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    Why we collect telemetry

    ...our team needs visibility into how features are being used in practice. We use this data to prioritize our work and evaluate whether features are meeting real user needs.

I'm curious why corporate development teams always feel the need to spy on their users? Is it not sufficient to employ good engineering and design practices? Git has served us well for 20+ years without detailed analytics over who exactly is using which features and commands. Would Git have been significantly better if it had collected telemetry, or would the data not have just been a distraction?

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I used to believe that it was not necessary until I started building my own startup. If you dont have analytics you are flying blind. You don't know what your users actually care about and how to optimize a successful user journey. The difference between what people tell you when asked directly and how they actually use your software is actually shocking.

I'm pretty ok with the github cli tool team flying blind. The tool isn't exactly a necessary part of any workflow. You don't need telemetry to glean that

that's akin to saying "i do not need their product therefore i don't care"... so what's your point? someone may have made it part of their workflow!

True. Some people shouldn't use git if their workflow doesn't beg it.

You're only flying blind if you make decisions not looking and thinking. Analytics isn't the only way to figure out "what your users actually care about", you can also try the old school way, commonly referred to as "Talking with people", then after taking notes, you think about it, maybe discuss with others. Don't take what people say at face value, but think about it together with your knowledge and experience, and you'll make even better product decisions than the people who are only making "data driven decisions" all the time.

We do both and they yield different learnings. They are complementary. We also have an issue tracking board with upvotes. I would say to your point that you can't improve what you don't measure.

I would say to your point that you can't not spy on me while also spying on me. Maybe just don't?

If I was running a physical business and I wrote down each person’s name and credit card number and the exact time and order they placed, that would be pretty invasive and “spying”. If I write down how many units I sold of each item per day, and the volume of transactions by credit card vs cash, it’s anonymized and I don’t think this would generally be considered “spying”, just normal business metrics. How’s the latter much different than anonymized product analytics?

Watching me use my computer in my house or office is spying.

Aggregating request statistics server-side unless you're only generating those requests to spy on what I'm doing on my computer is more like the not-spying you're talking about.

The logical conclusion is you’re asking for no local products and everything to run server side. It’s kind of a ridiculous position that doesn’t change the spying being done other than it’s on the other side of a browser.

I accounted for this in my post. Obviously if you’re making requests just so you can spy, that’s spying.

No you didn’t. If I build you a web video editor, is that because I want to spy on you or because I want to make deployment easier and reduce install friction?

You’re making a distinction that puts you in the privileged judge position of evaluating if a service is making requests just so you can spy vs what the app author’s might believe is a critical design feature in how they want the product to operate.

> Watching me use my computer in my house or office is spying.

I agree, but once you cross the borders out to the internet, I'd say you need to stop seeing that as "Me sitting at my computer at home", because you're actually "on someone else's property" at that point essentially. And I say this as someone who care greatly about preserving personal privacy.

I deeply hate that this attitude took over even among “hackers”.

Watching people move their mouse and click stuff on “your webpage” is fucking spying. It’s in my browser. On my machine. Not running on your hardware.

Tracking what I do on my own computer doesn’t stop being spying because the program I’m doing stuff in can make network requests. WTF.

> Watching people move their mouse and click stuff on “your webpage” is fucking spying. It’s in my browser. On my machine. Not running on your hardware.

Well, I was mainly talking about network requests, which are quite literally served by "my hardware" when your client reaches out to my servers, and they agree to serve your client. I do agree that it sucks that browser viewports now also are considered "mine" from the perspective of servers, but you do have a choice to execute that code or not, you can always say no.

I don't think it's as much "this attitude took over", people saying that the internet is the wild west and warning you "browse at your own peril" has been around for as long as I can remember.

Yeah server logs don’t bother me. I’m requesting a resource, you unavoidably see that happen.

The attitude that’s changed is that in the 90s and 00s a program that sent information about what you’re doing that wasn’t necessary and expected for how it operates would have been instantly, popularly, and unequivocally labeled spyware by a programmer crowd. Now it’s normal and you get a bunch of folks claiming it’s ok.

Worse, you get a bunch of programmers claiming it's impossible to write software without that level of spying.

Most telemetry is more along the lines of "user spent N minutes on platform, clicked on these things, looked at these other things" etc etc. And the primary way devs use this data is by aggregating across all users and running a/b tests or viewing longer term trends.

Are some companies spying on you the way you say? Yea, probably. Most of us just want data to know what's working and what's not.

You can write down your business transactions, sure.

Telemetry would be more akin to looking through your customers windows each day and noting down how often they use the tools you sold them. Not cool.

Sure, you can spend the weeks to months of expensive and time consuming work it takes to get a fuzzy, half accurate and biased picture of what your users workflows look like through user interviews and surveys. Or you can look at the analytics, which tell you everything you need to know immediately, always up to date, with perfect precision.

Sometimes HN drives me crazy. From this thread you’d think telemetry is screen recording your every move and facial expression and sending it to the government. I’ve worked at places that had telemetry and it’s more along the granularity of “how many people clicked the secondary button on the third tab?” This is a far cry from “spying on users”.

> Sure, you can spend the weeks to months of expensive and time consuming work it takes to get a fuzzy, half accurate and biased picture of what your users workflows look like through user interviews and surveys. Or you can look at the analytics, which tell you everything you need to know immediately, always up to date, with perfect precision.

Yes, admittedly, the first time you do these things, they're difficult, hard and you have lots to learn. But as you do this more often, build up a knowledge base and learn about your users, you'll gain knowledge and experience you can reuse, and it'll no longer take you weeks or months of investigations to answer "Where should this button go?", you'll base it on what you already know.

So if you don't want to spend the time doing that, or as is more accurate in corporate settings, the general turnover of the team is high enough that no one is around long enough to build that deep foundational product knowledge, and to be frank most people do not care enough.

This is why telemetry happens, its faster, easier and more resilient to organizational turmoil.

> This is why telemetry happens, its faster, easier and more resilient to organizational turmoil.

