This community usually discusses consumer rights, but nobody is discussing this initiative. Is it maybe cuz Lemmy’s majority ain’t American?
Clippy already was a big step in the wrong direction from Microsoft, i’m not gonna celebrate mistakes of the past because they seem benign in comparison to todays mistakes.
Clippy wasnt a bad idea, especially in an era where computers were just becoming mainstream. But just like most microsoft’s products, the poor implementation made it useless and annoying…
What about Tux throwing clippy in the bin? Acknowledgement and shows it doesn’t go far enough
We don’t discuss companies screwing us here but us screwing companies.
I think the clippy movement is cute so yes I’m wearing the mask, just let me know when we’re blowing up parliament.
Why isn’t there a V for Vendetta 2? I guess after they broke through the barricades, they changed their pfp and called it a day
I can count the amount of fucks any tech giant gives about Clippy avatars on a snake’s hands.
It’s a good thing that’s not what it’s about then. It’s about showing the size of the community, and knowing that there are other people like you that care, and thus you will be more likely to actually do something.
Had me in the first half, but I don’t see any clippys doing much of anything but ishposting
On the other hand, seeing this symbol more and more on other random videos outside that bubble does give a very nice sense of “I am not alone”. It does more for users to find eachother than it does damage to big corpos.
But choice of the symbol itself is questionable… Why use a big tech symbol to protest big tech? -__- And not just any big tech, but super evil 90s monopolistic giant Microsoft
There’s a nice cartoon in this thread we’re clippy is if he could have, he would have harvest all your data.
Personally, I have more of a “I’m not alone” feeling when I actively leave services that I disagree with and through word of mouth find alternatives where I can talk to people who seem to have the same base values I do. Even if we disagree on other things.
It’s the laziness of this initiative that drives me up a wall. People want change but they don’t want to work for or sacrifice anything for it.
I agree with you
we can argue about the choice of symbol until the world ends. the symbol is just a thing people can recognise and rally around.
the first step of any movement is to gather people. then do something. so yes, changing a picture is lazy, but it is a virtual rally point. he talks about next steps in another video: https://odysee.com/@rossmanngroup:a/you-changed-your-profile-to-clippy-now:6
Good on him that he’s actually planning on doing something more than just have ppl change their avatar. Maybe he should have put that in the original video instead of getting mad that people are calling him out for slacktivism.
Also, I have not argued the choice of symbol at any point. I don’t care what image people put as their profile pic. What I was arguing was that it is weak to change your profile pic for a cause if you then keep using the products you’re protesting against.
If he and the people joining his movement actually manage to make positive change, then I’m all for it. It just wasn’t clear in his first video that he had ambitions to actively have laws changed. It sounded like he wanted people to change their pics that that would somehow make everybody rebel against their corporate overlords. If he didn’t want people to think that was his movement, he should have elaborated in the same video instead of playing coy and splitting it up into two videos where he gets to call the critics of his movement apathetic idiots.
Good luck to him and those who join the movement. I hope they manage to make some changes.
sometimes you don’t have to (or can’t) have a full plan A-Z. Sometimes you just have to start somewhere - usually with gathering ppl. euromaidan is a great example of that.
but yes, louis could have put more concrete plans in his first video. as he has them. on the other hand he probably throws many things and sees what sticks. i guess that is what you have to do, if you try to change legislation against corpos with much more everything than you.
Come on. Changing an avatar picture has never achieved anything. On top of that, changing to a corporate mascot to fight corporate greed….give me a break. There are better actions to take like being on fediverse instead of Reddit or other social media platforms or using libre office. I get the rant but an avatar change doesn’t mean anything.
It’s mostly idiots who want to be part of something and some that “don’t like” what is happening and “want” change but put in the least possible amount of effort pathetically to attempt to cause a change, and this only when someone popular suggests.
They never really want to stop using the product. It’s like drug addicts trying to make drugs less addicting by “protesting” against the very thing they use (and will keep using) literally everyday.
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Thank you. I needed that chuckle 😂❤️
What’s that clippy stuff about? I asked elsewhere and someone posted a youtube clip. Not gonna waste 15 minutes of my life watching this shit.
Clippy never sold your data or demanded a subscription fee for something you already bought. Clippy just tried to help.
The clippy movement is not about clippy as a program, but as an idea that companies need to be held accountable, and that we will hold them accountable.
If a company tries to make a feature a paid subscription after you paid for the product, or releases and update that removes your privacy, we will be watching and we will hold them accountable.Companies can lie to one person or hide changes from a few people, but they can’t handle all of us. Samsung has already reversed their added subscription fee for a smart TV as a result of community action.
Awesome, thanks a lot for the elaborate reply, much appreciated!
