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 They pushed an update that gutted the app and said this app has been replaced by OneDrive.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.
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.
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.
What the fuck. I dodged a bullet by deciding to try a FOSS scanning app at F-Droid's suggestion (whose timing may not have been accidental). The trapeze correction of FairScan is not great... but it's not going to try to pull any crap on me, and if the app changes, it's probably for the better.
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.
I had same exact experience with macOS and iCloud. macOS by default enables offloading Documents to cloud, transparently. Problem is if you try to get those files back to store them offline, it gets very tricky very quickly with ambiguous verbiage and lengthy process that you never actually know status of. I ended up losing some files as a result, which came as a total shock to me. I was already in the process of moving back to Linux (hence downloading of the Documents) and this was final straw.
The vagueness is by design, it’s another dark pattern. “Delete all photos from icloud? [are we gonna delete the ones that we only keep compressed versions on your phone? Iono ¯\_(ツ)_/¯, you wanna find out? Yea, didn’t think so...]”
These is some weird bs there and it automagically sends everything up.
Despite stuff being placed on the drive, it decides to upload them and only have a cloud copy. I thought maybe it was me that caused this, then it happened to a family member overnight.
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!
Anecdata, they might have had a system error. My Microsoft account that I use the free tier OneDrive on had the same email sent (you're over x% full, consider upgrading!). I suspected everything you did - eventually I logged in after verifying the email - nope, 5% usage or so.
I then went and deleted more stuff, but my money would be on a reporting glitch than a malicious money campaign.
Myself–and many redditors–got this erroneous notification too. I don't think Microsoft ever sent out an "Oops, sorry, you don't actually need to pay us" correction though.
I wouldn't use the webui for that. Getting rid of onedrive in favor for a self-hosted nextcloud, I used the native client to download all the files on the machine and then moved them out. This also removed them from onedrive after acknowledging the "A lot of files have been deleted from your onedrive account" warning. Actually deleting the onedrive application was also not as straight-forward as some other users may want you to believe. Even now, I'm not sure it won't just pop-up one day once again.
From their point of view, that's the product working correctly. The whole point of all these consumer cloud storage products is to make it easy to upload your stuff and impossible to download it. (impossible - 1u to be precise, for legal purposes).
iPhoto does this the best. Its default is to upload every one of your photos to its cloud and delete the original from your phone. Then if you want it back, you can just click on the one photo you want and like magic, it's back on your phone. Want it on you PC? No problem. Open the web interface, click the one photo you want, and there's even a download button.
Want all your photos? Oh. Well, you can just click each one of them then click the download button.
I mean, sure, there's also this icloud app that will slowly download your entire photo collection into a single folder on your computer, slowing down the entire time before eventually grinding to a halt by the time it has put 10000 of your 250,000 photos into that folder. Of course, you can restart it, but it'll start again at the beginning.
But yeah, that's the business model. Put your stuff on the cloud, make it hard to get it back, charge you to keep it there.
Sorry if I'm reiterating known point, when the storage is full, API will stop working, so you won't be able to download files at all.
So you are completely stuck if you have too many files. Like I had. I used to keep pictures on onedrive, and used 6 user license. When the license expired, they locked me out completely. I couldn't download my own files! And the web UI is a crap.
So had to pay again for a year, this time I backed up all files locally.
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.
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 inaccessible
- User tries to turn iCloud back on but iOS 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 still view 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 a 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.
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.
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')
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.
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.
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.
For me the apps that don’t exist on Linux are Fusion360 (3d printing modeling) and OneNote (shared notebook with my non-technical wife that syncs to mobile). I also have zero tolerance for needing to tweak settings to make a game work on Linux. So I’m stuck on windows for now.
Every month I have to spend an hour fighting some new asshole behavior concocted up by some ambitious Microsoft product manager. The latest one was them adding Windows Store results to the start menu search. I use start menu search to launch applications and suddenly some games from the store started showing up when I did my usual searches. The only way to stop it was to uninstall the windows store entirely using a power shell command.
Is it really that much easier to fight Microsoft? Say what you will about tweaking settings in Linux but it lets you do just about whatever you want. And the settings changes are at least understood and documented. I’d hate to use an OS that you repeatedly have to fight with over its user hostile changes. Every time I boot Windows in a VM I’m reminded of how much harder Windows users have it because they can’t just do whatever they want with the computer, it has to be done with Microsoft’s blessing.