I don't disagree with that, I was mainly talking about trying to deliver an experience that makes sense, is intuitive and as helpful and useful as possible, even in exchange for it taking longer time.

Of course this isn't applicable in every case, sometimes you need different tradeoffs, that's OK too. But that some favor quality over shorter implementation time shouldn't drive people crazy, it's just making different tradeoffs.

> even in exchange for it taking longer time.

I think in terms of corporate teams this is the issue a lot of times, people just are not on the team long enough to build that knowledge. Between the constant reorgs, these days layoffs and other churn the no one puts in the years required to gain the implicit knowledge. So orgs reach for the "tenure independent knowledge base.

Asking users isn't a substitute for usage data.

Usage data is the ground truth.

Soliciting user feedback is invasive, and it's only possible for some questions.

The HN response to this is "too bad" but it's a thought-terminating response.

It goes the other way as well. Usage data isn't equivalent to asking users either. A solid percentage of bad decisions in tech can be traced to someone, somewhere forgetting that distinction and trusting usage data that says it's it's okay to remove <very important feature> because it's infrequently used.

This. If I'm forced to use a feature I hate because it's the only way to do something, the "ground truth" reflects that I like that feature. It doesn't tell the whole story.

Most metrics teams are reasonably competent and are aware of that. Excepting "growth hackers"

I haven't been in a single metrics discussion where we didn't talk about what we're actually measuring, if it reflects what we want to measure, and how to counterbalance metrics sufficiently so we don't build yet another growthhacking disaster.

Doesn't mean that metrics are perfect - they are in fact aggravatingly imprecise - but the ground truth is usually somewhat better than "you clicked it, musta liked it!"

Eh, there are a lot of cases where teams A/B test their way into a product that sucks.

And yet, the observable evidence of changes in software that collect metrics directly contradict this.

Yeah, it's not a good discussion without concrete examples.

One: Building a good UX involves guesswork and experiments. You don't know what will be best for most users until you try something. You will often be wrong, and you rarely find the global maximum on the first try.

This applies to major features but also the most trivial UI details like whether users understand that this label can be clicked or that this button exists.

Two: Like all software, you're in a constant battle to avoid encumbering the system with things you don't actually need, like leaving around UI components that people don't use. Yet you don't want to become so terse with the UI that people find it confusing.

Three: I ran a popular cryptocurrency-related service where people constantly complained about there being no 2FA. I built it and polished a UX flow to both hint at the feature and make it easy to set up. A few months later I saw that only a few people enabled it.

Was it broken? No. It just turns out that people didn't really want to use 2FA.

The point being that you can be super wrong about usage patterns even after talking to users.

Finally: It's easy to think about companies we don't like and telemetry that's too snitchy. I don't want Microslop phoning home each app I open.

But if we only focus on the worst cases, we miss out on the more reasonable cases where thoughtful developers collect minimal data in an earnest effort to make the UX better for everyone.

> You don't know what will be best for most users until you try something.

That's because you don't understand your users. If you did, you wouldn't need to spy on them.

> you rarely find the global maximum on the first try

One never finds the "global maximum" with telemetry, at best a local sort-of maximum. To find what's best, you need understanding, which you never get from telemetry. Telemetry tells you what was done, not why or what was in the people's mind when it was done.

> Usage data is the ground truth.

For what, precisely? As far as I know, you can use it to know "how much is X used" but not more than that, and it's not a "ground truth" for anything besides that.

The ground truth that I never click on Stargate on Netflix is completely at odds with the actual truth that I love Stargate and want more of it and things like it.

What the ground truth usage data is completely ignorant of is that Netflix's copy is a crappy blurry transfer, and so I got dvds instead.

Telemetry doesn’t tell the “why”. You never clicking in Stargate in Netflix is apparently true, so the telemetry isn’t wrong. It just doesn’t answer why.

Le duh. The whole point is that the perfectly true data is misleading and uninformative, and the "ground truth usage data" argument has a plot hole.

It's not that it has no value at all, it's just that it's stupid to know one thing (how to collect usage data) and think that is all you need to know and that that obviates all other sources of understanding.

If you wish to collect money from human customers, you have to be some minimum level of human yourself. Talking to your customers is not some icky hardship to be avoided and replaced with nice bash script.

Sure, but Netflix is not interested in whether you love Stargate or not. Telemetry says that you never click it, so it's ok to remove it from their catalogue (which is correct).

Now, they could've done a better job by increasing the quality, but that's a further (and costly) optimisation.

It's not correct. I paid someone else for dvds. A little more of that and I may consciously question why I pay both netflix and ebay.

Netflix should be very interested in a fact like "Netflix has show X, but Netflix subscribers who love show X choose to watch it someplace else due to issues with Netflix".

Then pay for the data if you need it so bad.

> Asking users isn't a substitute for usage data.

Sure.

> Usage data is the ground truth.

Absolutely not. That's how you get "we buried this feature and nobody used it, so clearly nobody wants it".

You seem to be interpreting my position as saying that one should only use telemetry to make decisions. Of course, no one reasonable would hold that position! What I’m saying is that only relying on user interviews without supplementing them with analytics would be knowingly introducing a blind spot into how you understand user behavior.

Yes, probably because someone else said "If you dont have analytics you are flying blind" which I initially replied to, then when you replied to my reply, I took that as agreeing with parent, which isn't necessarily true.

> What I’m saying is that only relying on user interviews without supplementing them

I also took your "spend the weeks to months of expensive and time consuming work [...] Or you can look at the analytics" as a "either this or that proposition", where if we're making that choice, I'd go with qualitative data rather than quantitative, regardless of time taken. But probably it comes down to what tradeoffs we're willing to accept.

Maybe it just comes down to how you interpret "flying blind", because I do tend to agree with that statement. Telemetry is one half of the puzzle, user interviews are the other. Without either I would argue you are flying blind; I think you agree here though.

In enterprise, you have little chance of getting the real story from end users in many cases. IT will also tell you that things are used one way, only for analytics to tell you it's the opposite. If you spend some of your UX research budget to deep dive on the area you can then finally get to the bottom of it.

