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 They pushed an update that gutted the app and said this app has been replaced by OneDrive.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.
Microsoft is employing dark patterns to goad users into paying for storage?
151–160 of 255 posts
Re: Microsoft is employing dark patterns to goad users into paying for storage?
#152Microsoft has been disrespecting their user base for a very long time now. This is not news. Stop giving them your money.
Re: Microsoft is employing dark patterns to goad users into paying for storage?
#153Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 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.
Re: Microsoft is employing dark patterns to goad users into paying for storage?
#154Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
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.
Re: Microsoft is employing dark patterns to goad users into paying for storage?
#155Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 referra…
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.
Re: Microsoft is employing dark patterns to goad users into paying for storage?
#156Microsoft 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 increas…
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.
Re: Microsoft is employing dark patterns to goad users into paying for storage?
#157Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Re: Microsoft is employing dark patterns to goad users into paying for storage?
#158Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
The question mark is pretty bad though.
Re: Microsoft is employing dark patterns to goad users into paying for storage?
#159I 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…
rclone supposedly supports transferring files from and to OneDrive.
Re: Microsoft is employing dark patterns to goad users into paying for storage?
#160This 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 accura…
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.