It's probably my last Windows. It's getting harder to undo the shenanigans each time they push out another update. The moment I can't undo it, I'll move to Linux. I'll learn FreeCad and use Onenote in a browser.
I have a long backlog of games that I finally have time to play, and for now they all just work on Windows. They probably 95% just work on Linux too, but it's that 5% that gives me pause.
Call it brainwashing or whatever. But the reality is that even one single popular app not working out of box is enough barrier preventing people from switching.
I've tried to convince people to use Linux. The conversation usually ended when they realize Photoshop isn't natively support Linux. And after many attempts, I ended up being converted to Windows + WSL.
Not if you are coming from windows and are not a tech nerd. I don’t want to end up being tech support for some non techie I coerced into Linux. It is nowhere near as seamless as zealots like to believe. Been having this discussion since 1997.
Have you actually tried a modern distro like Linux Mint?
Seriously, you don't even need to touch the terminal, everything is neatly organized in a single control panel (unlike the messy >2 control panels situation of Windows).
You can easily install all the applications you want; even games thanks to Steam and Proton.
It's easy to use, there are no ads, no preinstalled adware, no nagware, everything is fast and clean.
I”ve been installing Linux desktops for decades (mostly Ubuntu, but in the day: Suse and RedHat, and Qubes, and FreeBSD and NetBSD, Nix, Arch, etc…) I always check out the latest LTS release of Ubuntu. I tried Mint and didn’t see a huge difference. Same sort of belly flops into the shell to make things work, but with a difference skin. It is not fundamentally different than any other distribution with a desktop in my opinion of staring at this for 30+ years.
Honestly I've had more technical problems installing Windows than Linux Mint recently, not to mention the multiple hours spent hunting down and disabling all of the telemetry and ads in Windows. Still can't believe they put ads in File Explorer.
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.
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...
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.
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
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.
And that is just a fraction of what WinUtil does ...
It has been a while since I booted Windows, but I am fairly certain you can still circumvent the OneDrive nonsense (which is what the article is about) by setting up a local account. There are likely simpler ways, since Windows still has the concept of local file storage. That doesn't excuse the dark patterns, but it does highlight that we sometimes over complicate solutions.
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?
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.
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).
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.
> The minute Google Photos was installed, it started backing up photos
Just to be clear: It will ask you before doing it.
If you refuse, it will ask you again and again and again. Sometimes with a slightly different prompt. Until you accidentally say yes.
But it does ask you.
Even though I agree with your overall conclusion that people should avoid google photos, this moment should also be a learning experience for your family to be more careful what they agree to. Popup fatigue is insidious, we all need to remain vigilant!
I've lost count the number of times by wife has accidently agreed to store all her google photos on the cloud then filled up her account. The prompts are very good at making you ~seem~ like you need to do it.
To be fair, Google sends out multiple emails notifying that you won't receive new emails unless you upgrade or clear things out. If they read their emails even somewhat regularly -- which I acknowledge isn't a given for many people -- they'd know what's coming.
That isn’t the problem. The problem is Google photos pushes you to back up your tens of gigabytes of photos to your free Gmail account repeatedly until you say yes just once. At that point it fills up your email account with your photos and then disables your email until you pay them. Making statements about how often they warn you this is happening isn’t very helpful. No normal person would think of that as a consequence of using Google photos.
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.
Apple also by default backs up your apps to the cloud.
But it backs up the WHOLE package / folder / whatever terminology they use, including cached and redownloadable data. So if you have a game that has 10GB of cached data, it WILL upload that. Edge for me was >3GB.
And then they have the following user-hostile 'features':
1. They offer a paltry 5GB. Hasn't changed since inception, but app sizes have ... tripped? I have 2GB of health data now.
2. They don't tell you that you're backing up data that can be retrieved elsewhere.
3. The popup when storage is full shows only 'buy more' or ignore (no link/mention to disable individual app like described above)
4. No way to backup to a NAS
5. No way to backup to a computer automatically. You have to provide you passcode every time.
The Apple backup strategy is purposefully broken. I’m already paying for 50GB of iCloud and it often claims that it cannot backup my iPhone despite having multiple gigabytes free. It turns that that during the backup process it operates on a file level, so if you happen to have a large file it will require both copies of the file to fit within your storage limit before the backup can complete. And guess what, several third party apps I use store all their data in a single multi-gigabyte SQLite database that’s written to every day.
