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GitHub CLI now collects pseudoanonymous telemetry

cli.github.com

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Re: GitHub CLI now collects pseudoanonymous telemetry

#101

Post by DrScientist »

nkrisc wrote: post #77
Sytten wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to believe that it was not necessary until I started building my own startup. If you dont have analytics you are flying blind. You don't know what your users actually care about and how to optimize a successful user journey. The difference between what people tell you when asked directly and how they actually use your software is actually shocking.

> The difference between what people tell you when asked directly and how they actually use your software is actually shocking. And the difference between what they do and what they want is equally shocking. If what they want isn’t in your app, they can’t do it and it won’t show up in your data. Quantitative data doesn’t tell you what your users want or care about. It tells you only what they are doing. You can get s…

> If what they want isn’t in your app, they can’t do it and it won’t show up in your data.

Excellent point.

> but if it’s not entirely opt-in, I think it is effectively spying no matter what you’re collecting, varying only along a dimension of invasiveness.

Every web page visit is logged on the http server, and that's been the default since the mid 1990's. Is that spying?

Re: GitHub CLI now collects pseudoanonymous telemetry

#102

Post by dualvariable »

a2128 wrote: post #14

Why we collect telemetry ...our team needs visibility into how features are being used in practice. We use this data to prioritize our work and evaluate whether features are meeting real user needs. I'm curious why corporate development teams always feel the need to spy on their users? Is it not sufficient to employ good engineering and design practices? Git has served us well for 20+ years without detailed analytics…

> Is it not sufficient to employ good engineering and design practices? Git...

Git has horrible design and ergonomics.

It is an excellent example of engineers designing interfaces for engineers without a good feedback loop.

Ironically, you just proved your point that engineers need to better understand how users are actually using their product, because their mental visualizations of how their product gets used is usually poor.

Re: GitHub CLI now collects pseudoanonymous telemetry

#103

Post by johnfn »

embedding-shape wrote: post #65
Sytten wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to believe that it was not necessary until I started building my own startup. If you dont have analytics you are flying blind. You don't know what your users actually care about and how to optimize a successful user journey. The difference between what people tell you when asked directly and how they actually use your software is actually shocking.

You're only flying blind if you make decisions not looking and thinking. Analytics isn't the only way to figure out "what your users actually care about", you can also try the old school way, commonly referred to as "Talking with people", then after taking notes, you think about it, maybe discuss with others. Don't take what people say at face value, but think about it together with your knowledge and experience, and…

Sure, you can spend the weeks to months of expensive and time consuming work it takes to get a fuzzy, half accurate and biased picture of what your users workflows look like through user interviews and surveys. Or you can look at the analytics, which tell you everything you need to know immediately, always up to date, with perfect precision.

Sometimes HN drives me crazy. From this thread you’d think telemetry is screen recording your every move and facial expression and sending it to the government. I’ve worked at places that had telemetry and it’s more along the granularity of “how many people clicked the secondary button on the third tab?” This is a far cry from “spying on users”.

Re: GitHub CLI now collects pseudoanonymous telemetry

#104

Post by lamasery »

lukevp wrote: post #100
bfivyvysj wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would say to your point that you can't not spy on me while also spying on me. Maybe just don't?

If I was running a physical business and I wrote down each person’s name and credit card number and the exact time and order they placed, that would be pretty invasive and “spying”. If I write down how many units I sold of each item per day, and the volume of transactions by credit card vs cash, it’s anonymized and I don’t think this would generally be considered “spying”, just normal business metrics. How’s the latt…

Watching me use my computer in my house or office is spying.

Aggregating request statistics server-side unless you're only generating those requests to spy on what I'm doing on my computer is more like the not-spying you're talking about.