I think the root of the complaints here is prioritization. The things they care about are prioritized. Qualitative feedback is likely already telling PMs that something is wrong and really should be fixed, but other feedback has more data supporting it.

> with perfect precision.

Precision isn't accuracy and all that.

Telemetry is the previous obvious step to surveillance. Not the telemetry you implement in your own small bus, but at the scale of microsoft, apple, meta… yeah

> and sending it to the government

It literally is. The network itself is always listening: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A

The mere act of making a network connection leaks my physical location, the time I'm using my computer, and the fact that I use a particular piece of software. Given enough telemetry endpoints creates a fingerprint unique to me, because it is very unlikely that any other person at the same physical location uses the exact same set of software that I do, almost all of which want to phone home all the goddamn time. It's the metadata that's important here, so payload contents (including encryption) don't even matter.

You're never going to win this argument, most of the people who post here have never actually shipped a product themselves and only work on isolated features and others have to handle / manage all of this for them so they have no real understanding of what it takes to do it

the other crowd that pretends otherwise are larping or only have some generic open source project that only a handful of people use or they only update it every 6 years

> You're never going to win this argument

Probably because there is no "truth" here, only subjective opinion, there is no "winning", only "learning" and "sharing".

I could ramble the same about how "people relying on data never shipped an enjoyable thing to people who ended up loving, only care about shipping as fast as possible" and yadda yadda, or I can actually make my points for why I believe what I believe. I do know what I prefer to read, so that's what I try to contribute back.

You could hire people to be testers and pay them for the analytics, I think they would even allow you to record the screen if you paid well enough. The problem is that you do not want to pay or get consent, you want to grab the data for free and without permission and without people realizing what you do. And such kind of people deserve much worse treatment than they are treated today.

Nobody actually cares "what it takes to do it", that's not our problem. You're not entitled to knowing even a single bit of information about us without our consent. Try innovating a way to do it without spying on people.

> You're never going to win this argument, most of the people who post here have never actually shipped a product themselves and only work on isolated features and others have to handle / manage all of this for them so they have no real understanding of what it takes to do it

Have you asked those users or did you conclude this from (likely unrelated) "telemetry" you have gathered?

"You’d think telemetry is screen recording your every move" - that's literally what tracing and telemetry is about.

"Sure, you can spend the weeks to months of expensive and time consuming work it takes to get a fuzzy, half accurate and biased picture of what your users workflows look like through user interviews and surveys. Or you can look at the analytics, which tell you everything you need to know immediately, always up to date, with perfect precision." -> your analytics will never show what you didn't measure - it will only show what you already worked on - at best, it's some kind of validator mechanism - not a driver for feature exploration.

This kind of monitoring need to go through the documented data exposure - and it's a sufficient argument for a company to stop using github immediately if they take security seriously.

But I'd add that if you take security seriously you are not on Github anyway.

No, telemetry is not "literally" about screen recording. Telemetry is metrics. That is why they invented a new word for it rather than calling it "screen recording".

Many products would be much better if they listened to what people are saying on public forums instead of using telemetry. For example, Google Maps has a longstanding bug where it auto-translates all reviews even if they are in a language you speak. If Google cared about user feedback, they could’ve easily fixed it, but no amount of telemetry will tell them this.

I hate this feature. Google knows the languages I speak because I added them in my account, even with all the tracking they obviously know, but they keep messing it up in all their products, Google Search, YouTube (they add machine audio translations to videos and translate the thumbnails).

They even do it on Google Play. No, I don't want to buy books in a language I can't read, suggest me ones that I can. It's been like that for a decade now I think. I guess it doesn't make them lose a noticeable amount of money.

The reality is that most product leaders only care about the feedback that has visible consequences. If users aren't performing some action like quitting the app that shows in the telemetry, then they aren't going to pay attention.

They'd probably call the issue you see a "craft" issue. Some PM is likely raising it. What happens is that leaders in big companies want perspectives based on data. You can go in with issues like yours but if you don't have clear data that shows significant numbers of users leaving, or users piling in, then you might as well not show up. People care about craft primarily will really struggle in these large organizations. That's not a good thing but how it is.

In large organizations, you'll see a lot of A/B testing or experimentation. Some of the worst decisions from a craft perspective are ones where they only look for "did this cause some kind of negative impact on numbers?" situation. If your feature is neutral (on abandons, uninstalls, or whatever negative outcome), then it can get shipped which overrides any qualitative question around "should we ship this in this state?". Doesn't matter too much according to these folks because it's not making things worse (in terms of numbers.)

There is probably more to explore in modern "product management" that's at the root of many of these problems. HN tends to focus on engineering but within large companies there is now a bifurcation and development of a field that forgets lots of PM was already invented.

These kinds of issues cause a negative feeling towards the product in the user. They keep using the product even after having seen a badly auto translated review from a language they speak or all these other things, but they now have a little bit more resentment towards the product. It makes them a bit more likely, over time, to switch to a competitor. Maybe they vent to a friend a month later and the friend suggests giving Apple Maps a try.

How do the metrics you speak of capture these subtle, delayed effects?

My point is that they don't capture the effects you describe - unless designed in. There is little motivation to do that though because they can track larger effects which are aligned with current leadership priorities. That's why I included the part about the PM that has recognized the problem.

I can guarantee you that the class of problem you describe has been discussed at the individual contributor level, so is known to some extent. Getting it from recognition to action is the problem. It is a huge lift to get some of these small things through the gauntlet to execution. Meanwhile, as you say, competitors with taste and attention to detail are building a better product.

This is very much a problem of large organizations. Those same PMs at a small company. If Google Maps was an independent company, the impediments would be fewer and priorities more aligned with building the best Google Maps.

What you're saying is exactly wrong. What people say on public forums is a very biased sample, the proverbial vocal minority

Why do you need to collect hardware fingerprint, IMEI, phone number, geolocation, list of nearby wifi access points, list of installed applications, selfie and passport photo when you can simply count how much times a server route was called?

That's a slippery slope and we both know it. Telemetry does not automatically include those things.

