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GitHub CLI now collects pseudoanonymous telemetry

cli.github.com

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Re: GitHub CLI now collects pseudoanonymous telemetry

#201

Post by embedding-shape »

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.

> Usage data is the ground truth.

For what, precisely? As far as I know, you can use it to know "how much is X used" but not more than that, and it's not a "ground truth" for anything besides that.

Re: GitHub CLI now collects pseudoanonymous telemetry

#202

Post by throwaway27448 »

chrishill89 wrote: post #194
throwatdem12311 wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s total waste of time because both are going to be maintained in perpetuity. Increasing the maintenance burden and attack surface of git. “a novice thinks” Just learn your damn tools and stop whining.

The git-restore(1) implementation looks like about 35 lines of code. Then add a little more complexity for some apparent common functions that needed to be factored out. For a dedicated "restore" it's worth it to me... (who will not maintain it)

At the hidden cost of educating millions of users how git actually operates once they can't restore a file

Re: GitHub CLI now collects pseudoanonymous telemetry

#203

Post by theplatman »

ryandrake wrote: post #144
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.

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 sou…

open source projects are usually creating something for themselves so it's much easier to know what to build when you are the user

whereas, commercial software has a disconnect between who are the users and developers are

Re: GitHub CLI now collects pseudoanonymous telemetry

#204

Post by KronisLV »

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?

Cause the alternative is viewing all of your app as one opaque blob - you don't know exactly how it's being used, which features actually need your attention, especially if you're spread thin. If you're in consulting or something like that and the clients haven't let you configure and/or access analytics (and the same goes for APM and log shipping), it's like flying blind. Couple that with vague bug reports instead of automated session recording and if you need to maintain that, you'll have gray hairs appearing by the age of 30.

Take that disregard of measurement and spread it all across the development culture and you'll get errors in the logs that nobody is seeing and no insights into application performance - with the system working okay at a load X, but falling over at X+1 and you having to spend late evenings trying to refactor it, knowing that it needs to be shipped in less than a week because of client deadlines. Unless the data is something that's heavily regulated and more trouble than it's worth, more data will be better than less data, if you do something meaningful with it.

> Would Git have been significantly better if it had collected telemetry, or would the data not have just been a distraction?

Knowing the most common fuck ups and foot guns might inform better CLI design. Otherwise people saying that it's good have about as much right to do so as saying that it's bad (at least in regards to UX), without knowing the ground level truth about what 90% of the users experience.

Re: GitHub CLI now collects pseudoanonymous telemetry

#205

Post by goosejuice »

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 could, I don't know, do user interviews with the various customer segments that use your product.

Re: GitHub CLI now collects pseudoanonymous telemetry

#206

Post by chrishill89 »

throwaway27448 wrote: post #202
chrishill89 wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The git-restore(1) implementation looks like about 35 lines of code. Then add a little more complexity for some apparent common functions that needed to be factored out. For a dedicated "restore" it's worth it to me... (who will not maintain it)

At the hidden cost of educating millions of users how git actually operates once they can't restore a file

Neither of these two commands are any more really-operates than the other.

Re: GitHub CLI now collects pseudoanonymous telemetry

#207

Post by TimorousBestie »

Sytten wrote: post #161
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…

You are inferring your own perception based on my comment, no need to be an asshole here. Like I said elsewhere we do both and they serve different purpose. We also make is very clear and easy to disable in the onboarding. I hope you try to build a business sometimes and open up your perspectives that maybe just maybe you don't have all the answers.

> We also make is very clear and easy to disable in the onboarding.

Yeah, sure. How long is that policy gonna last? How does a user even know that that checkbox does anything?

Once you’ve decided to break a social contract it’s not like you can slap a bandaid on it and it’s all okay now.

> I hope you try to build a business sometimes and open up your perspectives that maybe just maybe you don't have all the answers.

People were building successful businesses long before the Internet.

Re: GitHub CLI now collects pseudoanonymous telemetry

#208

Post by johnfn »

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…

You seem to be interpreting my position as saying that one should only use telemetry to make decisions. Of course, no one reasonable would hold that position! What I’m saying is that only relying on user interviews without supplementing them with analytics would be knowingly introducing a blind spot into how you understand user behavior.

Re: GitHub CLI now collects pseudoanonymous telemetry

#210

Post by Lammy »

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…

The people who write any individual feature want to be able to prove usage in order to get good performance reviews and promotions. It's so awful that it's become normalized. Back in The Day we had the term “spyware” to refer to any piece of software that phoned home to report user behavior, but now that's just All Software.
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