Re: GitHub CLI now collects pseudoanonymous telemetry

#105

Post by embedding-shape »

johnfn wrote: post #103
embedding-shape wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're only flying blind if you make decisions not looking and thinking. Analytics isn't the only way to figure out "what your users actually care about", you can also try the old school way, commonly referred to as "Talking with people", then after taking notes, you think about it, maybe discuss with others. Don't take what people say at face value, but think about it together with your knowledge and experience, and…

Sure, you can spend the weeks to months of expensive and time consuming work it takes to get a fuzzy, half accurate and biased picture of what your users workflows look like through user interviews and surveys. Or you can look at the analytics, which tell you everything you need to know immediately, always up to date, with perfect precision. Sometimes HN drives me crazy. From this thread you’d think telemetry is scre…

> Sure, you can spend the weeks to months of expensive and time consuming work it takes to get a fuzzy, half accurate and biased picture of what your users workflows look like through user interviews and surveys. Or you can look at the analytics, which tell you everything you need to know immediately, always up to date, with perfect precision.

Yes, admittedly, the first time you do these things, they're difficult, hard and you have lots to learn. But as you do this more often, build up a knowledge base and learn about your users, you'll gain knowledge and experience you can reuse, and it'll no longer take you weeks or months of investigations to answer "Where should this button go?", you'll base it on what you already know.

Re: GitHub CLI now collects pseudoanonymous telemetry

#106

Post by embedding-shape »

LtWorf wrote: post #67
embedding-shape wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, you can be pretty sure they're heavily leveraging all their store data, in loads of ways. They probably sit on the biggest dataset of video game preferences for people in general, and I'm betting they make use of it heavily.

And you think microsoft isn't already doing that?

Of course they do, why would I believe otherwise?

Re: GitHub CLI now collects pseudoanonymous telemetry

#107

Post by Arch485 »

embedding-shape wrote: post #65
Sytten wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to believe that it was not necessary until I started building my own startup. If you dont have analytics you are flying blind. You don't know what your users actually care about and how to optimize a successful user journey. The difference between what people tell you when asked directly and how they actually use your software is actually shocking.

You're only flying blind if you make decisions not looking and thinking. Analytics isn't the only way to figure out "what your users actually care about", you can also try the old school way, commonly referred to as "Talking with people", then after taking notes, you think about it, maybe discuss with others. Don't take what people say at face value, but think about it together with your knowledge and experience, and…

Exactly - purely "data driven" decisions are how we end up with ads really close to (or overlapping with) some button you want to press, because the data says that increase click-through rate! But it's actually a user-hostile feature that everyone hates.

Re: GitHub CLI now collects pseudoanonymous telemetry

#108

Post by dale_glass »

bfivyvysj wrote: post #98
dale_glass wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How is git restore any better? Restoring what from when? At least git checkout is clear in what it does. And this is exactly where disconnects happen, and where you need telemetry or something like it to tell you how your users actually use the system, rather than imagining how they should. A technical user deep into the guts of Git thinks "you need to check out again this specific file". A novice thinks "I want to…

> A technical user deep into the guts of Git thinks "you need to check out again this specific file". This is a fundamental misunderstanding of both the user base who are by design all technical, and the use case that this tool serves: deeply technical and specific actions to a codebase. Git is not just software. It is also a vernacular about how to reason about code change. You can't just make arbitrary commands do…

Nonsense. The "git restore" command is now an official part of git, and nothing is being lost because it's technically a git-checkout underneath. It's just a thin UI on top for convenience, nothing is being sacrificed. The old commands still work just like before.

CVS and Subversion have nothing to do with this, they were extremely different to Git in the way they worked and lost for many reasons that have nothing to do with having command names understandable to normal people.

Re: GitHub CLI now collects pseudoanonymous telemetry

#109

Post by isoprophlex »

tornikeo wrote: post #95

Good for GitHub. All companies need this. Some use it to improve products, some use it for less commendable goals. I know HN crowd is allergic to telemetry but if you've ever developed a software as a service, telemetry is indispensable.

God forbid you talk to your users

Re: GitHub CLI now collects pseudoanonymous telemetry

#110

Post by charcircuit »

LtWorf wrote: post #66
charcircuit wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Git notoriously has had performance issues and did not scale and has had a horrible user interface. Both of these problems can be measured using telemetry and improvements can be measured once telemetry is in place.

How was it notorious if git has no telemetry? According to you without telemetry nothing can be known, and nothing can become notorious.

Because you already have a general idea by just using it. "Oh wow this is slow." Telemetry gives you hard data.
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