Indeed it's not fair in discussion context, so wonder if it was meant as a statement on the ills of telemetry as a whole.

My comment explicitly uses "how many people clicked the secondary button on the third tab" as an example, not any of that nonsense -- you are not responding in good faith.

> From this thread you’d think telemetry is screen recording your every move

> it’s more along the granularity of “how many people clicked the secondary button on the third tab?”

You don't see the contradiction here?

> Sometimes HN drives me crazy.

You can tell the difference between those who build businesses and those who simply use them.

I was gonna say it's a difference between producing something to make money, and producing something meant for people to like and perhaps love, but same thing :)

There are two aspects of that:

1) Metrics lead to wrong conclusion. There is software which has extremely rarely used features, I need it once or twice a year only, but the ability is why I use the software to begin with. If metrics get too much attention such things are removed as being unimportant ...

2) a lot of the tracking happening is way too intrusive and intransparent. There are valid use cases, however some large corporations especially, in the last had cases where they collected way too much, including private information, without really giving information about it. That overshadows good cases.

Yes, but the answer to "how many people clicked that button" is irrelevant if it describes the outside world. This id like concluding something is wrong with umbrellas because none of the users in the desert opened them.

If the questions you have can be answered by simple telemetry you are likely asking the wrong questions. E.g. a confused user will click all the buttons, while one thst efficiently uses your software to solve a very specific problem may always ever press the ssme ones.

The actually interesting questions are all about how your software empowers users to deal with the things they have to deal with. Ideally with as little buttons as possible. And if once a year they need that other button it will be there.

It is very easy to draw the wrong conclusions from telemetry.

> Or you can look at the analytics, which tell you everything you need to know immediately, always up to date, with perfect precision.

Analytics do not tell you everything you need to know immediately. The analytics may say that no one is using a given feature, but they don't necessarily tell you why. Maybe they don't use it because they're not aware of it, marketing is presenting it wrong, or sales isn't selling against it. Maybe they've tried to use it and it doesn't work for them and they never tried it again. Maybe the call to action to bring them to it doesn't work or directs them wrong. Maybe it gets used by 1% of the users who happen to be power users. You might look at that 1% and conclude that it's not getting enough use to warrant supporting it or keeping it around.

The problem is that, without the context of actually talking to and observing users in the real world, software teams have repeatedly misinterpreted telemetry. Even the description of how they use telemetry to decide which features need investment or improvement shows this. In the face of huge data with no context, they make bad assumptions rather than talking to actual users. Over and over again.

Exactly - purely "data driven" decisions are how we end up with ads really close to (or overlapping with) some button you want to press, because the data says that increase click-through rate! But it's actually a user-hostile feature that everyone hates.

But collecting data and looking for insights doesn't mean you mechanically optimize features, especially user-hostile ones? This is just as, if not more, likely to happen when basing your decisions on what people say they want over what they actually do.

If we were perfectly rational, then yeah, more data should never lead to worse decisions. However, it's easy to fall into the trap where being data-driven makes you only work on those things that you know how to measure.

Or worse, it makes you go look for data backing up the assumptions you already made.

It's easier to not care about users if they are just numbers and you can tell yourself to ignore what they actually say.

The reason that feature gets implemented is not because the devs think users will like it ... they know users don't want it, but it drives revenue and pays salaries.

It's sort of hilarious to compare "talking to people" with analytics. I'm not defending Github here, but you can't possibly think that "talking to 1M customers" is viable.

You could survey a representative sample

Not really. (a) People hate responding to surveys and hate emails, you're more likely to lose users than to get data (b) there's no way you're surveying people's in a way that gets you information like "time spent on a page" or "time between commits" or whatever.

This is just nonsense tbh. Surveys and customer outreach solve completely different problems from analytics.

I agree you can't practically get the same information as you could with telemetry.

Survey data is still real data that can be used for "analytics".

Some people also hate telemetry. It feels invasive. I have a guess about what direction the percentage of consumers who hate telemetry is moving toward.

You can hire people to test your product and provide analytics. But not try to siphon the data for free.

I'm not taking a side on whether a product should add telemetry. I'm rejecting the absurd notion that these suggestions are at all giving the same information.

No one claimed that they give the same information, only that it's viable to produce a good product that solves your user's needs without using telemetry. The whole point is that you don't get the same information, e.g. no private data that the users haven't provided informed consent for upload to your servers.

If people feel like their feedback is valued you don't even need to ask them for it, they will come to you.

That’s what user forums are for.

You can set up a user forum if you'd like. If you think it will get you the same information that analytics will, you're obviously wrong.

Kagi has a user forum (as well as listening to comments on other sites like Hacker News) and does not (at least supsosedly) collect telemetry. They seem to be doing fine when it comes to feedback.

Okay?

> Don't take what people say at face value, but think about it together with your knowledge and experience

While you’re comparing different information sources, you might even want to consider telemetry, too.

What people say, and what people do are different things. Especially when the people who agree to talk to you aren't representative of the whole user base.

And what people do and the reasons they do it are even more different.

It makes me think, what `gh` features don't generate some activity in the github API that could as easily guide feature development without adding extra telemetry?

Yeah. Unless they plan to move more local git operations in the tool and blur the line between git and gh.

> The difference between what people tell you when asked directly and how they actually use your software is actually shocking.

And the difference between what they do and what they want is equally shocking. If what they want isn’t in your app, they can’t do it and it won’t show up in your data.

Quantitative data doesn’t tell you what your users want or care about. It tells you only what they are doing. You can get similar data without spying on your users.

I don’t necessarily think all data gathering is equivalent to spying, but if it’s not entirely opt-in, I think it is effectively spying no matter what you’re collecting, varying only along a dimension of invasiveness.

> If what they want isn’t in your app, they can’t do it and it won’t show up in your data.

Excellent point.

> but if it’s not entirely opt-in, I think it is effectively spying no matter what you’re collecting, varying only along a dimension of invasiveness.

Every web page visit is logged on the http server, and that's been the default since the mid 1990's. Is that spying?

In principle, yes, I believe it is a form of spying. Not particularly invasive nor harmful, but spying nonetheless.

