that trip helping people get their storage back so they could send email again. I'll never recommend Google Photos to anyone ever again.

dwayne_dibley 6mo ago
Drives me insane that to see my existing Google library and shared albums I must allow Google photos access to my phones photos - at which point it turns auto back on.
antisthenes 6mo ago
It also doesn't help that Google's free tier (15GB) is laughably small in 2026. HDD capacity and Google's profits grew many-fold since that was last increased (in 2012-ish?).
- eterm 6mo ago
  It does seem ridiculous that over 20 years ago, gmail was advertised with a real-time allowance ticking away increasing, which started at an incredibly generous 1GB allowance and you could watch it tick up in real time faster than you could fill it with mail. People designed "gmail-as-storage" apps to take advantage of this. 20 years later and we get a pathetic 15GB for mail, photos and everything else combined.
  - Terr_ 6mo ago
    TBF that's a little bit apples-to-orchards, since publicly routed e-mails have certain expectable size/frequency characteristics compared to, say, all the videos someone possesses.

liendolucas 6mo ago

From the WinUtil screenshots presented in the article I'm absolutely shocked about all the things that you presumably want to turn off or delete to have a "clean" Windows (to some extent if that's possible at all). It's also ridiculous that you need an external tool to easily disable/remove/uninstall every single thing you don't want . I haven't used Windows since many many years ago and the few times I sit down to interact with someone else's computer I suffer so much that after a few seconds I simply give up, I can't stand anything about it. If someone were to use Windows, besides WinUtil, are there a set of recommended open source scripts to clean up all the shit out of a fresh Windows installation? Just to be aware in case of emergency or extreme need...

BLKNSLVR 6mo ago
It was the need to do increasingly more post-setup configuration with each iteration of Windows after Win7 that finally pushed me to using Linux as my daily driver a few years ago. Especially when a few of these settings would get switched back to defaults after a Windows Update. These days, the amount of background services that Windows runs just makes it feel as if Windows itself is increasingly malware. You don't need a virus present for modern day machines, with massive compute resources, to be bogged down and running like a 486 back in the day.
Esn024 6mo ago
Winhance for removing things like OneDrive and the option to KEEP them removed even if a future Windows Update tries to reinstall them. You can also save your configuration to easily get all your preferences back on a fresh Windows install. I use this instead of WinUtil (which I haven't tried yet... is there any way in which it is better?). Windhawk for quality of life improvements if you don't like some of Windows's defaults. For example, I use it to have two rows on my taskbar and smaller icons (which was disabled in Windows 11), always open Classic Notepad instead of the new one (it loads much faster), and add multi-step "undo" to the Classic Notepad (the only thing I didn't like about it), among other things.
- ripharamberip 6mo ago
  It's just so crazy that we are living in times where a notepad can be too slow. Wtf has happened?? How can they mess up a fucking Notepad App? Luckily I switched to MacOS mostly some time ago. Also has its issue but nothing compared to winslop

geophile 6mo ago

From perusing reddit, I see some Windows users tempted to consider Linux, often because of Windows 11. But then, many of them won't move because: it doesn't work just like Windows; there is some Windows application they must have, or maybe they just don't want to learn the alternatives. Or they use word/excel/powerpoint and have to interact with others who do also. The brainwashing, high tolerance for pain and misery (and expense!), and lock-in makes it close to impossible for ordinary computer users to escape.

