Minecraft to add telemetry

There are at least two distinct issues here this community is concerned about:

1. Telemetry is unethical if the users didn't provide informed consent (opt-in) for it. It's not just a theoretical point - anyone who's worked in tech sector for a while should know most companies cannot be trusted to behave ethically (especially if they took VC funding).

2. There's a certain dysfunction/antipattern that's popular in tech sector, called being a "data-driven company". It's the practice of making decisions through divination from data collected through extensive telemetry, to the exclusion of other knowledge sources (like e.g. actually talking to your users, hallway testing, or thinking things through). This leads to software being optimized in questionable directions - so in a sense, you could say that adding telemetry implies an increased chance the software will become worse over time.

Here you go https://www.minetest.net/

The problem is an irrational degree of distrust in the industry as a whole.

It's not that I blame those who distrust any form of telemetry. Many companies are eager to harvest as much personal information as possible. Depending upon one's definition of personal information, some of the data acquired by telemetry can be used for that purpose. In many cases the data collection process is deliberately opaque. In the remaining cases, very few people have the ability to verify that what is actually sent reflects what they are told is sent. That's before factoring in Microsoft's involvement here, since they have a negative reputation in some circles due to their past business practices.

Not related to telemetry, but I checked out Minecraft about less than a year ago for the first time in about 10 years (I had to dig out my old account details from an ancient email and migrate my account through some strange form) and spent a week playing it until I had enough, and I was shocked, absolutely shocked at how little has been added to the game during those 10 years.

Sure, the fact that they have two divergent, separate games and are completely unable to move over to the C++ codebase and sunset the Java version due to the lack of modding (I remember the modding community screaming about needing a proper modding API back in the olden days, and Mojang hiring some of the Bukkit team back in 2012 to develop it, and it never came to fruition, still to this day), makes them having to do twice the work implementing stuff, but that's at least parallelizable work. I doubt the same people work on both codebases?

I feel I need to sit down with someone who's working at Mojang and ask wtf is going on over there because it could be fascinating.

They're literally Microsoft. They've used up their lifetime supply of goodwill in the 90s.