As for cached and downloadable data, I have long ago turned off backups for many apps where the data is stored on a server anyways. Backing up these apps never makes any sense.
That's on app developers (I suspect mobile game developers are not the most competent of the bunch). My entire iPhone's backup is 4.6 GB, and my YouTube downloaded videos alone are way more than that.
> it started backing up photos until the paltry free tier was reached
How could everyone fill their 15 GiB quota when IIRC by default it only backups the camera roll with lossy compression? Also I've never heard of accounts getting disabled for filling the quota.
FYI I am notoriously bad at taking photos (as is constantly explained to me by family and my partner) and my Phone has 130GiB of Photos and Videos on it as we speak.
>I'll never recommend Google Photos to anyone ever again.
I try to pry myself away from Google. I've given up the Google Maps app, for the arguably slightly-less-worse Apple Maps. I'm now 95/5 Firefox/Chrome, but I still need Chrome for some things that simply do not work well on Firefox. Gmail is nearly impossible, if I had 6 months I might try to host my own email... but I don't even know how to avoid it. I can't NOT HAVE email, ISPs don't offer that as part of their internet service anymore. You can't host it without jumping through spam hoops meant to keep everyone but Gmail out of email. And I try to use DDG, but it's just abysmal compared to Google search in its heyday... even now, Google search is often slightly better.
All of it's just some tarbaby trap, and now that I'm stuck I can't get unstuck.
It is small, but if you look at their competition it's still competitive.
Only Mega offers more for free (20GB).
Microsoft offers 5GB.
Ente.io offers 10GB.
Proton.io offers 2GB (if you jump through some time-limited hoops, most of which defeats the purpose of using a privacy cloud, you get a whooping 5GB free instead)
Filen.io offers 10GB, but you can get 30GB if you do a similar dance to proton and spam your referral code everywhere.
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.
The limit used to cost a whole dollar of hard drive space (plus redundancy), sometimes more than that. If they kept that up with adjustment for inflation then 100GB would be the free tier today, not a $20/year tier.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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
> 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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I heard somewhere that Onedrive goes one step further, i.e. deleting local files and keeping them only in cloud. so when people delete file from onedrive, they find local files already deleted
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.)
Pricing mistakes which make the supermarket money are unfortunate but low priority. Pricing mistakes which cost the supermarket money must be fixed immediately.
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.
It's pretty obvious that Microsoft is forcing their cloud services on anyone that doesn't actively fight back. Whether this is because they deliberately expect that they will dupe people into paying for storage they don't need or just because the cloud services team needs to hit their user KPI doesn't really matter much.
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
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.
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.
-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)
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.
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.
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:
Separately from that: can you please stop posting so aggressively to HN? You've repeatedly crossed into personal attack. We ban accounts that do that, and I don't want to ban you, so if you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and take the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful. We can't have users throwing elbows like this:
All of those comments are in serious conflict with the intended spirit of HN, and unfortunately you've posted many more of those than I've listed here. In fact, it's been a problem for years:
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.
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.
However, when we do that, we always try to find a representative phrase within the article itself. We try not to make up our own wording but rather to let the article speak for itself. In this case, we found this sentence:
> Microsoft is very obviously employing dark patterns in order to goad its users into paying for Onedrive storage
However, since that's also a provocative claim, we added a question mark at the end. This is also a standard moderation edit; it's basically shorthand for "the article argues for controversial claim X, but whether that's true or not is something each reader can decide for themselves". In this way the title that appears on the frontpage becomes more neutral, which is what we're going for.
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.
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).
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.
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”.
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.
What do you meant?
A quick search on youtube give me many short showing this function in OneDrive app.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/YT9EmGCpRxk
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.
It doesn’t? I use the OneDrive app for scanning documents all the time. + button then “Capture”
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.
The "OneDrive" app definitely has a nice document scanning tool.
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.
What the fuck. I dodged a bullet by deciding to try a FOSS scanning app at F-Droid's suggestion (whose timing may not have been accidental). The trapeze correction of FairScan is not great... but it's not going to try to pull any crap on me, and if the app changes, it's probably for the better.
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.