bsder 6mo ago
> maybe they just don't want to learn the alternatives. Or they use word/excel/powerpoint and have to interact with others who do also. If they're on Office 365, they could be on Linux.
- knollimar 6mo ago
  The browser version of excel is vastly inferior for power users
- duskdozer 6mo ago
  Or winapps/cassowary/<latest tool> I try to use libreoffice when possible but sometimes the performance takes a nosedive for opaque reasons when excel is ok
  - subscribed 6mo ago
    Every time I try to edit my cv containing many disconnected tables I want to scream from the frustration. In Ms Office it's always the breeze and 2 minute job. In Libre office it's 15 at least, multiple fights with pages suddenly breaking, cells and rows refusing to stick to my dimensions or something perfectly fine in the print preview lose edges of the cells (ie missing letter, etc) when actually on paper/pdf. Infuriating. And I didn't even started about printing in Linux. What works in android ootb didn't consistently work for me across two distributions, several years and many versions. Papercut is the worst but cups is close second.
6mo ago

deleted 6mo ago

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ImPostingOnHN 6mo ago

This is part of a broader, financialization-related push across the entire economy to convert one-time-purchase revenue into steady, predictable, ratchet-able recurring revenue. As an added bonus for them, they can sell laptops with less storage (= fewer chips in this tight market) with the expectation that the customer will store everything in the cloud, with plenty of overage fees.

carodgers 6mo ago

I don't use Windows at home. What happens if you don't have Outlook but your personal local files still fill up OneDrive storage? Do you get error messages that files aren't being backed up? Are you unable to save files?

cute_boi 6mo ago

even if you remove one drive in next update it will be installed automatically.

aucisson_masque 6mo ago

> Microsoft is actively hostile towards its users. No shit. And I see some of the same pattern with Apple now, for instance by default files on iOS get downloaded to the iCloud. And phone get backed up too, same as photos. It just happens that the free 5gb of iCloud storage is slightly not enough for all this shit, and you quickly get a pop up showing you that you must purchase an iCloud subscription. I know that work because my mother almost fall for it.

to11mtm 6mo ago

I long ago learned to pay the 2$ a month or whatever the hell to just have 1TB of storage and remember to keep my user account drive small enough where I never hit the amount.

_wire_ 6mo ago

Anytime any device in any context greets you with "Hello" or "Welcome", it is announcing that it doesn't belong to you, and that you must be vigilant to its exploitation of you. Windows is remarkable in that it is constantly editing itself, revising terms of service without notice, nudging, cajoling, and end-running you and at every turn. Update cannot be stopped, yet updater messages make it seem like you are initiating work and responsible for its successful completion: "You're 90% there...", "Don't turn off your PC", "Something didn't go as planned, don't worry your data is safe", which is eternally followed by "Welcome" lets arrange a few things... Apple's dark patterns are far lower key as they supply the total stack, it's feels more custodial. Linux if it says anything-- which it usually doesn't say much-- will say these changes are well-known to wreck things but you're at our mercy, them your system is put into some polluted state associated with a bygone era and all your config and data is your problem hope you're skilled at IT.

legitster 6mo ago

We've really got to stop calling every bad UI a dark pattern. "Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by incompetence." Having worked at MSFT I can tell you there's a LOT more incompetence than malice.

raincole 6mo ago
This particular case isn't a dark pattern, but the fact OSes are written under the assumption that users want to create an account for cloud services is. (Yes, by this definition Google, Microsoft and Apple are all dark patterners.)
- deleted 6mo ago
  [deleted]
rectang 6mo ago
Selective incompetence for fun and profit: Pricing mistakes which make the supermarket money are unfortunate but low priority. Pricing mistakes which cost the supermarket money must be fixed immediately.
xzjis 6mo ago
The problem is that this incompetence is the result of (bad) choices by Microsoft's management. I'm not even talking about middle managers but the C-suite, who only care about satisfying shareholders, not about creating good working conditions or making sure the product is good.
Arainach 6mo ago
Forcing a cloud login for a desktop operating system is arguably a dark pattern. Defaulting to uploading all locally saved documents to cloud storage is ABSOLUTELY a dark pattern. The prompts every few months to "change back to recommended defaults" that make it easy to accidentally get into this state even if you made the correct decision previously to turn it off is a hellish black hole of a pattern. All three are intentional, not incompetent.
- 6mo ago

stogot 6mo ago

My tech illiterate family members fell for this Microsoft dark pattern. Revolting

brailsafe 6mo ago

Apple also does this with iCloud storage and it's maddening, not easy to reconcile, and threatening to turn off.

