We ditched Google Analytics • Hacker News Board

Re: We ditched Google Analytics

#101

Post by pdkl95 » Tue, Dec 08, 2015, 4:54 PM UTC

jessaustin wrote: post #63

digi_owl wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> thrives on developers' laziness in my opinion. Frankly most of what i read out of the tech world these days seems to be about pandering to developer laziness. All manner of APIs and services seem to exist in their current form simply to extract rent from developers that don't want to do back end "dirty work".

Being paid for doing work by those who need the work done is the opposite of "extracting rent".

Being paid for doing work has nothing to do with extracting rent, which is the practice of inserting yourself as a middleman so other people have to pay you "rent"[1] where none should be required.

The entire idea behind writing a Service as a Software Substitute[2] is about extracting rent.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-seeking

[2] http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/who-does-that-server-really-se...

Re: We ditched Google Analytics

#102

Post by wishinghand » Tue, Dec 08, 2015, 4:54 PM UTC

billmalarky wrote: post #62

rplnt wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aren't there self-hosted analytics anyway? Piwik[1] comes to mind first, but I'm sure there are many. 1. https://piwik.org/

Piwik is incredible. But it should be noted that it does provide a scaling challenge for high traffic use cases (> hundred million actions per month), and hosting your own analytics is expensive. I bring this up because people had been slamming moot for using GA on 4chan instead of piwik without understanding why.

Do any of the Google Analytics alternatives scale to that size?

Re: We ditched Google Analytics

#103

Post by rbinv » Tue, Dec 08, 2015, 4:54 PM UTC

> It took us only a few weeks to write our home-brew analytics package.

Unfortunately, there's no way to replicate what Google Analytics currently offers (for free!) within a couple of weeks (or even months). Not with big data sets. Yes, GA does enforce sampling if you don't pay for GA Premium, but the free edition is still one of hell of a deal (if you don't care about privacy).

If you only use Google Analytics as a hit counter, sure, you can do that yourself within a couple of minutes. The advanced features are way more complicated, though (think segmentation and custom reports).

This also begs the question: why not use Piwik?

Re: We ditched Google Analytics

#104

Post by modoc » Tue, Dec 08, 2015, 4:56 PM UTC

vermontdevil wrote: post #64

rplnt wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aren't there self-hosted analytics anyway? Piwik[1] comes to mind first, but I'm sure there are many. 1. https://piwik.org/

Does the adblock/ublock etc block this as well? Am looking to use this in lieu of Google Analytics.

No it parses web server logs, however as mentioned above it doesn't work well for very high traffic sites.

Re: We ditched Google Analytics

#105

Post by extesy » Tue, Dec 08, 2015, 4:58 PM UTC

jcfrei wrote: post #100

Someone1234 wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many of these types of services seem to intentionally cap upload speeds to reduce their potential storage liability (since they're likely over-selling storage to be able to offer 1 TB for $12 with the level of redundancy, staffing costs, etc, needed). I wonder if that is happening in this specific case? Although if it were the case the vendor should still be honest about it. Just saying they limit uploads to 2 Mbps i…

Yup, I've noticed the same with Wuala. The uploads were pretty slow. I've heard similar complaints from people using OneDrive. I would be very willing to switch to a smaller competitor even if it meant paying more than I do at Dropbox. But from my experience Dropbox is the only provider capable of synchronizing large amounts of data 24/7.

Backblaze client is uploading at the speed of several mb/s, very close to my connection upload speed limit.

Re: We ditched Google Analytics

#106

Post by jrgv » Tue, Dec 08, 2015, 4:58 PM UTC

jdmichal wrote: post #95

vermontdevil wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does the adblock/ublock etc block this as well? Am looking to use this in lieu of Google Analytics.

Self-hosted means that it will be served from your own servers, and thereby your own domain. So unless your domain is on a block list, it will be loaded. EDIT: Sorry, I've been dealing with uBlock Matrix for too long, and forgot how advanced the other blockers pattern matching is. See the many responses to this for better information.

The EasyPrivacy block list contains an entry that will block the piwik.js file. Of course, when you're self-hosting, it's trivial to serve that file with a non-default name.

Re: We ditched Google Analytics

#107

Post by rbinv » Tue, Dec 08, 2015, 5:00 PM UTC

wishinghand wrote: post #102

billmalarky wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Piwik is incredible. But it should be noted that it does provide a scaling challenge for high traffic use cases (> hundred million actions per month), and hosting your own analytics is expensive. I bring this up because people had been slamming moot for using GA on 4chan instead of piwik without understanding why.

Do any of the Google Analytics alternatives scale to that size?

Free alternatives? Not really. Paid? Yes, SiteCatalyst and Webtrekk come to mind.

People seem to ignore that the tracking JavaScript is not what you're paying for. It's the backend + servers.

Re: We ditched Google Analytics

#108

Post by Retra » Tue, Dec 08, 2015, 5:00 PM UTC

eponeponepon wrote: post #29

It took us only a few weeks to write our home-brew analytics package. Nothing super fancy yet now we have an internal dashboard that shows the entire company much of what we used analytics for anyway - and with some nice integration with some of our other systems too. I never quite grasp how the above isn't just a matter of intuition to anyone working in the tech sector. Google Analytics thrives on developers' lazine…

Everything developers don't do is a matter of laziness if you ignore the fact that they might have other priorities.

Re: We ditched Google Analytics

#109

Post by morgante » Tue, Dec 08, 2015, 5:01 PM UTC

eponeponepon wrote: post #29

It took us only a few weeks to write our home-brew analytics package. Nothing super fancy yet now we have an internal dashboard that shows the entire company much of what we used analytics for anyway - and with some nice integration with some of our other systems too. I never quite grasp how the above isn't just a matter of intuition to anyone working in the tech sector. Google Analytics thrives on developers' lazine…

Having implemented two different custom analytics dashboards, it's a lot more complex than you think.

Sure, the basics are easy. But marketers and business people want to drill into a lot of data which is non-trivial to gather.

Unless you have a compelling business case (which SpiderOak does), it's not worth it.

Re: We ditched Google Analytics

#110

Post by rbinv » Tue, Dec 08, 2015, 5:02 PM UTC

modoc wrote: post #104

vermontdevil wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does the adblock/ublock etc block this as well? Am looking to use this in lieu of Google Analytics.

No it parses web server logs, however as mentioned above it doesn't work well for very high traffic sites.

Piwik relies on client-side JavaScript for tracking, not log analysis.