I had same exact experience with macOS and iCloud. macOS by default enables offloading Documents to cloud, transparently. Problem is if you try to get those files back to store them offline, it gets very tricky very quickly with ambiguous verbiage and lengthy process that you never actually know status of. I ended up losing some files as a result, which came as a total shock to me. I was already in the process of moving back to Linux (hence downloading of the Documents) and this was final straw.
This is very annoying, but there’s a right click and force keep downloaded that reflags the folder and all items within it.
The vagueness is by design, it’s another dark pattern. “Delete all photos from icloud? [are we gonna delete the ones that we only keep compressed versions on your phone? Iono ¯\_(ツ)_/¯, you wanna find out? Yea, didn’t think so...]”
These is some weird bs there and it automagically sends everything up.
Despite stuff being placed on the drive, it decides to upload them and only have a cloud copy. I thought maybe it was me that caused this, then it happened to a family member overnight.
It’s painful.
I legitimately think this is exactly the type of thing that amounts to destruction of property with actual criminal penalties warranted.
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!
Isn’t there a recycle bin?
Apple has something similar. One has to delete out of the hidden deleted items area — unless they want to wait a full month!
I suppose if you’re not paying them, your storage limit is zero, so if you have zero bytes there you’ve reached max capacity.
Pretty sure the free limit is 5 GB, at least for personal Microsoft accounts, not zero.
Anecdata, they might have had a system error. My Microsoft account that I use the free tier OneDrive on had the same email sent (you're over x% full, consider upgrading!). I suspected everything you did - eventually I logged in after verifying the email - nope, 5% usage or so.
I then went and deleted more stuff, but my money would be on a reporting glitch than a malicious money campaign.
A system error on a file storage system makes it even worse! But easy to imagine after the recent report on Azure https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47616242
Sorry, what I meant by "system error" was more "notification system error". Not error as in "data loss", error as in "reporting".
Myself–and many redditors–got this erroneous notification too. I don't think Microsoft ever sent out an "Oops, sorry, you don't actually need to pay us" correction though.
I wouldn't use the webui for that. Getting rid of onedrive in favor for a self-hosted nextcloud, I used the native client to download all the files on the machine and then moved them out. This also removed them from onedrive after acknowledging the "A lot of files have been deleted from your onedrive account" warning. Actually deleting the onedrive application was also not as straight-forward as some other users may want you to believe. Even now, I'm not sure it won't just pop-up one day once again.
I have seen one drive silently reinstall itself, I think it does this as apart of an office365 update.
This is a common dark pattern. Go through the hassle of disabling some 'feature' or service; and it just magically reappears at the next 'update'.
Microsoft is just one of the companies that routinely does stuff like that.
From their point of view, that's the product working correctly. The whole point of all these consumer cloud storage products is to make it easy to upload your stuff and impossible to download it. (impossible - 1u to be precise, for legal purposes).
iPhoto does this the best. Its default is to upload every one of your photos to its cloud and delete the original from your phone. Then if you want it back, you can just click on the one photo you want and like magic, it's back on your phone. Want it on you PC? No problem. Open the web interface, click the one photo you want, and there's even a download button.
Want all your photos? Oh. Well, you can just click each one of them then click the download button.
I mean, sure, there's also this icloud app that will slowly download your entire photo collection into a single folder on your computer, slowing down the entire time before eventually grinding to a halt by the time it has put 10000 of your 250,000 photos into that folder. Of course, you can restart it, but it'll start again at the beginning.
But yeah, that's the business model. Put your stuff on the cloud, make it hard to get it back, charge you to keep it there.
rclone supposedly supports transferring files from and to OneDrive.
I wonder if rclone would have behaved any better than the web UI.
Sorry if I'm reiterating known point, when the storage is full, API will stop working, so you won't be able to download files at all.
So you are completely stuck if you have too many files. Like I had. I used to keep pictures on onedrive, and used 6 user license. When the license expired, they locked me out completely. I couldn't download my own files! And the web UI is a crap.
So had to pay again for a year, this time I backed up all files locally.
rclone usually works much better for all those cloud storages with terrible UIs/native clients
I too have seen onedrive do this to people who aren't super-heavy computer users. Onedrive is a menace.
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.
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-wind...
2: https://www.cloudcomputing-news.net/news/microsoft-tries-to-...
3: https://www.ctrl.blog/entry/windows-system-components-defaul...