tim-tday 6mo ago

If you want to experience Microsoft dark patterns just install a fresh copy of windows. Last a checked there were seven adversarial prompts where they try to trick you into doing something they want but you don’t. Send us your usage data! (No) Sign in with an online account (I want a local account) And on and on. Fuck those guys.

jpmitchell 6mo ago
I still have the old Win11 ISO that I used during my previous job. It still supported the 'oobe\bypassnro' command. I've read that Microsoft is phasing that one out in newer builds. I'll have to cling to that file with a death grip, lol. I remember so many times offering to my customers a clean setup with a local account and automatic login. I can't remember a single instance of anyone preferring to log in with an MS account.

rcxdude 6mo ago

What's also irritating is that onedrive will use some kind of 'smart' caching system to delete the local copy of a file. Which is all fine and dandy until you need said file when you don't have an internet connection. Explaining this to users is very difficult, they just know that something broke and usually when it was very important. (OK, what's even more stupid is IT departments who don't understand that onedrive has any problems at all, and insist on it and refuse to set up an actual backup system for user devices because 'onedrive will back everything up')

trinsic2 6mo ago
After Onedrive uploads all of your data to the cloud without your consent it sets all files as online only. Meaning the file will not live on your computer unless you click on it, then it will download a copy of that specific file to your system. If we didn't have criminals in our government right now I would think that this would be a huge anti-trust violation worth perusing.
- TitaRusell 6mo ago
  I had to completely nuke OneDrive from windows. With a 2 terabyte SSD I'm unlikely to ever run out of space. Automatically opt in and make the settings deliberately vague and obtuse- companies that have FAITH in their product don't need to do this.
  - trinsic2 6mo ago
    And pray it doesnt get reinstalled and it automatically moves your data back to the cloud again. I had this happened to one customer of mine, not quite sure of the circumstances.
  - onemoresoop 6mo ago
    Why bother with windows though?
    - subscribed 6mo ago

albedoa 6mo ago

This is some real title gore, and I don't know who is to blame. As it appears: > Microsoft is employing dark patterns to goad users into paying for storage? That Microsoft is employing dark patterns is neither surprising nor a question. Can you explain this gross departure from the actual title jpmitchell[1]? Here is the original for reference: > How Microsoft abuses its users This is much more interesting and accurate. 1. https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=jpmitchell https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=jpmitchell

jpmitchell 6mo ago
I have no idea what happened. I literally just copy and pasted my post title for the submission. I assume there's some form of active curation going on. I've only recently started posting my content to Hacker News so I'm not sure yet.
- albedoa 6mo ago
  [flagged]
- slater 6mo ago
  It's well-known that HN mods will edit submission titles to reduce chances of flamewars/axe-grindiness in the discussions. Not saying that's what happened here, but not a new thing.
  - albedoa 6mo ago
    I would love to hear the excuse that the mods have for this title change. Good luck to them!
    - slater 6mo ago
      Excuse? They don't need an excuse, "How Microsoft abuses its users" isn't very descriptive. The edited title reduces the heat and gives more info.

0x_rs 6mo ago

Google Photos does the same thing, aggressively prompting the user endlessly until they give in. A solution to that is disabling the malicious application and installing Google's Gallery app instead, that possesses no ransomware capability from what I've last heard of it. Make no mistake: Google and Microsoft know very well this behaviour will lead to people subscribing to services they have, for the most part, no use for. It is therefore explicitly by design, deceiving tech-illiterate people threatening to delete files they never meant to upload.

rk06 6mo ago
my wife had here google account storage full because photos does auto backup and even after i deleted the photos from google photos. Auto backup kicked in and re-added them. Also, there is no good way to download all photos and videos for backup. they have to be manually selected. the ui is super frustating. and since the storage is shared with email, emails are blocked due to this
tredre3 6mo ago
You can log out from Google Photos on Android and it will stop prompting you (tap the icon upper right). This is useful if you wish to maintain access to the editing tools (Google Gallery and most third party galleries I've tried lack simple things like adding text on a photo, and they often can't edit videos at all). If you don't care about those tools then disabling Google Photos is indeed the best!

