Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Launch HN: Jitsu (YC S20) – Open-Source Segment Alternative

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 114 posts

Re: Launch HN: Jitsu (YC S20) – Open-Source Segment Alternative

#31

Post by vklmn »

colesantiago wrote: post #23

> Jitsu solves the AdBlocker problem... This line alone is enough to infuriate me. So I am unable to block spying and data collection now? I don't understand why we are still praising spyware tools?

Jitsu certainly can be used to build spyware (and Linux too, probably 90% of spyware is running on Linux servers), but following this logic any OSS project can be accused of being spyware. I

Yes, jitsu can be deployed at custom domain such as track.yourcompany.com. And while some AdBlockers will block *.segment.com, track.yourcompany.com will remain functional. We don't consider this feature unethical, though. It depends on how data collected by Jitsu is used. If the app owner sells it without telling end-users that's probably bad. However, I believe most of our users using the data to improve product experience. And Jitsu can be configured to respect do-not-track/gdpr settings.

Re: Launch HN: Jitsu (YC S20) – Open-Source Segment Alternative

#32

Post by neximo64 »

soumyadeb wrote: post #12

Congrats on your launch. Great to see more innovation in this space. Segment deserves some serious competition. -RudderStack team.

What is the difference with Jitsu and Rudderstack. Aware of both projects but keen to get your take.

Re: Launch HN: Jitsu (YC S20) – Open-Source Segment Alternative

#33

Post by FunnyLookinHat »

colesantiago wrote: post #23

> Jitsu solves the AdBlocker problem... This line alone is enough to infuriate me. So I am unable to block spying and data collection now? I don't understand why we are still praising spyware tools?

I think calling this spyware is a pretty far stretch. We're talking about SAAS platforms that want to record events based on user behavior for a myriad of purposes; these are platforms that you are choosing to use, not tracking pixels dropped all across the web.

There are dozens of valid uses for this beyond ad-tech. Where we use Segment it barely even touches with marketing. Most of the value for Segment is piping user lifecycle events around to every platform and service you use to help enrich customer experience. Sure, call it sales or marketing or ad-tech, but that's really just an umbrella for trying to maximize revenue-per-customer - and isn't that the point of a SAAS platform?

I think we should be cautious about throwing the terms "spyware" and "malware" around right now; there are lots of very valid cases that should be labeled as such, but if we over-use the word it just makes it harder for us to delineate between powerful tools being used for good/valid purposes or deceptive ones.

Re: Launch HN: Jitsu (YC S20) – Open-Source Segment Alternative

#35

Post by vklmn »

reidalert wrote: post #26

Congrats on your launch, and looks really exciting! I'm curious how this compares to tools like Snowplow [1]? I guess Jitsu comes with more sources and destinations out of the box? [1] https://github.com/snowplow/snowplow

Essentially we're doing same thing. But we build Jitsu to be as simple as possible: you don't need to setup multiple services (just one Docker service!), data goes to DWH almost instantly. And we can pull data from more that 100 external APIs

Think of us as Snowplow 2.0 )

Re: Launch HN: Jitsu (YC S20) – Open-Source Segment Alternative

#36

Post by soumyadeb »

neximo64 wrote: post #32
soumyadeb wrote: post #12

Congrats on your launch. Great to see more innovation in this space. Segment deserves some serious competition. -RudderStack team.

What is the difference with Jitsu and Rudderstack. Aware of both projects but keen to get your take.

Disclaimer: Haven't looked at Jitsu in depth so my understanding below may be limited.

Reading through their comment below - "Jitsu can be used for any kind of data while Segment compatibility is just a thin layer on top".

I am guessing they have built a generic event API that can be used to send any JSON payload while RudderStack (like Segment) has a opinionated view of events - e.g. there has to be a userID (or anonymousID), that ID is persisted in a cookie (for web), every event must include that userID. Furthermore, there are certain standard for event tracking for specific verticals which RudderStack supports (e.g eCommerce https://rudderstack.com/docs/rudderstack-api/api-specificati...)

Having this opinionated view helps us map these events to all the 100s of destinations, otherwise, you cannot send any arbitrary JSON to these destinations. It also lets us build more post processing in the warehouse (e.g identity stitching, user sessions etc https://hub.getdbt.com/rudderlabs/, we are going to build more MLish applications like churn-models and release them too).

On the other hand, it becomes hard to send generic events (e.g. application telemetry) via RudderStack which seems possible via Jitsu. With RudderStack, you would have to create hacky userID to tag on every event which doesn't make sense.

In summary, go deep on one use case (customer-data) or wide as a generic event streaming platform.

Beyond this, there are other feature differences (transformation, reverse-ETL etc) but that's not a fundamental difference imo. They are just getting started and are a much smaller team so that's expected. Impressive to see what they have built.

Re: Launch HN: Jitsu (YC S20) – Open-Source Segment Alternative

#40

Post by vklmn »

leftnode wrote: post #37

Congrats on the launch. Unrelated to the actual software, are any of you actual Jiu-Jitsu grapplers? If not, why'd you go with the name Jitsu?

To be honest, we just grab a first short .com domain name we liked a) which was available at reasonable price b) we like
Post reply on HN