YSK: People are switching their profile pictures to Microsoft’s Clippy in protest of the unethical, immoral, anti-consumer practices by various companies. The movement was started by Louis Rossmann (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2_Dtmpe9qaQ) on August 7th, 2025.
@6:46 “Clippy’s a symbol that what used to be considered one of the worst annoyances in our life would now not only be welcomed, but for all of his flaws, celebrated as an idol. Because for all of these things that occur right now where there is negative malice of intent, […] Clippy just wanted to help. And if you were to turn him on today, unlike most cloud bullshit, he’d still work.”
Louis hopes for this to be a show of solidarity.
@5:44 “When a company CEO logs into their Slack and sees 10,000 Clippy’s looking back at them, what I hope occurs is that they intuitively understand that they no longer live in a world where they can get away with fucking over the consumer.”
@5:58 “[…] that [people] are alert and they are aware of what is going on, and they are going to politely but firmly push back against it. Every single one of those 10,000 people will be an obstacle to the anti-consumer practices and the anti-ownership practices, and they will no longer be another cog in the assembly line sending us all into a dystopia.”
Why YSK: I was curious about the number of Clippy avatars, and thought other people might be curious too.
@4:28 “Clippy never tried to normalize sex trafficking. He just wanted to help.”
I just… no thanks. Zero point to doing this as far as im concerned. Wish all participants the best of luck, however!
I concur - I agree with the sentiment, but this seems so… pointless. Remember the Reddit blackouts? Some people migrated to Lemmy but I doubt the number of new members ever increased in the same proportion as it did in those days, some horrible mods were sacked (like u/awkwardtheturtle from r/art) and some subs were closed by their mods, but Reddit just reinstantiated those subs to another admins (r/unexpected on the top of my head at the moment) and… shit’s even worse than ever and they keep earning their profit as usual, if not even more. In the end the “protests” and blackouts did absolutely nothing for them.
I disagree, without the protests I would still be using Reddit. Just because it doesn’t completely collapse the system doesn’t mean it’s been ineffective
Fair, it got your attention, which I think is worth it.
But as they mentioned, Reddit is doing fine, and making more revenue than ever. The premise of the clippy protest is to scare the CEOs into submission, exactly like the reddit blackouts, but that wasn’t the result of the blackouts and that won’t be the result of YouTube users changing their avatar to clippy.
The only thing that will scare them is users actually migrating away, which again didn’t happen enough with the reddit exodus, it didn’t get a massive blow like digg did. Users are too complacent now.
I’ll still change mine in case it gets one user’s attention enough to start them down the Louis rabbit hole and make them understand the problem of corporations owning all your data, with the hope they will self motivate to leave these platforms entirely, but it ain’t gonna get any CEOs attention when they wake up and see everyone on slack has clippy, they’ll laugh it off.
Bad example, reddit blackouts did work. People left
Kinda bad example: the server you are posting on (lemmy.world) literally started during the time of the subreddit blackouts, and other servers’ user count shot up 5x, 10x or more. It’s likely the surge would be muted without it, and even if more than half left Lemmy and returned to Reddit, it was still the first time it could even be considered a competitor. Its a positive and concrete resulf that came of it.
I dunno what changing a profile pic can do, without more of a goal than, “get a CEO to look at clippys and think its funny”. It would have a positive effect if it was even something small like telling people to change the profile and donate $1 to EFF.org
but the only reason the reddit blackout did not kill reddit is because a large portion did not care or was ok with what was happening. the same applies here and your sentiment is part of the problem that no change is happening. (well i also want to say that even if everyone would have a clippy as their profile picture, it would not change things directly)