rconti 6mo ago

Office in the Mac is AWFUL about this. By default, it saves to a OneDrive you never asked for and can never find. You can't permanently change the location of your saved documents-- just change it once, and the setting stays "forever", maybe, until a software update fucks it up for you again. Auto-save is disabled if you're not using OneDrive. Nobody asked for OneDrive. It makes it a goddamned nightmare to find your files. I was trying to make it easy for my partner to save their files to the same location every time, make it easy to find in the Finder, make it easy for mailing attachments. No such luck.

ValentineC 6mo ago
> Office in the Mac is AWFUL about this. > By default, it saves to a OneDrive you never asked for and can never find. You can't permanently change the location of your saved documents-- just change it once, and the setting stays "forever", maybe, until a software update fucks it up for you again. I don't remember ever encountering this problem, and I just checked that I am definitely logged into my Microsoft account for whatever reason.
- rconti 6mo ago
  I'm guessing you picked a location you wanted (outside of OneDrive) and the location has stayed, as I mentioned? I don't trust that it won't be reverted some day, but it hasn't in the past few weeks.

worik 6mo ago

Just replying to the headline: Well, duh! What do we expect? Reading the article, I still feel the same way.

zb3 6mo ago

Thanks to obsession over KPI and metrics in general, we can no longer trust big tech corporations. It seems they've forgotten WHY you actually want to play fair, they can no longer be trusted. We need to teach non-technical people that in this reality, a scam might come directly from the real seemingly "reputable" company.

mdavidn 6mo ago

I recently helped my mother-in-law configure a new Windows 11 laptop. I knew Microsoft did this, I was deliberately looking to avoid OneDrive, and it _still_ burned me. It silently uploaded all of her personal documents that I had transferred from an older computer. I was livid. Microsoft has permanently lost me as a customer. Every friend and family member who listens will upgrade to something else.

jpmitchell 6mo ago
Same for me. It was slow but now I've fully joined the hate parade. I only use MS products as necessary to support my business.

fhn 6mo ago

you should see Outlook 365. constant nagging about adding the url as the default mailto. Constant nagging for feedback. Mail doesn't load at consistently. OneDrive is just as bad.

hsbauauvhabzb 6mo ago

Recently I noticed autosave is not enabled by default on word, I clicked to enable and it prompted me to save to one drive as apparently that’s the only way to enable autosave, a feature which has been around since ~Word 2000.

1116574 6mo ago

This has been default experience for "normies" for quite some time now. Same for Google gallery which syncs to gdrive. Just today we had a guy who got similar messages from one drive as one in the blogpost, and made the mistake of asking chatgpt about it. After renaming, moving, deleting and even doing regedit as llm instructef, some of the files went missing, some we managed to find. Few weeks ago I had to explain over the phone how to setup windows without ms account, and we had to resort to turning off WiFi in the house lmao

seemaze 6mo ago

So I never saw the 2020 series Space Force. But this clip[0] about Windows updates just happened into one of my feeds today and I was physically bowled over laughing. I must have watched it a half dozen times in rapid succession. I suspect I'm just one of today's lucky 10,000 and everyone else here is already in on the joke, but I can't not share. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k899IiwP-iw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k899IiwP-iw

sakesun 6mo ago

Not just storage expense. Recently I work extensively for a very large financial institute. They provide me with Windows terminal to work on the project. I initially expected to myself to work on a very institutional security constrained environment. Instead, the workspace keep popping up with annoying msn Ads inadvertently, out of any context. The default browser, Edge, was default to msn, which is full of more distracting Ads. They trick corporate users to be their Ads viewers using their trustworthy image in enterprise IT. No idea why they think that revenue would worth the downsides.

