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Comment by groestl | Hacker News Reader

> The problem of scrying into the unknowable

People really need to accept that they can't and shouldn't have full introspection into everything they're ever interested in. Even if it's a thing they care about (like their own homepage or programming language). Sure it's nice to get feedback. Sure it's nice to know that somebody uses it. But putting a tracker on everything with the argument of "will help me provide a better service", forgoing informed consent.. It's wrong when it's done on an institutional level, whether it's companies or the goverment, and it's wrong when individuals do that.

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The new owners of Audacity did this and then gaslit the community about it for weeks, despite constant, almost unanimous backlash.

Please elaborate on your allegations. As I understand it, there was the original telemetry PR, which had a "Don't Send"/"Send" dialog at first startup. (A screenshot of this dialog was not added to the PR until several days after it was first posted, so many were under the impression that it was strictly opt-out.) The "Send" option was more prominent, which many people called a dark pattern, but it was still an explicit choice by the user.

After that, they resolved to only add "Don't Send"/"Send" crash reporting and opt-out update checking, which only sends the OS version, Audacity version, and IP address. (They claim to immediately anonymize the IP address.) The user is notified about the update checking at first startup.

Which part of this do you consider "doing this and gaslighting the community about it"?

> opt-out

There's your answer.

> Which part of this do you consider "doing this and gaslighting the community about it"?

Telling long time users that the new owners knew better. Everyone was able to go and check out how they ruined their other products too.

They had an army of people telling them "no" and they did it anyway.

You seem to be familiar with the fiasco so I'm not sure how we aren't seeing the same thing....

> There's your answer.

So you're saying that opt-out automatic update checking ruined their product by any reasonable definition, and they were entirely aware of this, so by claiming that automatic update checking is useful they were gaslighting their users?

If so, then from what source are we certain that the "army of people telling them 'no'" in the relevant GitHub issues is representative of how their broader user base feels about automatic update checking? And how do we know that they ought to have been similarly certain?

It's right there in the name.

But the creators (someone trying to be "owners" of sowmth5 that is just a name, lol) has the foresight to make it free and open source, so we have Tencity, the original software with a new name.

I'm not sure what it is you're saying.

(to have the audacity to do something unacceptable)

Ah thanks :D

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