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 inaccessible
- User tries to turn iCloud back on but iOS 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 still view 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 a 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.
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.
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')
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.
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.
Why bother with windows though?
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.
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.
For me the apps that don’t exist on Linux are Fusion360 (3d printing modeling) and OneNote (shared notebook with my non-technical wife that syncs to mobile). I also have zero tolerance for needing to tweak settings to make a game work on Linux. So I’m stuck on windows for now.
Every month I have to spend an hour fighting some new asshole behavior concocted up by some ambitious Microsoft product manager. The latest one was them adding Windows Store results to the start menu search. I use start menu search to launch applications and suddenly some games from the store started showing up when I did my usual searches. The only way to stop it was to uninstall the windows store entirely using a power shell command.
Is it really that much easier to fight Microsoft? Say what you will about tweaking settings in Linux but it lets you do just about whatever you want. And the settings changes are at least understood and documented. I’d hate to use an OS that you repeatedly have to fight with over its user hostile changes. Every time I boot Windows in a VM I’m reminded of how much harder Windows users have it because they can’t just do whatever they want with the computer, it has to be done with Microsoft’s blessing.
It's probably my last Windows. It's getting harder to undo the shenanigans each time they push out another update. The moment I can't undo it, I'll move to Linux. I'll learn FreeCad and use Onenote in a browser.
I have a long backlog of games that I finally have time to play, and for now they all just work on Windows. They probably 95% just work on Linux too, but it's that 5% that gives me pause.
Call it brainwashing or whatever. But the reality is that even one single popular app not working out of box is enough barrier preventing people from switching.
I've tried to convince people to use Linux. The conversation usually ended when they realize Photoshop isn't natively support Linux. And after many attempts, I ended up being converted to Windows + WSL.
Linux Mint is super easy to use. I've personally battle tested it with my elder parents.
Given all the nagware present in Windows 11, I'd even say Linux Mint is easier than Windows.
The most difficult part is probably the installation itself.
Not if you are coming from windows and are not a tech nerd. I don’t want to end up being tech support for some non techie I coerced into Linux. It is nowhere near as seamless as zealots like to believe. Been having this discussion since 1997.
> It is nowhere near as seamless as zealots like to believe.
Perhaps not. But it's still more seamless than Windows these days. Microsoft keeps lowering the bar.
Have you actually tried a modern distro like Linux Mint?
Seriously, you don't even need to touch the terminal, everything is neatly organized in a single control panel (unlike the messy >2 control panels situation of Windows).
You can easily install all the applications you want; even games thanks to Steam and Proton.
It's easy to use, there are no ads, no preinstalled adware, no nagware, everything is fast and clean.
> modern distro
Let them cook...
> Linux Mint
Oh. :(
Modern != brand new shiny hipster thing. Unless you're a devotee of rolling release or unconvential things like Nix, Mint is not obsolete.
Depending on your age, "brand new shiny hipster thing" could be Enlightenment Desktop, Mate Desktop, or it could be Cosmic or Hyprland+.
Mint is a steady distro like Debian is. It certainly hasn't changed much in the last 15 or so years. For better or worse, depending on your POV.
Mint lags upstream by years. Lol
I don't know the last time you tried - I made numerous attempts to migrate to Linux since 2003, until I finally made it for good in 2022.
Modern beginner friendly distros are genuinely more user friendly than Windows nowadays.
I”ve been installing Linux desktops for decades (mostly Ubuntu, but in the day: Suse and RedHat, and Qubes, and FreeBSD and NetBSD, Nix, Arch, etc…) I always check out the latest LTS release of Ubuntu. I tried Mint and didn’t see a huge difference. Same sort of belly flops into the shell to make things work, but with a difference skin. It is not fundamentally different than any other distribution with a desktop in my opinion of staring at this for 30+ years.
Honestly I've had more technical problems installing Windows than Linux Mint recently, not to mention the multiple hours spent hunting down and disabling all of the telemetry and ads in Windows. Still can't believe they put ads in File Explorer.
> The brainwashing, high tolerance for pain and misery (and expense!), and lock-in makes it close to impossible for ordinary computer users to escape.
Or opposite of the house, the arrogance and presumption.
> 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.
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
The browser version of excel is vastly inferior for power users
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
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...
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.