greazy 6mo ago
I liked Win10, once you use ShutUp10 it was a solid OS minus a few annoyances. But Win11 is horrendous. Watching the right click menu dynamocally and slowly populate with "open with" options is jaring. Now add two right click menus is wild.
- subscribed 6mo ago
  My choice was win10privacy, pretty quick and brutal, gutting and disabling most intrusive things. Now I'm moving to Linux (once I finally found one that supports nvidia and mux really well).
sakesun 6mo ago
Just a moment ago while I'm working on the previously mentioned workstation provided by the financial institute, at the bottom left corner there a new notification read: "News for you: 'New girls clubs...'" Meh. Turns out it's a news that has nothing to do with me nor my work at all. https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2026/04/15/trump-dei-crackdown-targets-women-networking/89426934007/ https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2026/04/15/trump-dei-cr... Similar notifications keep poping up all days.

deleted 6mo ago

[deleted]

vachina 6mo ago

If you think this is egregious wait till you experience Apple products.

vaylian 6mo ago
Can you elaborate?
- vachina 6mo ago
  -iOS by default uploads your entire Photo album to iCloud. -iOS by default backs up all app resources to iCloud (so cloud native apps like Google Drive also gets backed up). You have to explicitly disable this backup app by app. -Save to.. dialog on iOS defaults and resets to saving to iCloud’s “Downloads” directory. -On MacOS, everything on the Desktop directory is synced to iCloud. You cannot delete the iCloud copy of files without also (it automatically) deleting the local copy. -When you (very very easily) run out of iCloud storage (paltry 5GB), they made sure you know via nagging notifications, a dedicated header in Settings. Then they start warning you your iPhone is not getting backed up every now and then. -They also don’t provide a way to use the same backup interface to make backups locally. You MUST use iCloud for backups. I tolerate Apple products because the alternatives are worse (for now)
  - deafpolygon 6mo ago
    - false (you have to opt in) - false (it depends on the app) - depends on your cloud settings - if you opt in, yes - well if your storage is full, you kind of need to know - they do, it's called time machine. you need a local disk for that.
    - vachina 6mo ago
      I'm not sure if you even use any Apple products. I recently reset my iPhone and started from scratch (because of another system storage bloat issue) and THOSE WERE THE DEFAULTS, I HAD TO TURN EVERYTHING OFF MANUALLY. It didn't even ask. > time machine Oh great, let's get a dedicated, proprietary device just to store MY binary blobs. I'm not even sure if Timemachine supports exactly the features offered by iCloud. I cannot for example, browse photos backed up in Timemachine in the Photos app just like with iCloud.

JumpCrisscross 6mo ago

Are the number of computers running Windows rising or falling? (Most curious for the U.S. and Europe.)

tonyedgecombe 6mo ago
Windows share of the desktop market has been falling for a long time. https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/worldwide/#monthly-200901-202603 https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/worldwide...
- JumpCrisscross 6mo ago
  What's unknown?
  - tonyedgecombe 6mo ago
    I don’t know.
  - shmeeed 6mo ago
    A sure sign of garbage stats. Edit: https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/india#monthly-200901-202603 https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/india#mon...

VerifiedReports 6mo ago

To be fair (and I hate Microsoft, so it's painful), Microsoft is not alone here. Google and Apple perpetrate similar BS, with Google Drive being a major offender.

deckar01 6mo ago

Microsoft used to have an app called Office Lens. It helped color correct and keystone adjust documents scanned with a phone camera. They pushed an update that gutted the app and said this app has been replaced by OneDrive. After installing OneDrive and dodging multiple dark pattern storage upsells, I discovered the OneDrive app doesn’t have any of the document scanning tools. I’m sure someone got a bonus for increasing OneDrive installs though.

