Earlier quoted context omitted.
It’d be clearer if they just said “opted-in by default”.
No. To "opt" literally means "to make a choice". If the choice has been made for you, you are not "opted-in", you are in.
A choice was still made.
Telemetry
41–50 of 69 posts
Re: Telemetry
#42Submission title is a bit confusing: “opt-in” means you have to opt-in, that is, the default is “off”. The sentence “opt-in by default” is the opposite of what I assume the poster meant. Storybook’s telemetry is opt-out as stated at the top of the page. This also looks like something that should be posted as a text submission with commentary - simply editorializing a link + title is discouraged in HN.
When discussing the title, as people often do, copy the title verbatim when doing so. The title is now "Telemetry" and 90% of the discussions makes no sense anymore.
> PSA: Storybook sends telemetry data, opt-in by default
Re: Telemetry
#43Isn't there a telemetry manifesto? I understand that developers want to peek into what their users are doing. That is the fruit of their labor after all. However telemetry became increasingly easy lately, and it is impossible (in theory and in practice) to do it right. Collecting data of your users is - stupid - illegal - harming your users - makes your software a spyware so in summary, don't do that. Instead, do the…
This is pretty basic stuff, but developers and the HN audience have a hard time to accept that.
Ask yourself what value you got from your telemetry lately. Also how much effort you put into it. Do you even look at it regularly? Does it still make sense?
Maybe consider the legality? Hint - if it isn't opt-in you are most likely doing something illegal. Congratulations! Does it still make sense?
Maybe consider not being a total jackass and insult your users? Does it still make sense?
Re: Telemetry
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
That’s fair. If the telemetry really is helpful to building a better product it should be an easy case to make to users.
If Telemetry is valuable, it's largely valuable to the degree it's representative. Opt-in sacrifices this and even a well optimized opt-in process won't prevent that. This is not to say that Telemetry should be opt-out, just that you place other justifications ahead of the usefulness of Telemetry (which is fine).
These days I reckon running an LLM over the storybook discord and reddits would yield more valuable data. How big peoples projects are on average doesn’t matter. 100 people asking the same question does.
Re: Telemetry
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think its value is considerably overstated from the use I've seen made of it. Executives absolutely love it though. It makes them feel scientific in their decision making and gives them ass-cover when justifying their decisions. I really think that the ability to collect opt in opinions at strategic points in the app is vastly more effective, not to mention less creepy and invasive.
Absolutely agreed with the second point. I’m not sure I agree with the first though. At least not that that’s the main reason telemetry is desired from product teams. (Though obviously telemetry does provide fodder for that type of stupidity for sure.) To give a concrete example from my past experience, I used to work on a product that essentially knitted a bunch of services from a major cloud provider together to pr…
My edited statement wasnt directed at you (Ive only just read your reply) but it does indirectly answer your question.
What I mean is that you survey your users via your app on, say, the config page and ask them if they think its too complex and if it would benefit from layers or whatever and always let then enter an optional opinion when you do.
Re: Telemetry
#46I took some interest in the concept of hashing IPs to avoid PII issues [0], and it turns out that since there's only so few IPv4 addresses, it's trivial to simply take the salt the project uses and calculate all the hashes. On my laptop it would take around two hours with the most naive implementation, so I don't really think this solves anything. This problem would be sidestepped by IPv6, but we all know how that is going so far.
[0] https://github.com/storybookjs/storybook/discussions/19910#d...
Re: Telemetry
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
When discussing the title, as people often do, copy the title verbatim when doing so. The title is now "Telemetry" and 90% of the discussions makes no sense anymore.
> PSA: Storybook sends telemetry data, opt-in by default
Fixed: Storybook sends telemetry data, opt-out
Re: Telemetry
#48I don’t mean to dismiss the importance of users owning and controlling their data, but isn’t telemetry a valid tool for software projects to gain valuable insights into how their product is being used and thus how to improve it? Yes, it can be (and, probably frequently is) abused. Yes there should be a way to opt-out of telemetry if a user desires for whatever reason. But I can’t help but feel this is posted in the s…
Telemetry is fine, it's just that under GDPR and co, it has to be opt-in; the user needs to make an informed decision on whether or not the app can collect and share telemetry.
Re: Telemetry
#49Storybook is one of those projects, like Postman, that has completely lost the plot. It's unclear what objectives they are pursuing but in terms of developer experience they seem increasingly developer hostile. The CSF format is an unreadable joke and doesn't play that well with TypeScript, the number of plugins you need to do anything sane is ridiculous, and this telemetry story is a farce - open source should not skim data by default.
I remember writing a super simple wrapper around Jasmine to do the same kind of thing, and was glad when I could ditch it for Storybook many moons ago. But if I was starting a project now I would probably rawdog it again, Storybook just causes too much pain.
Is anyone aware of any similar projects that are more developer friendly?
Re: Telemetry
#50I don’t mean to dismiss the importance of users owning and controlling their data, but isn’t telemetry a valid tool for software projects to gain valuable insights into how their product is being used and thus how to improve it? Yes, it can be (and, probably frequently is) abused. Yes there should be a way to opt-out of telemetry if a user desires for whatever reason. But I can’t help but feel this is posted in the s…
> there should be a way to opt-out of telemetry There should be a way to opt-in. Anything else is egregious.
I have the same opinion on telemetry but I have never opted in for any tool no matter how politely they asked and also never seen any other technical person doing it either. So maybe for software developers it doesn't work if it's opt-in and opt-out is a good strategy?