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

GitHub CLI now collects pseudoanonymous telemetry

cli.github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 368 posts

Re: GitHub CLI now collects pseudoanonymous telemetry

#141

Post by pc86 »

Sytten wrote: post #61
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…

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 can "optimize a successful user journey" by making the software easy to use, making it load so fast people are surprised by it, and talking to your customers. Telemetry doesn't help you do any of that, but it does help you squeeze more money out of them, or find out where you can pop an interstitial ad to goose your ad revenue, and what features you can move up a tier level to increase revenue without providing any additional value.

Re: GitHub CLI now collects pseudoanonymous telemetry

#142

Post by hombre_fatal »

embedding-shape wrote: post #105
johnfn wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, ha…

Asking users isn't a substitute for usage data.

Usage data is the ground truth.

Soliciting user feedback is invasive, and it's only possible for some questions.

The HN response to this is "too bad" but it's a thought-terminating response.

Re: GitHub CLI now collects pseudoanonymous telemetry

#143

Post by a012 »

Sytten wrote: post #61
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…

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 have all info you need on server side, I don’t believe that you’re totally blind without client tracking

Re: GitHub CLI now collects pseudoanonymous telemetry

#144

Post by ryandrake »

Sytten wrote: post #61
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…

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.

This got me thinking: Are there prominent examples of open source projects that 1. collect telemetry, 2. without a way to opt-out (or obfuscating / making it difficult to opt-out)? This practice seems to be specific to corporate software development.

Why is it that startups and commercial software developers seem to be the only ones obsessed with telemetry? Why do they need it to "optimize user journeys" but open source projects do just fine while flying blind?

Re: GitHub CLI now collects pseudoanonymous telemetry

#145

Post by 1vuio0pswjnm7 »

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…

Perhaps the more interesting question is why these companies feel the need to "explain" why they are collecting telemetry or "disclose" how the data is used

The software user has no means to verify the explanation or disclosure is accurate or complete. Once the data is transferred to the company then the user has no control over where it goes, who sees it or how it is used

When the company states "We use the data for X" it is not promising to use the data for X in the future, nor does it prevent the company, or one of its "business partners", from using the data additionally for something else besides X

Why "explain" the reason for collecting telemetry

Why "disclose" how the data is used

What does this accomplish

Re: GitHub CLI now collects pseudoanonymous telemetry

#146

Post by e12e »

Sytten wrote: post #61
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…

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.

I think there's room for a distinction between "not using metrics" and "not using data".

Unthinkingly leaning on metrics is likely to help you build a faster, stronger horse, while at the same time avoiding building a car, a bus or a tractor.

Re: GitHub CLI now collects pseudoanonymous telemetry

#147

Post by JoshTriplett »

incrudible wrote: post #93
dijksterhuis wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think yes, because git famously has a terrible UI, and any amount of telemetry would quickly tell you people fumble around a lot at first. 1. git doesn’t have a UI, it’s a program run in a terminal environment. the terminal is the interface for the user. 2. git has a specific design that was intended to solve a specific problem in a specific way. mostly for linux kernel development. so, the UX might seem terrible…

Mercurial was better than Git on almost any metric, it eludes me why it lost out to Git, perhaps because it lacked the kernel hacker aura, but also because it did not have a popular repository website with cute mascot going for it. Either way, tech history is full of examples of better designs not winning minds, due to cost, market timing, etc. And now with LLMs being trained on whatever was popular three years ago,…

> Mercurial was better than Git on almost any metric, it eludes me why it lost out to Git

I used Mercurial, professionally, back when there were a half-dozen serious VCS contenders, to contribute to projects that used it. I disliked it and found it unintuitive. I liked Git much better. Tastes vary.

Git made me feel like I was in control. Mercurial didn't.

Mercurial's handling of branches was focused on "one branch, one working directory", and made it hard to manage many branches within one working directory.

Mercurial's handling of branches also made it really painful to just have an arbitrary number of local experimental branches that I didn't immediately want to merge upstream. "Welcome to Mercurial, how can I merge your heads right now, you wanted to do that right now, right?"

Git's model of "a branch is just a pointer to a commit, commits internally have no idea what branch they're on" felt intuitive and comfortable.

Re: GitHub CLI now collects pseudoanonymous telemetry

#148

Post by embedding-shape »

Forgeties79 wrote: post #122
embedding-shape wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you have details on what they’re collecting Well, you can start with everything a typical HTTP request and TCP connection comes with, surely they're already storing those things for "anti-fraud practices", wouldn't be far to imagine this data warehouse is used for analytics and product decisions as well.

>wouldn’t be far to imagine I explicitly said I agree it’s a distinct possibility, but that’s not proof. If you have actual info on what they collect and how it’s used I can assess it. As it is we don’t know the extent or uses at all, we are speculating.

Personally if I don't have any evidence of something, I'll leave it unsaid if I like what Valve is doing about that something or not. Saying "We don't have evidence either way, we're just speculating, so therefore I respect what Valve does" feels like the wrong way around. But you do you :)

Re: GitHub CLI now collects pseudoanonymous telemetry

#149

Post by pc86 »

alexchantavy wrote: post #140
jubilanti wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow, it really is sad how literally unthinkable it is to you and so much of the industry that you could actually talk to your users and customers like human beings instead of just data points. And you know what happens when you reach out to talk to your customers like human beings instead of spying on them like animals? They like you more and they raise issues that your telemetry would never even think to measure. It…

The problem they're trying to solve is to find out what functions of their software are most useful for people and what to invest in, and to make directions on product direction. Yes, vendors can, do, and should talk to users, but then a lot of users don't like receiving cold messages from vendors (and some users go so far as to say that cold messages should _never_ be sent). So, the alternative is to collect some so…

If you have an existing financial relationship with someone it is by definition not a "cold message." People who think they should never, ever be contacted by a company they are paying to use a service of are in the extreme minority. That's "cabin in the woods with no electricity" territory.

Re: GitHub CLI now collects pseudoanonymous telemetry

#150

Post by lukewarm707 »

#Telemetry FUCK OFF export DOTNET_CLI_TELEMETRY_OPTOUT=1 export ASTRO_TELEMETRY_DISABLED=1 export GATSBY_TELEMETRY_DISABLED=1 export HOMEBREW_NO_ANALYTICS=1 export NEXT_TELEMETRY_DISABLED=1 export DISABLE_ZAPIER_ANALYTICS=1 export TELEMETRY_DISABLED=1 export GH_TELEMETRY=false
Post reply on HN