Hacker News Reader

Comment by makecheck | Hacker News Reader

Here is the problem I see:

1. Users enjoy product for free.

2. Users pretty much never tell maintainers what is going wrong for them: no messages (much less proper bug reports), no contributions in any way!

3. Something invariably goes wrong for users that do the above.

4. Users immediately hit social media and try to tar the entire project, developer/company reputation, whatever. “Zero stars”, doesn’t work in their use case. You have surely seen these “reviews” before, and mindless tweets.

THIS is why I am torn on telemetry to some degree. IF you demand no auto-feedback in the name of privacy, THEN you should help out voluntarily OR not use free software! Yet software maintainers can’t count on this at all. They risk being hanged in the public square for every bug.

View on HN

> 1. Users enjoy product for free.

You got this part wrong. Users contribute to the project and/or draw contributers to the project. This happens to proprietary projects like twitter as well, where key features were invented by users. https://qz.com/135149/the-first-ever-hashtag-reply-and-retwe...

What if the telemetry data went through an intermediary you trust? I’ve been thinking about this and I am similarly torn on the issue. But if I knew the data was going to pass through some organization I trust , like the eff for example, I’d be much more comfortable opting in. This would be a sort of guarantee that the data I’m giving away is needed to improve the software and is not going to be used for anything else.

I think that makes sense. I am not in favor of a free-for-all on the implementation but I can definitely see the benefits of (say) having a bunch of anonymous crash logs telling you the things that users won’t, and such a thing should at least go through a reasonable 3rd party.

No. Just no. When I'm running a local application against local data on a local machine, there's no need for anything related to any of that to leave the machine for any reason.

> Users pretty much never tell maintainers what is going wrong for them: no messages (much less proper bug reports), no contributions in any way!

Does something have to go wrong and do maintainers have to know about it?

I mean, if users are using the software, even if it's not perfect, what's the big deal - is that not good enough?

> IF you demand no auto-feedback in the name of privacy, THEN you should help out voluntarily OR not use free software!

The point of free software is that I can use and modify it as I want. I do not "owe" feedback (or anything else for that matter) to the developer.

You don’t “owe” feedback but you should stay off Twitter/reviews/etc. if you haven’t at least tried to contact the developer first when there is a problem.

As I see it, your options are:

- Decide the software is not for you, for some reason, and silently uninstall it, or...

- Try to make the software better, working with the maintainer somehow (tell them what is wrong, contribute a fix or a bug report, etc.). People would be surprised how sometimes a fix is really simple but the use case may be really obscure, and it is literally just a matter of finding out that the problem exists.

My problem is that people seem to employ a “3rd option” of just deciding all by themselves that software must be poorly implemented and trash, and worthy of public scorn, because they can. If developers go long enough without any real feedback, while enduring negative “press”, you’d better believe they will at least consider something like a telemetry tracker to tell them what the heck is going on. At least that way, they can find these problems and actually fix them, to preserve their reputation.

Yes, some people are difficult, but that's neither here nor there. That they exist is not a justification to violate the trust of a larger group. Floss did fine before mandatory telemetry.

You can find plenty of complaints online about software which gathers data from its users too. Putting telemetry in your software doesn’t stop people from complaining about it.

Audacity brought this problem on themselves. They walked down the slippery slope of telemetry.

YOUR exaggeration is grounds for removing any credibility.

If users 'tar' a product, it likely deserves it.

I'm completely cool with people forking Audacity.

Now we can send all of the privacy seeking developers over to the new project where they can demonstrate their productivity.

I see this fork as a wonderful thing as the Audacity people can finally kick the excessively whiny to the curb--I mean the new forked project.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com