Logging every page visited is not a technical requirement of serving the requested resource.

> Logging every page visited is not a technical requirement of serving the requested resource.

How will you know which page is having problems being served or is having performance problems?

You won’t, but that’s not what was asked.

Logging the requested resource is not a technical requirement of serving that resource.

Depends how you define “technical requirement” but I’d say 404 for example is an indication of a failure to serve a given resource. If you don’t have logging you won’t know unless someone complains which means you’ll only catch the most visible issues. Same goes for performance - everywhere I’ve ever worked serving a resource was tightly coupled to “how fast can the user retrieve that resource”.

But it's just tracking something the server was asked to do - I'd say it's legitimate logging.

If you buy something at the supermarket, the supermarket keeps a record of the transaction - it's part of the process.

However if you try and link that to entities and build a pattern behaviour across multiple websites then I think you stray into spying.

Also if the tin of beans I bought at the supermarket records audio at home and uploads to the cloud - that's spying.

No, since GDPR logging for page views is not something you can do without thinking what metadata you store with it and for how long.

> If you dont have analytics you are flying blind

More like flying based on your knowledge as a pilot and not by the whims of your passengers.

For many CLIs and developer tooling, principled decisions need to reign. Accepting the unquantifiability of usage in a principled product is often difficult for those that are not the target demographic, but for developer tools specifically (be they programming languages, CLIs, APIs, SDKs, etc), cohesion and common sense are usually enough. It also seems real hard for product teams to accept the value of the status quo with these existing, heavily used tools.

Actually it's more like flying in the clouds with no instruments which can lead to spatial disorientation when you exit the cloud cover and realize you're nosediving towards the earth. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spatial_disorientation

Flying based on the whims of your passengers would be user testing/interviewing, which is a complementary, and IMO necessary, strategy alongside analytics.

Wow, it really is sad how literally unthinkable it is to you and so much of the industry that you could actually talk to your users and customers like human beings instead of just data points.

And you know what happens when you reach out to talk to your customers like human beings instead of spying on them like animals? They like you more and they raise issues that your telemetry would never even think to measure.

It's called user research and client relationship management.

I think you’re overlooking that they were talking about stated and revealed preferences, a well known economic challenge where what people say is important to them and what shows up in the data is a gap. Of course you talk to users and do relationship management. That doesn’t negate the need to understand revealed preferences.

In the OSS world this is not a huge deal. You get some community that’s underserved by the product (ie software package) and they fork, modify, or build something else. If it turned out to be valuable, then you get the old solution complemented or replaced. In the business world this is an existential threat to the business - you want to make sure your users aren’t better served by a competitor who’s focusing on your blindspot.

Marketing came to the conclusion that people dont know what they actually want. They decided to lump in engineers and programmers as well, since they started abusing their goodwill.

Apple and Microsoft reached their peak usability when they employed teams of people to literally sit and watch what users did in real life (and listen to them narrating what they want to do), take notes, and ask followup questions.

Everything went to crap in the metric-based era that followed.

The problem they're trying to solve is to find out what functions of their software are most useful for people and what to invest in, and to make directions on product direction.

Yes, vendors can, do, and should talk to users, but then a lot of users don't like receiving cold messages from vendors (and some users go so far as to say that cold messages should _never_ be sent).

So, the alternative is to collect some soft telemetry to get usage metrics. As long as a company is upfront about it and provides an opt-out mechanism, I don't see a problem with it. Software projects (and the businesses around them) die if they don't make the right decisions.

As an open source author and maintainer, I very rarely hear from my users unless I put in the legwork to reach out to them so I completely identify with this.

If you have an existing financial relationship with someone it is by definition not a "cold message." People who think they should never, ever be contacted by a company they are paying to use a service of are in the extreme minority. That's "cabin in the woods with no electricity" territory.

You are inferring your own perception based on my comment, no need to be an asshole here. Like I said elsewhere we do both and they serve different purpose. We also make is very clear and easy to disable in the onboarding. I hope you try to build a business sometimes and open up your perspectives that maybe just maybe you don't have all the answers.

> We also make is very clear and easy to disable in the onboarding.

Yeah, sure. How long is that policy gonna last? How does a user even know that that checkbox does anything?

Once you’ve decided to break a social contract it’s not like you can slap a bandaid on it and it’s all okay now.

> I hope you try to build a business sometimes and open up your perspectives that maybe just maybe you don't have all the answers.

People were building successful businesses long before the Internet.

> You are inferring your own perception based on my comment, no need to be an asshole here.

People in this case are likely extrapolating based on how user data is harvested in the industry at large. So there is bound to be (very likely) some characterization that is unfair to you.

Given modern data aggregation, really data vacuuming, and that software is opaque, it can be really hard to trust anyone with any aggregation of data. They say that they pseudonymize properly. The proof? Trust them bro. Then read yet another news article about how some data aggregation was either sloppily leaked or just a front for selling data.

A natural response to opaque practices by people you don’t trust is a hardline no.

You stated that you are blind without analytics, which heavily implies other forms of user research are useless and don’t provide meaningful signal. I don’t think an assumption that you’re not using other methods is that outrageous.

Customer interviews are an indispensable, high-value activity for all businesses. They are a permanent, ongoing capability that the organization must have. A conversation will surface things that analytics will not catch. People will describe their experiences in a qualitative manner that can inspire product improvements that analytics never will.

However, the plural of "anecdote" is not "data". People are unreliable narrators, and you can only ask them so many questions in a limited time amid their busy lives. Also, there are trends which appear sooner in automated analytics by days, weeks, or even months than they would appear in data gathered by the most ambitious interview schedule.

There is a third, middle-ground option as well: surveys. They don't require as much time commitment from the user or the company as a sit-down interview. A larger number of people are willing to engage with them than are willing to schedule a call.

In my experience, all three are indispensable tools.

Get off your high horse.

Talking to users when you have hundreds of customers does no more than give you an idea of what those specific people need. If you have hundreds of users or more, then data is the only thing that reliably tells you these things.