sjs7007 6mo ago
I got caught up in that too. Install OneDrive and saw you can't use it without signing up. I bailed right that. Now admittedly my workaround ended up being uh... Google Drive.
laserlight 6mo ago
Wow. This is news to me. Office Lens had been my trusted scanning app for ten years. It was years ahead of Cam Scanner bullshit, which many people used, likely because of marketing.
Frieren 6mo ago
Unregulated capitalism descents into scams and fraud. Why better your products and services when it is possible to buy competitors, increase prices and lie? We need judges and policymakers that punish harshly this behavior and force companies to compete in quality and price instead of lies and competition elimination.
thombles 6mo ago
It doesn’t? I use the OneDrive app for scanning documents all the time. + button then “Capture”
- deckar01 6mo ago
  Oh, I have to use their app to take the pic. I can’t use my existing photos anymore.
ahartmetz 6mo ago

ddtaylor 6mo ago

Microsoft has been disrespecting their user base for a very long time now. This is not news. Stop giving them your money.

bloomingeek 6mo ago
I like/love your statement. The problem is, to their detriment, most users don't have the chops to switch to Linux/Apple.(Or the patience.) Since I couldn't afford Apple at the time, I jumped into Red Hat years age. What a nightmare! But I didn't give up because it was kind of fun. A lot of folks didn't think so. Linux and Apple have made tremendous strides, of course, but if tech stuff is not your thing, you keep financing MS. On this great site, there's a lot of complicated things discussed, some of which I admit I don't grasp. Many outside this sphere are mostly lost on any tech that is slightly complex, sometimes even if they are helped. One could argue, correctly, that they learn their smartphones and smart TVs just fine. These devises are computer like, but still not a computer. Changing people's minds on operating systems is as hard as politics and religion I've found.
- ddtaylor 6mo ago
  Desktop Linux has been a little bit of a fragmented landscape over time, but I think that what keeps most organizations using Microsoft is that they have someone on staff dedicated to resolving all of these problems for all their users. Most organizations don't ask their regular employees to do things related to setting up software, making sure that they have access to network shares, etc, that's done by a dedicated IT staff that just happens to only be Windows right now for some reason. Over time the web browser is becoming the only real software that is needed and that has simplified things. Gaming has helped improve the Desktop Linux space, and Valve is a great force for change there. KDE has decent funding and adoption now.

vaughands 6mo ago

I see a lot of hate for Google in this thread but at least one thing they do well: it's really easy to fix. Takeout actually works. You can just download your photos and leave. As the top post identified here, Microsoft makes this a REAL pain to leave after they snared you.

themafia 6mo ago

Onedrive: "How would you like your files sorted?" Me: "Can I do alphabetical and perhaps by creation time?" Onedrive: "NO! Absolutely not! I will sort everything based on the last time you opened the document." :|

thombles 6mo ago

Microsoft could tone it down a bit (especially all the full screen harassment after windows updates) but I wonder how many casual users have had their bacon saved precisely because their documents and desktop got pushed to the cloud?

hansmayer 6mo ago

Well, colour me surprised :)

Gazoche 6mo ago

Not that it's any excuse, but Apple does something similar by saving your photos to iCloud and deleting them from your local storage without telling you. I have seen the following scenario play out twice already: - The free iCloud tier runs out of storage because of the photo backups - Apple spams the user with warning notifications and emails and incentives to upgrade - User sees that nonsense and decides they don't really need iCloud backups (sometimes they didn't even know it was on) and turn it off - But oops, turns out iOS had "helpfully" removed the original photos from the local device to "save space", and now the photos are inaccessible - User tries to turn iCloud back on to access their photos but iOS now refuses to do it because the account is out of storage space (but don't worry, you can still upgrade to a paid plan!) - The photos are now held hostage by Apple You can access the photos from the iCloud website, but the download interface is clunky because it is not made for mass exports. And in this age of smartphones and apps, how many people know this is even an option? When this happened to an elderly family member of mine, it was only sheer luck that he had his iCloud password written down somewhere and I was able to rescue his photos from Apple's jaws.

