Can you explain a bit more your way of though? How should you decide what to support if not having the information from your user?
The only other alternative is to ask, and then only the one that answer will get supported, which sure is great for the one that answer, but that may means a much bigger audience that you won't support even though they need to be supported.
There are many well-known and largely perfected methods of getting that information without the use of telemetry. The thing that general telemetry really brings is cost savings and convenience. But it also brings a peculiar kind of blindness as well, since companies largely stopped doing product research that isn't telemetry.
Can you link to a few of this many known methods? I am interested in ones that would fit open source projects that have no budgets for research. Thanks
Just ask your users.
Then they made the conscious choice that their usage won't get known and thus be aware that another way of communication will have to be used.
> Just ask your users.
"A very significant proportion of your potential users" won't tell what they want, or won't even know what they want. The one that will be the most vocal won't necessarily be the voice of reasons either.
I see nothing wrong with that.
Nope.
> Why did you just quote the beginning
Because the rest can be extrapolated from it.
> We are on Hacker News please
So? Just because we happen to be on Y Combinator's corporate propaganda machine doesn't mean I'm any more compelled to respond to things about which I care not.