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
> Wtf has happened?? How can they mess up a fucking Notepad App?
they made it use Electron
Windows 10 Enterprise LTSC IoT version. Official support until 2032
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.
And that is just a fraction of what WinUtil does ...
It has been a while since I booted Windows, but I am fairly certain you can still circumvent the OneDrive nonsense (which is what the article is about) by setting up a local account. There are likely simpler ways, since Windows still has the concept of local file storage. That doesn't excuse the dark patterns, but it does highlight that we sometimes over complicate solutions.
They made it very difficult to create local accounts on win11.
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?
I'm surprised their has not been a class action here, about how ( unskilled , mainly ) people are tricked? / Forced ? into using cloud storage.
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.
>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
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).
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.
> The minute Google Photos was installed, it started backing up photos
Just to be clear: It will ask you before doing it.
If you refuse, it will ask you again and again and again. Sometimes with a slightly different prompt. Until you accidentally say yes.
But it does ask you.
Even though I agree with your overall conclusion that people should avoid google photos, this moment should also be a learning experience for your family to be more careful what they agree to. Popup fatigue is insidious, we all need to remain vigilant!
It’s super hostile. I realised I was going to press it by accident eventually so I switched to Fossify Gallery before I did.
I've lost count the number of times by wife has accidently agreed to store all her google photos on the cloud then filled up her account. The prompts are very good at making you ~seem~ like you need to do it.
"It asks" doesn't matter when it doesn't actually tell you want the consequences of the choice are.
To be fair, Google sends out multiple emails notifying that you won't receive new emails unless you upgrade or clear things out. If they read their emails even somewhat regularly -- which I acknowledge isn't a given for many people -- they'd know what's coming.
That isn’t the problem. The problem is Google photos pushes you to back up your tens of gigabytes of photos to your free Gmail account repeatedly until you say yes just once. At that point it fills up your email account with your photos and then disables your email until you pay them. Making statements about how often they warn you this is happening isn’t very helpful. No normal person would think of that as a consequence of using Google photos.
Happened to me too, almost identically. Clearly this is a pattern across the major consumer cloud app/service providers.
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.
Apple does the same thing with iCloud. I had to go through a lot of hoops to get my wife's photos back down locally on the computer.
Apple also by default backs up your apps to the cloud.
But it backs up the WHOLE package / folder / whatever terminology they use, including cached and redownloadable data. So if you have a game that has 10GB of cached data, it WILL upload that. Edge for me was >3GB.
And then they have the following user-hostile 'features':
The Apple backup strategy is purposefully broken. I’m already paying for 50GB of iCloud and it often claims that it cannot backup my iPhone despite having multiple gigabytes free. It turns that that during the backup process it operates on a file level, so if you happen to have a large file it will require both copies of the file to fit within your storage limit before the backup can complete. And guess what, several third party apps I use store all their data in a single multi-gigabyte SQLite database that’s written to every day.
As for cached and downloadable data, I have long ago turned off backups for many apps where the data is stored on a server anyways. Backing up these apps never makes any sense.
That's on app developers (I suspect mobile game developers are not the most competent of the bunch). My entire iPhone's backup is 4.6 GB, and my YouTube downloaded videos alone are way more than that.
> it started backing up photos until the paltry free tier was reached
How could everyone fill their 15 GiB quota when IIRC by default it only backups the camera roll with lossy compression? Also I've never heard of accounts getting disabled for filling the quota.
FYI I am notoriously bad at taking photos (as is constantly explained to me by family and my partner) and my Phone has 130GiB of Photos and Videos on it as we speak.
Disabled in the sense that you can no longer receive email (which for many is the primary purpose for a Google account), not that you can’t login.
Same thing happened to me and it did not default to lossy. Days later I got the "you will stop receiving email soon" warning in Gmail.
It's not just the photos that you take going forward, but all the photos you already have stored on the device.
>I'll never recommend Google Photos to anyone ever again.
I try to pry myself away from Google. I've given up the Google Maps app, for the arguably slightly-less-worse Apple Maps. I'm now 95/5 Firefox/Chrome, but I still need Chrome for some things that simply do not work well on Firefox. Gmail is nearly impossible, if I had 6 months I might try to host my own email... but I don't even know how to avoid it. I can't NOT HAVE email, ISPs don't offer that as part of their internet service anymore. You can't host it without jumping through spam hoops meant to keep everyone but Gmail out of email. And I try to use DDG, but it's just abysmal compared to Google search in its heyday... even now, Google search is often slightly better.
