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GitHub CLI now collects pseudoanonymous telemetry

cli.github.com

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Re: GitHub CLI now collects pseudoanonymous telemetry

#181

Post by dijksterhuis »

ulbu wrote: post #136
dijksterhuis wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i lump those into user experience (UX) stuff as it’s more leaning towards “flow of user action” etc.

ok, you do, doesn’t mean that the difference others make of it are necessarily wrong, as the tone of your first comment suggested.

i believe that those people are wrong :shrug:

doesn’t change the bigger, more important fact that the struggles people have with git stem from the system design. i.e. the thing that ultimately determines what commands people need to run in what order (see points 2 and 3).

Re: GitHub CLI now collects pseudoanonymous telemetry

#182

Post by AlotOfReading »

hombre_fatal wrote: post #142
embedding-shape wrote: post #105

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. 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.

It goes the other way as well. Usage data isn't equivalent to asking users either. A solid percentage of bad decisions in tech can be traced to someone, somewhere forgetting that distinction and trusting usage data that says it's it's okay to remove because it's infrequently used.

Re: GitHub CLI now collects pseudoanonymous telemetry

#183

Post by mgfist »

Arch485 wrote: post #107
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…

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.

The reason that feature gets implemented is not because the devs think users will like it ... they know users don't want it, but it drives revenue and pays salaries.

Re: GitHub CLI now collects pseudoanonymous telemetry

#184

Post by mgfist »

lamasery wrote: post #104
lukevp wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Most telemetry is more along the lines of "user spent N minutes on platform, clicked on these things, looked at these other things" etc etc. And the primary way devs use this data is by aggregating across all users and running a/b tests or viewing longer term trends.

Are some companies spying on you the way you say? Yea, probably. Most of us just want data to know what's working and what's not.

Re: GitHub CLI now collects pseudoanonymous telemetry

#185

Post by embedding-shape »

lamasery wrote: post #176
embedding-shape wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Watching me use my computer in my house or office is spying. I agree, but once you cross the borders out to the internet, I'd say you need to stop seeing that as "Me sitting at my computer at home", because you're actually "on someone else's property" at that point essentially. And I say this as someone who care greatly about preserving personal privacy.

I deeply hate that this attitude took over even among “hackers”. Watching people move their mouse and click stuff on “your webpage” is fucking spying. It’s in my browser. On my machine. Not running on your hardware. Tracking what I do on my own computer doesn’t stop being spying because the program I’m doing stuff in can make network requests. WTF.

> Watching people move their mouse and click stuff on “your webpage” is fucking spying. It’s in my browser. On my machine. Not running on your hardware.

Well, I was mainly talking about network requests, which are quite literally served by "my hardware" when your client reaches out to my servers, and they agree to serve your client. I do agree that it sucks that browser viewports now also are considered "mine" from the perspective of servers, but you do have a choice to execute that code or not, you can always say no.

I don't think it's as much "this attitude took over", people saying that the internet is the wild west and warning you "browse at your own peril" has been around for as long as I can remember.

Re: GitHub CLI now collects pseudoanonymous telemetry

#186

Post by defmacr0 »

PhoenixFlame101 wrote: post #175
Arch485 wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

But collecting data and looking for insights doesn't mean you mechanically optimize features, especially user-hostile ones? This is just as, if not more, likely to happen when basing your decisions on what people say they want over what they actually do.

If we were perfectly rational, then yeah, more data should never lead to worse decisions. However, it's easy to fall into the trap where being data-driven makes you only work on those things that you know how to measure.

Re: GitHub CLI now collects pseudoanonymous telemetry

#187

Post by [deleted] »

isoprophlex wrote: post #109
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

[deleted]

Re: GitHub CLI now collects pseudoanonymous telemetry

#188

Post by Rapzid »

dijksterhuis wrote: post #84
ForHackernews wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

UI means "user interface". For a CLI tool the UI is the commands and modifiers it offers on the terminal.

i lump those into user experience (UX) stuff as it’s more leaning towards “flow of user action” etc.

Yeah, UI impacts UX.

Also git has a UI.

Re: GitHub CLI now collects pseudoanonymous telemetry

#189

Post by chrishill89 »

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…

Git relatively recently got an `--i-still-use-this` option for two deprecated commands that you have to run if you want to use them. The error you get tells you about it and that you should "please email us here" if you really am unable to figure out an alternative.

I guess that's the price of regular and non-invasive software.

Re: GitHub CLI now collects pseudoanonymous telemetry

#190

Post by chrishill89 »

dale_glass wrote: post #48
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'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? No, because users have different needs and thoughts from the developers. And because sometimes it's hard to get good feedback from people. Maybe everyone loves the concept of feature X, but then never uses it in practice for some reason. Or a given feature has…

Didn't Go propose opt-out telemetry but then the community said no?

Compilers and whatnot seem to suffer from the same problem that programs like git(1) does. Once you've put it out there in the world you have no idea if someone will still use some corner of it thirty years from now.

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