141–150 of 242 posts
Is there a free server-side analytics service that’s not a pain to set up? I’m using Netlify, but enabling analytics is 9$/site/month, so I tell myself that GA is just fine.
I like GoAccess: https://goaccess.io/
I wonder if this is actual data?
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Subverting the desires of people who would like privacy is not a good look.
"X is not a good look" should be left in the echo chambers of Twitter. It comes across as smug, because you assume you're an authority on what a "good look" is, that is, what the correct thinking is. But you're doing this while the reader is noting that you failed to express a real argument, so they're not sure you even know what the correct thinking is, let alone why it ought to be correct.
I'm not on Twitter…
> It comes across as smug, because you assume you're an authority on what a "good look" is, that is, what the correct thinking is. But you're doing this while the reader is noting that you failed to express a real argument, so they're not sure you even know what the correct thinking is, let alone why it ought to be correct.
I think it's fairly obvious what my argument it: people who are blocking client-side analytics have expressed a clear interest in not being tracked. Saying that you're tracking them anyways on your server shows that you don't really care about their wishes–and as other have mentioned, it might fall afoul of active consent legal requirements. Considering that my comment is currently at the top of this thread, I think it would be fairly difficult to not know what my argument is.
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When I turned off my Windows 10 Telemetry, I expressed a clear choice that I'd rather not give my data, and it's fine for my voice to not be heard. I just really don't care about Windows 10 that much. On the other hand, I turned on all the telemetry for OctoPi, Steam, and a bunch of other softwares I care about. I want my voice to be heard for those cases. Just curious, what's so inexcusable about that?
Customers should not have to surrender their information to be accounted for by the business they pay. Giving a business your data is an act of charity. It should never be an expectation. Yes, it costs more to collect the data manually. It usually costs more to behave ethically when you aren't legally required to.
Alternatively the business could pay us to do that but obviously they resist the idea.
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Server side analytics are overwhelmed by bots and crawlers and other non humans in my experience
In general it's quite easy to filter out bots and crawlers from your basic access logs, as most bots and crawlers will identify themselves as such. If you're running anything with an API, then unless somethings horribly wrong it's even easier: look at the number of requests being made to an API endpoint and spot check a few of the user identifiers (tokens, keys, whatever you're using) to see the variety of users. All…
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Customers should not have to surrender their information to be accounted for by the business they pay. Giving a business your data is an act of charity. It should never be an expectation. Yes, it costs more to collect the data manually. It usually costs more to behave ethically when you aren't legally required to.
I get where you're coming from, and this is a problem, but this isn't a practical or pragmatic stance. Typical web/app tracking is orders of magnitude cheaper than research. > Yes, it costs more to collect the data manually. Not just that, but you also get data biased to people willing to spend two hours answering questions for a $25 Amazon gift card.
It doesn't just ethics, and I think it should be "first, do no harm", as in, first, be ethical.
Btw, opt-in metrics are ethical and cheap afaik. As for biased? all metrics are biased...
One of the corollaries to this is that if you are basing your decisions on analytics, you are probably under-representing people who block them, who often tend to be a non-representative subset of your users. I have seen multiple projects do things like stop supporting features that their analytics “showed nobody was using” but failed to realize that a significant portion of their (often technical and very vocal) use…
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How I use a software is not an indication of how I want to use a software. It’s what I’m doing with the options the software has given. If I’m really lucky, I’ll be like everyone else, and an inefficiency in the software will be spotted and fixed so the software will be slightly easier to use. In practice, I’m just doing workarounds to accomplish things the telemetry won’t explain on its own; and even if other users…
It really sounds like you’ve never worked on a product team that actually used analytics tbh. > In practice, I’m just doing workarounds to accomplish things the telemetry won’t explain on its own This is one of the most obvious things people are looking for in analytics. People will always use your product in unpredictable ways to get the whatever functionality it is that they really wanted. This is one of the things…
What you wrote here sounds very naive to me.
I might be completely wrong, but i assume if you have a large enough user base you would use telemetry only in an aggregated way, and then prioritize the majority of the user base. So I might totally be underrepresented but still have the same loss of privacy as everyone else.
I also feel i always have the right to complain about a product, publicly and vocally (it's just a different channel for analytics/telemetry, imo). Much like product owners have the right to just change it remove features that break my workflow.
This test compares: 1. Number of visitors as recorded in Google Analytics 2. Number of loads of a 1x1 pixel served on a different domain They see higher numbers for (2) than (1), and attribute the difference to users blocking Google Analytics. I don't see them describing how they excluded bot traffic, however, and for my sites the majority of hits I get are from bots. Only some bots run JS, so I suspect their numbers…
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Subverting the desires of people who would like privacy is not a good look.
"X is not a good look" should be left in the echo chambers of Twitter. It comes across as smug, because you assume you're an authority on what a "good look" is, that is, what the correct thinking is. But you're doing this while the reader is noting that you failed to express a real argument, so they're not sure you even know what the correct thinking is, let alone why it ought to be correct.
They don't assume that, they know that. Everybody is the authority of their own moral judgmement.
> But you're doing this while the reader is noting that you failed to express a real argument,
They pointed out that what they're responding to is subverting the desires of people who would like privacy, that's the meat, "that is not a good look" is just a bonus statement, something that would be implied anyway even if left out.