Clearly the data doesn't tell you that. Either that or most companies gobbling up ungodly amounts of private data don't actually cares what it tells them about the user's needs.

You can "optimize a successful user journey" by making the software easy to use, making it load so fast people are surprised by it, and talking to your customers. Telemetry doesn't help you do any of that, but it does help you squeeze more money out of them, or find out where you can pop an interstitial ad to goose your ad revenue, and what features you can move up a tier level to increase revenue without providing any additional value.

You have all info you need on server side, I don’t believe that you’re totally blind without client tracking

This got me thinking: Are there prominent examples of open source projects that 1. collect telemetry, 2. without a way to opt-out (or obfuscating / making it difficult to opt-out)? This practice seems to be specific to corporate software development.

Why is it that startups and commercial software developers seem to be the only ones obsessed with telemetry? Why do they need it to "optimize user journeys" but open source projects do just fine while flying blind?

open source projects are usually creating something for themselves so it's much easier to know what to build when you are the user

whereas, commercial software has a disconnect between who are the users and developers are

I think there's room for a distinction between "not using metrics" and "not using data".

Unthinkingly leaning on metrics is likely to help you build a faster, stronger horse, while at the same time avoiding building a car, a bus or a tractor.

The totality of Microsoft's products is proof that this is false. If telemetry and analytics actually mattered for usability, every product Microsoft puts out wouldn't be good instead of garbage.

There are far too many factors to assign the quality of microsoft's products to telemetry.

Having the data doesn't mean you will act on it. And doesn't mean microsofts interests are aligned with the users.

> If you dont have analytics you are flying blind.

We... we are talking about a CLI tool. A CLI tool that directly uses the API. A tool which already identifies itself with a User-Agent[0].

A tool which obviously knows who is using it. What information are you gathering by running telemetry on my machine that couldn't.. just. be. a. database. query?

Reading the justification the main thing they seem to want to know is if gh is being driven by a human or an agent... Which, F off with your creepy nonsense.

Please don't just use generic "but ma analytics!" when this obviously doesn't apply here?

[0]: https://github.com/cli/cli/blob/3ad29588b8bf9f2390be652f46ee...

I agree with you in that regard. That said, knowing that this is Microsoft, the data will be used to extract value from the customers, not provide them with one.

Teams that do this need to just dogfood internally. Once you start collecting telemetry on external users defaulted to opt-in you're not a good faith actor in the ecosystem.

You could, I don't know, do user interviews with the various customer segments that use your product.

How did GitHub ever survive without this telemetry? Was it a web application buried in obscurity?

Game developers benefit tremendously from streams where they get to see peoples webcams _and_ screens as they use their software.

This would be _absolutely insane_ telemetry to request from a user for any other piece of software, but it would be fantastically useful in identifying where people get frustrated and why.

That said, I do not trust Microsoft with any telemetry, I am not invested in helping them improve their product, and I am happy not to rely on the GitHub CLI.

You can get this level of observation by paying testers (both professions as well as existing users who provide informed consent). You don't get to just spy on random users, yes.

Analytics is wrong. I never click any ads, but they keep showing it. I avoid registering or enter fake emails, but they keep showing full screen popups asking for email. I always reject cookies but they still ask me to accept them. And youtube keeps pushing those vertical videos for alternately gifted kids despite me never watching them. What's the point of this garbage analytics. It seems that their only goal is to annoy people.

All of those are affected by analytics.

Ad slots will be filled whether or not you click. If you never click, you'll tend to match with either very low quality ads or ads that pay per impression (display ads).

Email registration is highly valuable for a business, so analytics won't be used to decide whether to show the modal but rather test different versions of it.

Cookies are too valuable to not push on users, because without them only the previously mentioned low quality ads can be shown. High quality and display ads match on interest or demographic labels.

The business decision to keep vertical videos is highly likely to be affected by analytics, and of course the choice of which videos to show is based on recommendation models trained on interaction logs.

The priority isn't making your experience better, though that is often an incidental result -- it's driving the business.

It's not like they don't own API's that those cli's are hitting. They have all the stats they need.

> If you dont have analytics you are flying blind

If you have too much emphasis on (invasive) analytics you might end up flying empty i.e. without customers.

Be very careful with that.

Analytics driven development easily leads to bad outcomes. 1. Important, but less frequently used feature gets moved to a hidden spot leading to even less usage leading to eventual removal. 2. Poorly functioning features not getting the improvement they need because few use them due to how poorly they function.

I have seen these patterns a lot in software where decisions are based on analytics, and I usually stop using that sofware when I find a replacement.

They could well use the data from their own developers, couldn't that be enough?

Bats are mostly blind and manage to fly just fine.

> I'm curious why corporate development teams always feel the need to spy on their users? Is it not sufficient to employ good engineering and design practices?

No, because users have different needs and thoughts from the developers. And because sometimes it's hard to get good feedback from people. Maybe everyone loves the concept of feature X, but then never uses it in practice for some reason. Or a given feature has a vocal fan base that won't actually translate to sales/real usage.

> Would Git have been significantly better if it had collected telemetry, or would the data not have just been a distraction?

I think yes, because git famously has a terrible UI, and any amount of telemetry would quickly tell you people fumble around a lot at first.

I imagine that in an alternate world, a git with telemetry would have come out with a less confusing UI because somebody would have looked at the stats and for instance have added "git restore" right from the very start, because "git checkout -- foo.txt" is an absolutely unintuitive command.

A more intuitive git UI would reduce engagement. Do you really want to cut a 30 minute git session down to five minutes by introducing things like 'git restore' or 'git undo'? /s

> because git famously has a terrible UI

Thankfully, github has zero control over git. If they did have control they would have sank the whole operation on year one

> because somebody would have looked at the stats and for instance have added "git restore" right from the very start, because "git checkout -- foo.txt" is an absolutely unintuitive command.

How is git restore any better? Restoring what from when? At least git checkout is clear in what it does.

> How is git restore any better? Restoring what from when? At least git checkout is clear in what it does.

And this is exactly where disconnects happen, and where you need telemetry or something like it to tell you how your users actually use the system, rather than imagining how they should.