All of it's just some tarbaby trap, and now that I'm stuck I can't get unstuck.
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?).
It is small, but if you look at their competition it's still competitive.
Only Mega offers more for free (20GB).
Microsoft offers 5GB.
Ente.io offers 10GB.
Proton.io offers 2GB (if you jump through some time-limited hoops, most of which defeats the purpose of using a privacy cloud, you get a whooping 5GB free instead)
Filen.io offers 10GB, but you can get 30GB if you do a similar dance to proton and spam your referral code everywhere.
Notably Microsoft used to offer 15GB until decreasing it a decade ago.
So while I would say 15GB is pretty typical, I would not say it's competitive. I would say the competition died in 2013.
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.
1GB that grew to 7GB over about 4 years and then 15GB over another 5 years. And has been stuck at 15GB for about 13 years. https://lifetourer.com/gmail-and-storage-capacity-cmon-googl...
The limit used to cost a whole dollar of hard drive space (plus redundancy), sometimes more than that. If they kept that up with adjustment for inflation then 100GB would be the free tier today, not a $20/year tier.
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.
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.
Apple also does this with iCloud storage and it's maddening, not easy to reconcile, and threatening to turn off.
Microsoft has been disrespecting their user base for a very long time now. This is not news. Stop giving them your money.
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.
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.
Are the number of computers running Windows rising or falling? (Most curious for the U.S. and Europe.)
Windows share of the desktop market has been falling for a long time.
https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/worldwide...
What's unknown?
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.
My Suspicion - Microsoft would have put lots effort into their cloud storage trickery - it would be an enormous revenue item . ....
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.
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.
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!
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
> 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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I heard somewhere that Onedrive goes one step further, i.e. deleting local files and keeping them only in cloud. so when people delete file from onedrive, they find local files already deleted
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.)
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.
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.
It's pretty obvious that Microsoft is forcing their cloud services on anyone that doesn't actively fight back. Whether this is because they deliberately expect that they will dupe people into paying for storage they don't need or just because the cloud services team needs to hit their user KPI doesn't really matter much.
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."
:|
Well, colour me surprised :)
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
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.
Just replying to the headline: Well, duh! What do we expect?
Reading the article, I still feel the same way.
even if you remove one drive in next update it will be installed automatically.
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.
If you think this is egregious wait till you experience Apple products.
Can you elaborate?
-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)
- 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.
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.
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.
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
I've responded to the bit about the title here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47713835.
Separately from that: can you please stop posting so aggressively to HN? You've repeatedly crossed into personal attack. We ban accounts that do that, and I don't want to ban you, so if you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and take the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful. We can't have users throwing elbows like this:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47526685 (March 2026)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47512697 (March 2026)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47512669 (March 2026)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47480879 (March 2026)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47434614 (March 2026)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47373748 (March 2026)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47342398 (March 2026)
All of those comments are in serious conflict with the intended spirit of HN, and unfortunately you've posted many more of those than I've listed here. In fact, it's been a problem for years:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31393023 (May 2022)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17832778 (Aug 2018)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11781469 (May 2016)
Not cool.
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.
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.
I would love to hear the excuse that the mods have for this title change. Good luck to them!
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.
That's a fair point. I enjoy being a _bit_ provocative, but that title might have been a bit much.
Yes, it's fairly straightforward - if a title is too baity, we edit it, in keeping with this guideline:
"Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait." - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
However, when we do that, we always try to find a representative phrase within the article itself. We try not to make up our own wording but rather to let the article speak for itself. In this case, we found this sentence:
> Microsoft is very obviously employing dark patterns in order to goad its users into paying for Onedrive storage
However, since that's also a provocative claim, we added a question mark at the end. This is also a standard moderation edit; it's basically shorthand for "the article argues for controversial claim X, but whether that's true or not is something each reader can decide for themselves". In this way the title that appears on the frontpage becomes more neutral, which is what we're going for.
The question mark is pretty bad though.
My tech illiterate family members fell for this Microsoft dark pattern. Revolting
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.
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).
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.
Exactly! They've gotten very good at mark-identification over the years.
if using windows in 2026, it might be that you are leveraging the device driver maturity while running your favorite Linux in WSL2.
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.
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”.