ValentineC 6mo ago
> Not that it's any excuse, but Apple does something similar by saving your photos to iCloud and deleting them from your local storage without telling you. Photos > Download and Keep Originals.
- Gazoche 6mo ago
  I know how to disable it. I should not have to. The setting is (intentionally) confusing too: "download and keep" implies that photos always have to transit via iCloud first, and the default is ambiguously named "optimise storage" rather than something more explicit like "move photos to iCloud".

bentobean 6mo ago

MacOS does this as well, and it drives me nuts. No, I do not want files on my desktop to be synced to iCloud.

boh 6mo ago

When you use your highly restricted/infosec encrusted enterprise Windows laptop and still see the Xbox App, you know Microsoft have lost all respect for their customers. Consumer laptops are just a pure sales distribution channel on top of an OS that can now barely handle spying on you, selling you things AND actually doing the thing you bought it for. The most eye-opening moment when you switch to Linux is that it takes as fast as you typing your password in to start using it. You realize just how much Microsoft has fundamentally compromised software and people are too used to it to assume computers aren't just slow by default.

joshstrange 6mo ago

I'm shocked that I can't find a single top-level comment that understands that the general public does not back up their data. We can call OneDrive a dark pattern or saving customer's butts from themselves. If it wasn't the default: "What do you mean all my pictures are gone forever because I never turned on OneDrive?". I have no love for Microsoft but I'm having a really hard time seeing how it isn't the smart default to backup the user's files/photos to the cloud. Sure, if you are here on HN then maybe you have NextCloud, Immich, Dropbox, Google Drive/Photos, etc, that you make sure to backup your pictures to. I can assure you the general public does no such thing unless it's the default in the OS. Try consoling a few people about how the pictures or files they hold dear are gone forever and then come back and talk about this "dark pattern". This blog post is somehow a success story? No, it's a ticking time bomb. Great, you free'd up space for email at the expense of un-protecting all his pictures/files. That's not a win. The author gets _so close_ to the point but manages to miss it completely: > but I suspect that he deleted files (including family photos) for which he had no other backup. > I’m a computer nerd, and if you are reading this you probably are as well. We can change that setting ourselves without much thought, and we probably have backups of our important data in case recovery is necessary. But they couldn't make 1 more tiny hop to "my neighbor will not manage backups and so these files are now at risk".

WhyNotHugo 6mo ago
Synchronisation is not back-up. Dropbox is not a back-up mechanism. If files get deleted on the local host, they get deleted from OneDrive/Dropbox too.
- joshstrange 6mo ago
  > If files get deleted on the local host, they get deleted from OneDrive/Dropbox too. Dropbox, at least, does offer file history but I'm talking about protecting against hardware failure here more than a user deleting their own files. That's the use-case I've personally dealt with more often than not. "I dropped my phone in the pool, how do I get my pictures back", "My laptop won't turn on anymore, just shows a folder with a question mark on it when I try to boot", etc. Self-inflicted or just general hardware failure is the main issue people deal with in my experience.

jcalvinowens 6mo ago

I've been replacing old windows machines with raspberry pi fives for my extended family. They all love them! The cost makes the biggest difference: everybody is resistant, but caves and tries it when I say it only costs $100.

prism56 6mo ago
I setup my mum one of those cheap four core atom boxes with Linux. Was about £120 (before the current situation). They browse the internet on chrome for 99% of their PC usage. Edit the very odd letter. For a lot of people its perfect.

rng-concern 6mo ago

My wife ran into something similar to this. Microsoft changed the bucket that email attachments went into for quota purposes. She had a lot of emails with pictures attached, so was immediately above the new quota, and she stopped receiving emails. This definitely puts a fire under one, as she had to quickly under pressure (as each day was missed emails), figure out which emails to keep/backup. We signed her up for a new gmail immediately. The experience was stressful. Very poor.

1vuio0pswjnm7 6mo ago

Actual title: How Microsoft abuses its users