Comment by rnhmjoj | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rnhmjoj | Hacker News Reader

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As a user of free software I have the opposite bias. If a software is built around a community, which should be the case of free software, I think it's better if decisions are taken by asking the users, be it forum discussions, polls or whatever.

As you mentioned, reducing the costs usually amounts to taking something out: this can piss off users, particularly if they were not informed and no discussion took place. An example that comes to mind was the decision by Mozilla to stop supporting the ALSA driver in Firefox based on the telemetry showing little usage.

Ths example also shows that often data are biased and making a decision solely based on data is not ideal: ALSA is (was) the default choice on most GNU/Linux and BSD distributions, where firefox is usually built and distributed by the maintainers with telemetry disabled.

> is akin to demanding free beer that people can optionally pay for.

This is similar to how donations work: with donations you can't force people to give you money but you can be very insistent and it can leave users with a bad taste in their mouth. Also, if you are implying the service providers are entitled to collect all the data they can, I think this must have limitations. Running code on the client side from which the provider only can (directly) benefit should require permission, because you grant users access to server and so should the users grant you access to their machine.

Gathering telemetry data is asking the users, and happens to be the most cost effective way to do so. Forum discussions do not scale and only satisfy the needs of the loudocracy, and polls are going to suffer from a similar participation bias.

Disabling telemetry by default ended up harming the users of those distributions by making their usage of ALSA invisible. Again, that choice by the distro maintainers isn't something that Mozilla had any control over. Voluntarily withholding telemetry data is similar to abstaining from an election. You dont get to complain about who got elected if you didn't vote, likewise you dont get to complain about lack of support for your use cases if you don't allow upstream projects to know that you have them.

> Gathering telemetry data is asking the users

No, it absolutely is not.

Firefox disabling ALSA after the people that use it most refused to tell Mozilla that they did in fact use it seems like a “leopards ate my face” moment.

Telemetry IS asking their users in a way that scales past putting a random poll in some random forum that only a specific subset of people will ever interact with.

You can have some idealistic view of how feedback should be holistically gathered by “just damn listening to people!”, but this entirely glosses over the specifics of how it will scale and how accurate it will be which is vitally important when you go past 10,000 users.

Listening to people biases the outcome towards those who feel confident speaking up, and have time and energy and ability to do so. Having those circumstances apply is a privilege, and does not implicitly grant those who have that privilege the right to control the outcome.

Telemetry provides unbiased data about the vast majority of users, especially including those not privileged enough to make their needs known (for any one of thousands of reasons) — with the notable exception of various Linux distributions who have decided that they do not wish their users to be represented in the data, and certain power users who simultaneously demand the right not to contribute unbiased data yet seem to feel entitled to have their needs met.

I didn’t know that Firefox disabled ALSA but it doesn’t surprise me at all that it impacted users whose telemetry is disabled for idealistic reasons. Open source is discovering that the economics of free and the burden of long tail support are not compatible goals, and there will be many more pain points in many more open source products along this road. In the past, the squeaky wheel would get the grease; now, sometimes, the car might be converted to a tricycle and the squeaky wheel disposed of as superfluous to the greater good.

Most of the time, I take for granted that this is where the rubber meets the road on their ideals: The distro’s ideals demand that their users not be represented via telemetry, and so their users pay that price in exchange for the ideals they (often unknowingly) signed up for with that distribution. If upstream fails to take them into account as a result, the distro already accepted on behalf of its users that upstream will make decisions that aren’t compatible with their users as a result of disabling telemetry. Idealism is not free of costs.

In my more cynical moments, I wonder if this is because they fear that unbiased data would show that their use cases are in the severe minority (like, 0.0001%), and so feel think there’s a higher chance of having their needs met by withholding telemetry and then banging the outrage drums loudly to make their numbers look larger than life. Game theory suggests it’s a possibility, anyways.

It feels like as user you can say whatever you want without considering concrete realities "Julia needs to know how many people use the software for funding".

The legal document also clearly indicates that Julia is collecting a very small amount of info, so there's no trickery either.

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