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.
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.
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.
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…
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…
They made it very difficult to create local accounts on win11.
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')
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.
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).
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…
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.
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: