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Comment by newaccount74 | Hacker News Reader

I think that 90% of telemetry is useless (eg. how often a feature is used says nothing about how important it is), but telemetry related to errors and crashes is extremely important.

My experience with shipping software is that if 50 people encounter a bug, maybe 1 of them will click the "feedback" button to report it. If you don't have a feedback button, it's less than that. If you don't have a technical audience, it's even less again.

So if you want to ship high quality software, then automatic error reporting is essential.

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I don't bother to report bugs because I know I'm just speaking to /dev/null.

If you want to ship high quality software, listen to your customers and make it clear their words really matter.

No, telemetry does not count; that only reinforces I'm speaking to /dev/null.

It’s telling that you have products absolutely jam packed full of telemetry, yet their “community support” forums will have years old threads with hundreds of replies about specific unresolved bugs and small tweak requests that go completely ignored despite getting bumped weekly.

This disconnect is common, stark, and very obvious to all. I've long been genuinely amazed that companies allow this state of things to persist. It makes them look really terrible, and certainly doesn't help to make the case that users sacrificing some privacy to the software maker actually results in benefits to the user.

And to add to the general disdain for users, many of the larger company support forum are staffed exclusively by volunteer “experts” that aren’t even associated with the company or have a direct line of communication to it. Heaven forbid someone working on the product actually sees what their users desperately want them to know.

I would be much more inclined to click a "report bug" button if software didn't put itself into an adversarial position by engaging in shady telemetry tactics.

But, especially these days, you pretty much have to regard all software as being a bit hostile.

On a related note, exploiting security vulnerabilities is often non-deterministic. There might be thousands of errors or process crashes before the exploit is successful, and if at least some of those get reported to your telemetry servers it becomes a goldmine for discovering zero-days which are actively being exploited.

Microsoft has people who hunt for evidence of zero-days in their telemetry, for example.

I think opt out error reporting that prompts the user to send a report and lets them review it first is very worthwhile.

> how often a feature is used says nothing about how important it is

Exactly. But that doesn't mean it's not important. If you think something is important, but it's not being used, it's something to look into.

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