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Telemetry

storybook.js.org

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51–60 of 69 posts

Re: Telemetry

#51

Post by morbicer »

faichai wrote: post #49

Storybook 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 s…

It indeed became Sorrybook.

https://github.com/tajo/ladle looks promising if you use React

Re: Telemetry

#52

Post by armchairhacker »

tilne wrote: post #22
have_faith wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> there should be a way to opt-out of telemetry There should be a way to opt-in. Anything else is egregious.

That’s fair. If the telemetry really is helpful to building a better product it should be an easy case to make to users.

The problem is most people really don’t care about telemetry, but don’t even care enough to opt themselves in. It’s simply not in their focus.

I think a very pronounced opt-out is fine, because it means anyone who is remotely against telemetry can leave, but you still get data from those who genuinely don’t care. Opt-in means you only take data from those who are explicitly for telemetry, which is a very small and not representative number.

Opt-out does have to be visible and pronounced though, and not have any drawbacks. “opt-out” through 30 secret menus which are only known to those who read internet forums doesn’t count, because you’re still secretly collecting telemetry from those who aren’t aware; and wording like “opt-in by default” is flat-out misleading (it’s like saying “made by metal artisans” when the “metal artisans” are literally robots). I’m pretty sure it’s also not necessary: even if there’s a big checkbox “enable telemetry” which is on-by-default, or in this case a flag `telemetry: false` which is very well-documented, the majorly of people choose the path of least resistance and will keep it enabled.

Re: Telemetry

#53

Post by goenning »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #48
tilne wrote: post #17

I 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.

If it truly is anonymous and there’s no PII or any persistent identifier (like a Machine ID) being collected, then GDPR doesn’t apply

Re: Telemetry

#54

Post by microflash »

faichai wrote: post #49

Storybook 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 s…

There's also Histoire[1] for Svelte and Vuejs.

[1]: https://histoire.dev/

Re: Telemetry

#55

Post by buildfocus »

Etheryte wrote: post #46

I 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…

The classic better approach would be to drop part of the IP address entirely, so it's impossible to recreate the full value.

For example, dropping the last octet (turning 123.4.5.6 into 123.4.5.0) means you can usually still do useful IP things (where in the world do our users come from, very roughly) while making it impossible to track unique users, or to definitively recognize real individuals.

I've seen one octet masking used as standard, probably just because it's easy, but you could do any other similar change you like, optimising for more or less anonymity/granularity as required.

Re: Telemetry

#56

Post by bluefishinit »

tilne wrote: post #22
have_faith wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> there should be a way to opt-out of telemetry There should be a way to opt-in. Anything else is egregious.

That’s fair. If the telemetry really is helpful to building a better product it should be an easy case to make to users.

"Better products" don't spy on me. As a user, I don't want any information about my usage leaving my machine. In addition to privacy issues, this is now code that needs to be maintained, discussed, debugged... that has nothing to do with why I'm using the software. It's an entire feature set that costs money and time and technical complexity that provides literally no value to people using the tool for its intended purpose.

Software is best when it's designed and built by an expert with an opinion. You can look at things like Linux or vim as an example.

Re: Telemetry

#57

Post by a_c »

The HN crowd seem to largely against “telemetry”.

I wonder how do you know the things you build is useful if you don’t know it is being, well, used?

On the other hand, back in the server side everything days, I can have more or less all metrics I want from nginx log. I wonder was it equally frowned upon or is the frowned upon an SPA phenomenon?

Re: Telemetry

#58

Post by asoneth »

quickthrower2 wrote: post #44
sf_rob wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I completely agree that qualitative feedback is the most valuable kind of product input.

However, quantitative metrics like telemetry are used to answer different kinds of questions.

> How big peoples projects are on average doesn’t matter.

To give concrete examples, at my current company we do not collect telemetry and have regularly encountered problems where some assumption about customer usage (the number of items in the largest project, the size of the largest document, the smallest browser window, the oldest browser version, the usage of a deprecated feature) turns out to be incorrect, sometimes wildly so, and we only find out after a customer finally complains that they've been struggling with something for months.

If we had telemetry we could have known about these issues well ahead of time and in many cases avoided the problem in the first place. We still choose not to have telemetry for many of the reasons presented in other comments, but we should at least be honest that it can provide immense value to the product team.

Re: Telemetry

#59

Post by have_faith »

vijaybritto wrote: post #50
have_faith wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

People don't want their privacy violated. It doesn't matter what data you're collecting. If you peer into my windows every day in order to document the colour of the paint on my walls, you don't get to use a defence of "I was only interested in unidentifiable information and besides, they wouldn't let me do it when I asked nicely".

Software installed on my machine is in a privileged position. It has more access to my personal files than my close friends and relatives. I'd rather that software respected some simple boundaries.

Re: Telemetry

#60

Post by yomlica8 »

tilne wrote: post #17

I 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…

If telemetry is so valuable these companies should give you discounts or payments for enabling it instead of sneaking in like a thief in the night to take it.

A lot of modern software seems overloaded with dark patterns to trick users into unintended actions that make the company more money. I suspect for many companies telemetry's real value is for marketing research and A/B testing the effectiveness of the latest dark pattern implementations.

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