A technical user deep into the guts of Git thinks "you need to check out again this specific file".

A novice thinks "I want to restore this file to the state it had before I touched it".

Now we can argue about whether "restore" is the ideal word here, but all the same, end users tend to think it terms of "I want to undo what I did", and not in terms of git internals.

So a hypothetical git with telemetry would probably show people repeatedly trying "git restore", "git undo", "git revert", etc, trying to find an undo command.

> A technical user deep into the guts of Git thinks "you need to check out again this specific file".

This is a fundamental misunderstanding of both the user base who are by design all technical, and the use case that this tool serves: deeply technical and specific actions to a codebase.

Git is not just software. It is also a vernacular about how to reason about code change. You can't just make arbitrary commands do magic stuff by default and then expect that vernacular to be as strong as it is today.

Those "ergonomics" you're asking for already existed in other tools like CVS and subversion, they are specifically why those tools sucked and why git was created.

Nonsense. The "git restore" command is now an official part of git, and nothing is being lost because it's technically a git-checkout underneath. It's just a thin UI on top for convenience, nothing is being sacrificed. The old commands still work just like before.

CVS and Subversion have nothing to do with this, they were extremely different to Git in the way they worked and lost for many reasons that have nothing to do with having command names understandable to normal people.

I don't think this is worth the effort. A user either tries to understand the data structures underlying the tool or they don't. We don't market cars to babies, right? We don't pretend the car floats around—it's inherently based on engines and wheels, and the user must understand this to operate it safely. Similarly, git is inherently based around objects and graphs, and its operations should reflect this. "Restore" has simply no meaning in this world. Restore what to when in a world where time doesn't exist?

Surely, telemetry should help educate the tool maker to reveal the underlying model rather than coercing the model to reflect a bastardized worldview (as restore seems to).

Trying to wedge git into workflows that don't operate around git seems like a fool's errand. Either we must build tools around the workflow, or we must build the workflow around the tool.

This is part of why I find jujustsu so unintuitive: there is no clear model it's built around, only some sense of how to work with files I apparently lack. But perhaps it is the perfect tool for some workflow I have not yet grasped!

It’s total waste of time because both are going to be maintained in perpetuity. Increasing the maintenance burden and attack surface of git.

“a novice thinks”

Just learn your damn tools and stop whining.

The git-restore(1) implementation looks like about 35 lines of code. Then add a little more complexity for some apparent common functions that needed to be factored out.

For a dedicated "restore" it's worth it to me... (who will not maintain it)

At the hidden cost of educating millions of users how git actually operates once they can't restore a file

Neither of these two commands are any more really-operates than the other.

How do you figure? Are you discarding the semantics of how people invoke git? If so why advocate for "restore" to begin with?

I don’t know what the semantics of invoking Git means?

These two commands operate on the same level of abstraction. And they should be equally powerful, which means that whichever you choose to learn will be able to serve all of your restore-content needs. That's what I mean.

Of course there is always the pedagogic cost of having two similar commands.

Well surely people who use git and who also know english will think of restoring something. You want to restore what from when? Git offers no concept of time and in fact believing that it does will hamstring your efforts to use it. That's the cost. Why cater to this concept of before and after when this undermines usage?

> I think yes, because git famously has a terrible UI, and any amount of telemetry would quickly tell you people fumble around a lot at first.

1. git doesn’t have a UI, it’s a program run in a terminal environment. the terminal is the interface for the user.

2. git has a specific design that was intended to solve a specific problem in a specific way. mostly for linux kernel development. so, the UX might seem terrible to you — but remember that it wasn’t built for you, nor was it designed for people in their first ever coding boot camp. that was never git’s purpose.

3. the fact that every other tool was designed so poorly that everyone (eventually, mostly) jumped on git as a new standard is an expression of the importance of designing systems well.

UI means "user interface". For a CLI tool the UI is the commands and modifiers it offers on the terminal.

i lump those into user experience (UX) stuff as it’s more leaning towards “flow of user action” etc.

ok, you do, doesn’t mean that the difference others make of it are necessarily wrong, as the tone of your first comment suggested.

i believe that those people are wrong :shrug:

doesn’t change the bigger, more important fact that the struggles people have with git stem from the system design. i.e. the thing that ultimately determines what commands people need to run in what order (see points 2 and 3).

Yeah, UI impacts UX.

Also git has a UI.

"UI" is a category that contains GUI as well as other UIs like TUIs and CLIs. "UX" encompasses a lot of design work that can be distilled into the UI, or into app design, or into documentation, or somewhere else.

> “UX" encompasses a lot of design work that can be distilled into the UI

like how git needs you to “commit” changes as if you’re committing a change to a row in a database table? thats a design/experience issue to me, not an “it has commands” issue.

Mercurial was better than Git on almost any metric, it eludes me why it lost out to Git, perhaps because it lacked the kernel hacker aura, but also because it did not have a popular repository website with cute mascot going for it. Either way, tech history is full of examples of better designs not winning minds, due to cost, market timing, etc. And now with LLMs being trained on whatever was popular three years ago, we may be stuck with it forever.

Because Git was faster.

This mattered because speed is the killer feature [1], and speed is often seen by users as a proxy for reliability [2].

[1]: https://bdickason.com/posts/speed-is-the-killer-feature/

[2]: https://craigmod.com/essays/fast_software/

> Mercurial was better than Git on almost any metric, it eludes me why it lost out to Git

I used Mercurial, professionally, back when there were a half-dozen serious VCS contenders, to contribute to projects that used it. I disliked it and found it unintuitive. I liked Git much better. Tastes vary.

Git made me feel like I was in control. Mercurial didn't.

Mercurial's handling of branches was focused on "one branch, one working directory", and made it hard to manage many branches within one working directory.

Mercurial's handling of branches also made it really painful to just have an arbitrary number of local experimental branches that I didn't immediately want to merge upstream. "Welcome to Mercurial, how can I merge your heads right now, you wanted to do that right now, right?"

