Microsoft is employing dark patterns to goad users into paying for storage? • Hacker News Board

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

#211

Post by subscribed » Fri, Apr 10, 2026, 12:41 PM UTC

Esn024 wrote: post #79

liendolucas wrote: post #30

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 i…

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…

W10privacy has the same. I have a strict set of changes I apply in 5 minutes after every update.

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

#212

Post by Forgeties79 » Fri, Apr 10, 2026, 12:43 PM UTC

selectively wrote: post #98

ijk wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And this keeps it from reinstalling?

Yes.

No.

From M$:

>Hide OneDrive in Windows 10/11

>OneDrive is built in to some versions of Windows and can't be uninstalled. But you can hide it and stop the sync process, so it stays hidden.

They essentially integrated it into the OS. It’s their file manager. This is easy info to verify.

Source: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/turn-off-disable-...

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

#213

Post by Forgeties79 » Fri, Apr 10, 2026, 12:45 PM UTC

selectively wrote: post #6

Forgeties79 wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>uninstall it Go tell all our parents to navigate that process. Microsoft is very insistent on their using onedrive.

Open the screen where you remove apps and click the uninstall button.

Follow up since I decided to look at their actual support/policy around OneDrive

From M$:

>Hide OneDrive in Windows 10/11

>OneDrive is built in to some versions of Windows and can't be uninstalled. But you can hide it and stop the sync process, so it stays hidden.

Source: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/turn-off-disable-...

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

#214

Post by joshstrange » Fri, Apr 10, 2026, 12:49 PM UTC

I'm shocked that I can't find a single top-level comment that understands that the general public does not back up their data. We can call OneDrive a dark pattern or saving customer's butts from themselves. If it wasn't the default: "What do you mean all my pictures are gone forever because I never turned on OneDrive?".

I have no love for Microsoft but I'm having a really hard time seeing how it isn't the smart default to backup the user's files/photos to the cloud. Sure, if you are here on HN then maybe you have NextCloud, Immich, Dropbox, Google Drive/Photos, etc, that you make sure to backup your pictures to. I can assure you the general public does no such thing unless it's the default in the OS.

Try consoling a few people about how the pictures or files they hold dear are gone forever and then come back and talk about this "dark pattern".

This blog post is somehow a success story? No, it's a ticking time bomb. Great, you free'd up space for email at the expense of un-protecting all his pictures/files. That's not a win.

The author gets _so close_ to the point but manages to miss it completely:

> but I suspect that he deleted files (including family photos) for which he had no other backup.

> I’m a computer nerd, and if you are reading this you probably are as well. We can change that setting ourselves without much thought, and we probably have backups of our important data in case recovery is necessary.

But they couldn't make 1 more tiny hop to "my neighbor will not manage backups and so these files are now at risk".

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

#215

Post by WhyNotHugo » Fri, Apr 10, 2026, 12:53 PM UTC

joshstrange wrote: post #214

I'm shocked that I can't find a single top-level comment that understands that the general public does not back up their data. We can call OneDrive a dark pattern or saving customer's butts from themselves. If it wasn't the default: "What do you mean all my pictures are gone forever because I never turned on OneDrive?". I have no love for Microsoft but I'm having a really hard time seeing how it isn't the smart defau…

Synchronisation is not back-up. Dropbox is not a back-up mechanism.

If files get deleted on the local host, they get deleted from OneDrive/Dropbox too.

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

#216

Post by joshstrange » Fri, Apr 10, 2026, 12:58 PM UTC

WhyNotHugo wrote: post #215

joshstrange wrote: post #214

I'm shocked that I can't find a single top-level comment that understands that the general public does not back up their data. We can call OneDrive a dark pattern or saving customer's butts from themselves. If it wasn't the default: "What do you mean all my pictures are gone forever because I never turned on OneDrive?". I have no love for Microsoft but I'm having a really hard time seeing how it isn't the smart defau…

Synchronisation is not back-up. Dropbox is not a back-up mechanism. If files get deleted on the local host, they get deleted from OneDrive/Dropbox too.

> If files get deleted on the local host, they get deleted from OneDrive/Dropbox too.

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

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

#217

Post by jpmitchell » Fri, Apr 10, 2026, 1:10 PM UTC

joshstrange wrote: post #214

I'm shocked that I can't find a single top-level comment that understands that the general public does not back up their data. We can call OneDrive a dark pattern or saving customer's butts from themselves. If it wasn't the default: "What do you mean all my pictures are gone forever because I never turned on OneDrive?". I have no love for Microsoft but I'm having a really hard time seeing how it isn't the smart defau…

I do say in my post that I performed a backup. I should have clarified that that was not merely for my benefit while performing the work. My final conversation with him involved handing off a clearly labeled USB drive, and an explanation that all the data from his laptop was copied to that drive and that he should store it somewhere safe.

> Try consoling a few people about how the pictures or files they hold dear are gone forever and then come back and talk about this "dark pattern".

I have, and pretty much every time I've had that conversation with someone it ended with them buying a portable storage drive and having learned a valuable lesson regarding the need for a real backup strategy.

Microsoft's design choices can be both a benefit and an abuse of its users. There's no excuse here for using important features and functionality of the software as an underhanded marketing exercise.

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

#218

Post by brimwats » Fri, Apr 10, 2026, 1:13 PM UTC

TitaRusell wrote: post #195

jasonkester wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 c…

I am in my 40s and prefer a old school flash drive instead of an expensive cloud subscription. An elegant tool from a more civilised age!

I am an archivist; please don't use flash drives because they lose data to the air; use hard disk drives.

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

#219

Post by joshstrange » Fri, Apr 10, 2026, 1:32 PM UTC

jpmitchell wrote: post #217

joshstrange wrote: post #214

I'm shocked that I can't find a single top-level comment that understands that the general public does not back up their data. We can call OneDrive a dark pattern or saving customer's butts from themselves. If it wasn't the default: "What do you mean all my pictures are gone forever because I never turned on OneDrive?". I have no love for Microsoft but I'm having a really hard time seeing how it isn't the smart defau…

I do say in my post that I performed a backup. I should have clarified that that was not merely for my benefit while performing the work. My final conversation with him involved handing off a clearly labeled USB drive, and an explanation that all the data from his laptop was copied to that drive and that he should store it somewhere safe. > Try consoling a few people about how the pictures or files they hold dear are…

You described your client as:

> not tech literate.

Yet you expect him to understand the need to backup his data, manually, to a local device?

You want to use a 3-2-1 backup strategy:

- 3 backups

- 2 different mediums

- 1 (at least) offsite

A local USB drive satisfies only part of that and doesn't account for the most important (IMHO) offsite requirement. And again, unless there is a some automated process you can assume whatever backup you took will probably be the only one ever done. Perhaps they will backup manually a handful of times but it's just not realistic to expect anyone, even a "computer nerd", to manually backup their files regularly.

I'm really not trying to be a jerk here but I fear you have a call in your future about how their computer died and they plugged that "thumb thing you gave us" into the new computer ("actually, do you have a dongle? The new computer only has round holes, not these square ones") but I have the pictures I took last week (/month/year/since you took the original backup).

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

#220

Post by subscribed » Fri, Apr 10, 2026, 1:42 PM UTC

debugnik wrote: post #41

jmcphers wrote: post #24

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 Micro…

> 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.

It's 2026, year of decent cameras.

70 seconds long 4K video is 2GB.