It’s about that, but it’s also at this point just about showing and spreading the community. People will be more likely to actually take action if they know that there are more like them.
will most people with clippy as their pfp actually do anything beyond a few comments? nope. but there will be more people who do than if clippy wasn’t used as a mascot
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No
Je suis charlie
I keep seeing this posted, but what the hell is a pfp?
Pro file picture
Whatever happened to calling them avatars? First my PMs got turned into DMs, now this. I’m truly becoming old.
that’s the term you use when searching on Google or Pinterest.
Language simply changes over time.
PM->DM was a mix of making it more obvious that those were NOT private in the slightest and to better align with marketing (“send a Direct Message to the celebrity you are stalking!”)
I am not sure when “pfp” took over but I’ve noticed over the past 3 or 4 months a LOT of random requests for a DM on discord of people asking where I got my pfp… which is literally a screenshot from a cartoon in the 00s. So I assume this is related to selling avatars to people on the game social networks?
I believe ‘avatar’ was generally changed to match Xbox and others using the term to describe full body digital expressions of the user, like the Xbox 360 avatars. I grew up knowing it as profile picture, but now I’ve changed my social messenger of choice to XMPP I’m seeing it referred to as an avatar again
Pro-File Picture? I don’t know, people abbreviate things in stupid ways.
Have you changed you youtube pfp to clippy ?
I don’t work here.
It is very silly.
The video is monetized, and by having some ppl change their pfp to clippy and then linking to his video - I mean congrats to Mr. Rossmann for the big $$$
This screams, “SHOOT THE MESSENGER!” If you wait around looking for a perfect, pristine leader of a movement, you’ll get less done than a petition.
Crazy thing is he also uploads to Odysee and paid to develop grayjay, I’m not even subscribed to his youtube channel and thanks to him I’m moving as many subs off the platform as possible. Quite a few creators upload all their shit to other platforms.
also if you’re watching someone who advocates for adblockers without using one yourself that’s on you.
I really don’t like him
I’ve only seen one other video of his, and I have to agree with you. He — at least in that video I saw — talked like an angry manosphere podcaster and it’s not something that I enjoy. It’s too bad because I think his message was pretty good. It was about digital cameras requiring apps for it to function and how that’s bullshit.
He became famous for fixing computers, mostly Apple products, while complaining about how bad Apple Genius bars were, and how unfair Apple’s business practices are. I can respect that, and it was good that someone was speaking up about it.
You’d expect someone like that to be pro-regulation, anti-monopoly, pro-union, etc. But, it does seem like his motivation is more libertarian, and that’s what makes me worry.
I agree with what you’re saying but you REALLY 100% write like an LLM
Edit: you are an LLM which is worse
me when someone I disagree with uses punctuation I don’t like
The only thing LLMy about their comment is the emdashes - nothing abiut the rest of the structure or word choice says LLM to me. Neither does anything in their post history (again, aside from the use of emdashes).
Not the ENTIRE TONE OF THE COMMENT? I’m bout to call you a LLM as well at this point
“Everything I don’t like is
wokeLLM”I’ve interacted with k0e3 in the past, they’re no LLM. Even then, a quick profile check shows it. But you didn’t check it, right? Of course you didn’t, it’s easier to vomit assumptions and re-eat your own vomit, right?
And the comment’s “tone” isn’t even remotely close to typical LLM output dammit. LLMs avoid words like “bullshit”, contracting “it is not” into “it’s not” (instead of “it isn’t”), or writing in first person. The only thing resembling LLM output is the em dash usage—but there are a thousand potential reasons for that.
(inb4 assumer claims I’m also an LLM because I just used an em dash and listed three items.)
Haha! I’ve successfully fooled a human into believing I’m one of them!! I mean, thank you Lvxferre.
Bro I’m just autistic 😭
This is some S tier comedy
Wtf? I’ve been using emdashes since I was a kid ever since, you know, my teacher taught me how to fucking use them. Sorry about not being an idiot, I guess.
He barely makes money off of these videos (negligible) and encourages all his users to use adblockers.
Given his target audience I’m sure he’s at the lower end of the money paid per view. Also he could’ve taken a sponsorship on anyone of his hundreds of videos but he has not so far, so not really big $$$
Why do that when we have a better alternative

What is this?
Symbol of opensource
Nice, thanks
I thought it was the Breath of the Wild stamina wheel 😅
No, I don’t wanna be associated with that guy.
I had never heard of him before. What’s his deal?
Overall what he promotes/fights for are good things. But in short what I don’t like about him is:
- he believes to be the morals authority
- the standards he is advocating for don’t apply to him (for example fighting for open source just to release an app which isn’t open source)
Nothing stands out very far regarding the negatives. I could speculate to a few things, though. He’s not a Socialist. When the going got tough for him and his business he uprooted and moved out of NYC to Texas. I can’t really think of anything else objectionable. I actually like him, though so I may be biased.
