191–200 of 272 posts
>Internet Service Providers (ISPs) are probably soon going to dictate what traffic can or cannot arrive at people’s end devices. This was the money quote for me. FANG may kill the web, but the idea that ISPs (in my opinion some of the scummiest corporations out there) get to decide what content they serve me and what they don't has the potential to kill the Internet as we know it.
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20+ years ago, we wouldn't discussing the ethics of server/client based tracking with a straight face, because that shit is creepy as fuck. Now, everyone takes tracking for granted as if the option of not being tracked is some sort of unachievable goal. That's the issue. It isn't tracking A as opposed to tracking B. It's tracking period.
I need to understand why my customers are not clicking on the "subscribe" button. I'm not selling adverts to them. I'm not capturing personal information. all I'm doing is trying to understand who my customer is and why they're not buying my product. Why is this unethical? And why is it OK to analyse server logs, but not OK to use javascript, to do this?
The data in your server logs is data that people sent to you on purpose (by visiting a page on your site, or filling out a form on your site). If you collect data about people by sending them code to execute and send data back to you, they're not meaning to send you that data; you're doing it behind their back.
I'm glad you try to use data you collect responsibly, but if people aren't meaning to send you data, you're not entitled to it.
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"back then Google was still admired by the tech people" "Losing our support" why do you generalize 'tech people' as 'we' ? I'm in tech and I've been for 30+ years. I still admire Google. Sure some tech people don't like Google anymore or even never have. But I wouldn't generalize my case nor should you generalize yours. And it's not all or nothing: I want to believe most tech people are mature and educated enough to…
> DDG/Bing/Yandex will list the exact same pages that Google gives as a search result most of the time, and sometimes better ones. I've switched to DDG about a year ago, and this just doesn't match my experience. Results are frequently worse. It's worth it to me but makes it hard to recommend to everyone still. There's probably a wide range of how people use search; works for you doesn't mean works for everyone. As a…
In addition, what's changed between 2017 and now is that back then Google was still admired by the tech people. "Google is evil" sounded ridiculous only a few years ago. I've been ridiculed by my colleagues and fellow engineers every time I said it. But I think it began to change with the introduction of AMP, a growing list of products discontinued for no apparent reason, failures of some of the new products often pr…
I'm refusing to implement Google Analytics on my startup's product. Because it's slow, but mainly because I don't trust Google enough to let them put whatever code they like on my page. I'm running into serious flak from the marketing team because they don't know how to use any other tool. GA is the industry standard, apparently, and every site uses it, etc etc. They're even hinting that not using it could affect our…
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Surprised nobody mentioned Matomo Analytics yet: https://matomo.org/ It's FLOSS, comes both self-hosted and as a paid service and it's pretty good. Perhaps good enough for your use case?
I’ve been using self-hosted Matomo for https://www.cannonvoice.com since I launched a couple of weeks ago. Man this is some neato software! On top of that it was super easy to deploy to the K8s cluster that runs the app. +1 would recommend. To folks saying to “Just use server logs”, it’s simply too hard to connect the dots unless you really know what you’re doing. Digging through my nginx logs to find that the majori…
GUI is nice, currently trying it out but not with php code but with embeded js like other tools use.
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> Ironically, the thing I would appreciate most is a manually curated, Wikipedia inspired, hierarchical directory. Yahoo?
Fun fact... This is how search engines started. One of the first steps in early SEO was to get your site listed on a manually curated web directory. VLIB, the first web directory, still operates at http://vlib.org/ . List of Web Directories, Wikipedia, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_web_directories
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How is Windows OS these days? I haven't used it since the early 2000s. I think the last version I used was... XP? Everyone at my work uses a MacBook. Some of my children are in their early 20s now and have never used Windows. It has always been OSX/MacOS, iOS, Ubuntu, Android, or ChromeOS. I don't know if my kids are typical or not but if many of the rising generation don't grow up using Windows, will they want to us…
If they work in any large company in most industries, then yes, they will use Windows. At scale, Apple is too mercurial to be a sole source supplier. Chrome is interesting, but there isn’t a ton of adoption outside of schools.
In addition, what's changed between 2017 and now is that back then Google was still admired by the tech people. "Google is evil" sounded ridiculous only a few years ago. I've been ridiculed by my colleagues and fellow engineers every time I said it. But I think it began to change with the introduction of AMP, a growing list of products discontinued for no apparent reason, failures of some of the new products often pr…
I’m no fan of Google these days (I use DuckDuckGo) but I’m not sure I can entirely fault them with the decline of search quality. Spamdexing is burying the web in mountains of garbage. Malicious SEO and fraud have exploded and continue to grow at an accelerating rate. What do we do about all this? I don’t know. I want to see a new kind of search engine that can mine through all this crap. I would build it myself but…
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20+ years ago, we wouldn't discussing the ethics of server/client based tracking with a straight face, because that shit is creepy as fuck. Now, everyone takes tracking for granted as if the option of not being tracked is some sort of unachievable goal. That's the issue. It isn't tracking A as opposed to tracking B. It's tracking period.
I need to understand why my customers are not clicking on the "subscribe" button. I'm not selling adverts to them. I'm not capturing personal information. all I'm doing is trying to understand who my customer is and why they're not buying my product. Why is this unethical? And why is it OK to analyse server logs, but not OK to use javascript, to do this?
all I'm doing is trying to understand who my customer is and why they're not buying my product.
Then ask them. The same way companies did for hundreds of years before javascript tricks made people lazy.
These things can be achieved by simply talking to your customers. Why is that so hard to do?
Also, what makes you think that your interest in knowing your customer's behavior is more important than your customers' right to privacy?
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Or, we could stop sending people programs to track themselves on their own computers. Just use your server logs. I don't care how much of an inconvenience it is, you should never have started doing any client-side tracking in the first place.
What's the huge objection to client-side tracking over server-side tracking?