From the update: 'We will not activate user level product usage tracking on GitLab.com or GitLab self-managed before we address the feedback and re-evaluate our plan.'
That leaves a lot of wiggle room.
That seems like a pretty solid indication that the plans are cancelled.
Self-host it if you don't want it. I dunno what to tell you; at some point, the company does have to observe how people use their product, and they'll do so a lot more effectively by looking at how most people are using it, rather than … idk, send a survey or something. Not that they won't do the latter anyway, nothing prevents them from doing that, but it's a very different type of data.
I'm a privacy nut by the way, and nothing in that field pisses me off more than people who vocally shit on telemetry. "I hate you, you should just GUESS what I want rather than do real work to figure it out" sort of thing.
What is it about telemetry you don't like, exactly? And I do say "telemetry" in general, because you're saying it sucks in general. So no specific examples like Windows 10's abhorrently overreaching telemetry, privacy invasions that look at PII, etc.
Telemetry generally is things like "97% of users have visited the issue tracker. 66% of projects with an issue tracker enabled have at least 1 issue. new issue rate on public repositories climbs by 15% if the new issue button is orange instead of green. users spend 30% more time on the new issue page if there's a new issue template. issues with a template have a commit/mr associated with them at a 8% higher rate than issues with empty templates".
By choosing to die on this hill, you're taking both good-will and attention away from much more severe issues of telemetry abuse, such as "let's collect the precise geoloc of all our users in our gay dating app at 5 minute intervals, store it for 3 years and not care one ounce about security".
And it may still have it. I just don't trust GitLab's management anymore.
There is still a difference between sending actions you selected to the server and tracking where you move the mouse while on the page in your browser or other bs like that. One is required to implement the functionality, the other is not.
I am more than willing to help GitLab, but telemetry in a VCS is simply a red flag (even a legal impediment in many cases).
You want a counter-example? Reddit has very little telemetry and quite famously barely looks at the data it does gather. You want to talk about deterioration, how's that for some severe rot.
Fair. It's just my opinion. Though I'm not the only one expressing it. You've probably heard the phrase "optimizing for lowest common denominator", or as 'dredmorbius calls it, "the tyranny of the minimum viable user".
> I personally find that a lot of software I use daily does improve over time, especially web software.
I find the reverse. GMail and Dropbox being prominent examples.
> Reddit has very little telemetry and quite famously barely looks at the data it does gather.
Huh. That's not what I expected. I see Reddit as poster child of making the UX worse and worse, driven by advertising goals - something that generally does correlate strongly with running telemetry. I'm confused about them now.
Dropbox I'd agree with, gmail I actually much prefer the current UI to the old one.
And indeed web services do tend to optimize for the "lowest common denominator", or more generally for the "majority of users". Which does tend to fuck over power-users. But it also means for most people telemetry works out.
It does fuck over power-users, but it also fucks over regular users. Not only doing tasks takes longer than it could (or than it took in previous generations of equivalent software), it often precludes them from becoming power users. Because a "power user" of a specific suite of software is something a person becomes over time and repeated exposure. Which includes essentially everyone doing a full-time job in front of computers. I believe dumbed down software is causing a huge hidden economic loss in reduced efficiency of office workers. Not to mention their misery.
(A good example here would be POS systems. If you've ever seen a DOS based one, you'll know it's an order of magnitude more efficient to use than the current breed of browser-based ones. The old-school UI was clean, ergonomic, consistent and fully keyboard-operated, allowing to do most tasks without even looking at the screen for most of the time. There was a relevant thread on HN recently[2].)
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[0] - actually, I think it's more like: $$ \sum_{user \in users} utility_{user} $$ (https://latex.codecogs.com/gif.latex?%5Csum_%7Buser%20%5Cin%...).
[1] - by "useful" I mean, what tasks it lets users accomplish and how efficiently.
I’ll reserve the pitchforks for if this comes up again.
I'm gonna keep my pitchfork sharp, close, and on display here.