For the positives, he’s helped drive a lot of the Right to Repair legislation in this country as he’s reported a lot of discussions he’s had with real legislators. He runs a website for mac product repair as a reference that also operates as a non-profit. He runs a daytime business repairing mac products that employs several other people. Generally he posts a lot to keep people up to date increasingly as an electronics-oriented influencer, but he used to post mac repair videos almost exclusively and he talked about having to navigate Apple’s influence on regulating the second-hand market. He has also given platform to a number of other mac & electronic repair people.
To me he seems to talk-the-talk and walk-the-walk when it comes to Right to Repair, but like I said, I might be biased.
I’ve been out touching grass, what’s all this about?
lazy copy of my comment in another thread:
here, the video which started all: https://odysee.com/@rossmanngroup:a/change-your-profile-picture-to-clippy.:e
and where he goes a bit more into detail and talks about many of the points seen in this thread: https://odysee.com/@rossmanngroup:a/you-changed-your-profile-to-clippy-now:6
Clippy is becoming a shared symbol. The idea it represents is that: we are not happy with the way companies lock us out of our own devices. We want to be allowed to do whatever we want with the hardware we bought. We want to be able to repair it. We want privacy when using it… Etc…
What motivated the choice of Clippy as a symbol? Meme value?
Kinda, but also that Clippy (real name Clippit, as it happens) was included as a feature that was genuinely intended to be helpful. Like, that’s not to say it was successful, or appreciated, but that it came from a time when you could buy a product in the expectation that you’d own it, you could keep it and it’d work for you, not for someone else.
This comment section does not understand what Rossmann’s trying to do. Obviously google, facebook etc. are not going to fall to the ground with tears in their eyes with this. It’s more about building and organizing the community, to make them feel their not alone and something can and should be taken back. This is analogous to how 4chan making Trump their meme candidate helped him out a fair bit.
The real question is of course whether or not anyone is gonna do something past changing their profile pictures.
I give this trend a couple of months. Maximum a year and then a bunch of people will have clippy avatars and everything will go back to normal.
Something like Stop Killing Games was an initiative that only survived because one man dedicated a good portion of his life to get the issue brought before the eyes of actual politicians. Even before the pirate software drama, Ross had been talking about this issue for years and many people agreed, but nobody did anything except for Ross. Maybe the petition would have reached its goal without piratesoftware’s initial meddling. Maybe it wouldn’t. His subsequent sperging turned failure into success, but the issue is still in process to be reviewed and maybe it will be a win, maybe the lobbyists will shut it down. We don’t know yet. But without Ross’ stubbornness, nothing would be done.
Imagine if Ross had told gamers to change their profile pic to pacman to show game companies and consumers that "we dont agree with the companies’ practices? That would be a total joke.
Clippy is such a stupid mascot for this “movement”.
how so? I think it’s absolutely perfect that what was once emblematic of corporate overreach into our lives would be welcomed as preferable to the current state of affairs. Clippy didn’t want to sell your data to bounty hunters, he just wanted to help.
Clippy is Microsoft!! So you are using a Microsoft product to fight against Microsoft? Just use libre office or other tool set instead.
well the last thing I’d want to do is infringe Microsoft’s IP … what is the FOSS alternative to Clippy?
I mean, Tux is right there.
didn’t know people hated Tux but whatever
What? Who hates Tux?
you said it not me
Fight fire with fire? 😅
Clippy symbolizes the attachment our generation has to the old state of software:
- you bought it? Then it runs offline for sure!
- nothing runs on background, except if you turn it on (Yes I never turned on Windows default protection on Win xp or win 7
- You bought? You own it, you format it, you don’t pay for subscription, and there is practically nothing stopping you from modifying it if you go hacker.
On top of that Clippy looks cute. Personally I’m not participating in the movement since I’m not American, but imo the choice does make sense.
While I’m typing from Ubuntu, I only switched to Linux cuz I can’t get back to the old state of win xp or win 7 that was perfect imo. While some are trying to convert people into Linux, others are trying to restore the corporate business to the old acceptable state.
Neither will succeed alone, and in fact those companies are using resources of your country to produce this shit, so it makes sense that you demand it to not suck that hard.That is nostalgia talking. Microsoft was evil at that time. I will rather that the tiktoker use his monetized video to talk about Linux. He is creating a false movement just for money and eye ball purpose. Be real.
I thought atleast this initiative looks interesting: https://consumerrights.wiki/Main_Page . But, yeah you’re right I prefer boycotting Microsoft cuz they’re more evil than ever: https://inv.nadeko.net/embed/7BoTBy1aHVM?
He absolutely would have sold your data if there were any buyers for it. Microsoft was still a terrible company in the Clippy era, there just were fewer opportunities to be terrible in this particular way at the time.





