Git's model of "a branch is just a pointer to a commit, commits internally have no idea what branch they're on" felt intuitive and comfortable.

I think the big problem with Telemetry is that it's too much of a black box. There is 0 transparency on how that data it really used and we have a long history of large corporates using this data to build prediction products that track people by finger printing behavior though these signals. There is too much at stake right now around this topic for people to trust any implementation.

Didn't Go propose opt-out telemetry but then the community said no?

Compilers and whatnot seem to suffer from the same problem that programs like git(1) does. Once you've put it out there in the world you have no idea if someone will still use some corner of it thirty years from now.

> I'm curious why corporate development teams always feel the need to spy on their users

Unfortunately this is due to a large part of "decision makers" being non-technical folks, not being able to understand how the tools is actually used, as they don't use such tools themselves. So some product manager "responsible" for development tooling needs this sort of stuff to be able to perform in their job, just as some clueless product manager in the e-commerce absolutely has to overload your frontend with scripts tracking your behaviour, also to be able to perform in their job. Of course the question remains, why do those jobs exist in the first place, as the engineers were perfectly capable of designing interaction with their users before the VCs imposed the unfortunate paradigm of a deeply non-technical person somehow leading the design and development of highly technical products...So here we are, sharing our data with them, because how else will Joe collect their PM paycheck, in between prompting the AI for his slides and various "very important" meetings...

Man if I had a nickle for every time a PM asked me to violate user privacy for the purposes of making a slide that will be shown to their boss for 2.5 seconds I'd probably make enough to actually retire someday.

There's obviously misuse and abuse in the world, but telemetry from production systems out in the wild is incredibly useful for all kinds of decision-making. It's silly to dismiss it outright.

Some of it, yes. But not the kind that's put in place so the clueless Joe who used to do copy-writing 3 years ago can keep their high salary because they decided to join the proverbial "IT".

Sure but I'm talking about actual privacy violations that have been pitched to me over my career I'm not calling all telemetry a privacy violation.

> Would Git have been significantly better if it had collected telemetry, or would the data not have just been a distraction?

I'm not sure if you're implying it's obvious but it's not obvious to me that it would be unhelpful.

Just anecdotally, I get the feeling telemetry often does more harm than good, because it's too easy to misinterpret or lie with statistics. There needs to be proper statistical methodology and biases need to be considered, but this doesn't always happen. Maybe a contrived example, but someone wants to show high impact on their next performance review? Implement the new feature in such a way that everyone easily misclicks it, then show the extremely high engagement as demonstration that their work is a huge success. For Git, I'm not sure it would be widely adopted today if the development process was mainly telemetry-driven rather than Torvalds developing it based solely on his expertise and intuition.

Not to mention it's really hard to statistically tell the difference between people spending a lot of time with a feature because it's really useful or because it's really difficult to get to do what you want

Telemetry is a really poor substitute for actually observing a couple of your users. But it's cheap and feels scientific and inclusive/fair (after all you are looking at everyone)

That is just poor analytics IMO, if you have a good harness you can definitely tell if a feature is not well designed. You have to optimize for things like number of clicks to perform an operation not time spent in app.

I think the seeing the underutilized commands and flags (with real data not just a hunch) would have helped identify where users were not understanding why they should use it, and could have helped refine the interface and docs to make it gradually more usable.

I mean no solution is perfect, and some underused things are just only sometimes extremely useful, but data used smartly is not a waste of time.

The people who write any individual feature want to be able to prove usage in order to get good performance reviews and promotions. It's so awful that it's become normalized. Back in The Day we had the term “spyware” to refer to any piece of software that phoned home to report user behavior, but now that's just All Software.

> Is it not sufficient to employ good engineering and design practices? Git...

Git has horrible design and ergonomics.

It is an excellent example of engineers designing interfaces for engineers without a good feedback loop.

Ironically, you just proved your point that engineers need to better understand how users are actually using their product, because their mental visualizations of how their product gets used is usually poor.

Apparently I use git wrong since I do not feel this design and ergonomics issue.

How many years of experience with git do you have? How much of git do you use? I bet you use 5 commands and 10 flags at most. Take a look at git's docs

> Git has horrible design and ergonomics.

People say this and never has written about the supposed failure of design. Git has a very good conceptual model, and then provides operations (aptly named when you know about the model) to manipulate it.

Most people who complains about git only think of it as code storage (folder {v1,v2,...}) instead of version control.

> never has written about

If you don't want to look at what people write you can't say that they haven't written about it.

> the supposed failure of design

I don’t think people complain about the internals of git itself as much as the complexity of all the operations.

If you want to read about complaints, you really don't have to look further than the myriad of git GUIs, TUIs and otherwise alternative/simplified interfaces.

> I don’t think people complain about the internals of git itself as much as the complexity of all the operations.

The complexity is only there when you want to avoid learning what you’re doing. Just like find(1) is complex if you don’t know stuff about the file system or sed(1) is complex if you don’t know regex and line based addresing of a text file.

A lot of people who are using git don’t want to know what a commit is and their relation to branches. And then they are saying rebasing is too complex.

> If you want to read about complaints, you really don't have to look further than the myriad of git GUIs, TUIs and otherwise alternative/simplified interfaces

Git is a cli. The goal is always for you to find your workflow then create aliases for common operations. It does assume that you want complete control and avoid doing magic (which is what jj is doing).

Wanting magic is great (I use magit which makes git magical ;) ) but it’s like wanting to fly a plane without learning the instruments.

Really? What does checkout and fast-forward means? This is why people don't like git. Basic operations that have arcane naming.

I've written my own toy git implementation before, I know how the underlying design works.

You're assuming that I have trouble understanding and using git, when I actually have 16+ years of experience with it, and I can use it just fine.

It is horrible to try to teach to new people. Those operations sort of make sense one you already know how it all works, and can see how the coders wrote it. But that is backwards, since it actively makes it more difficult for neophytes to understand it. "It gets easy once you're an expert" isn't actually good design.

> Is it not sufficient to employ good engineering and design practices?

It's not that it's insufficient, new developers, product people and designers literally don't know how to make tasteful and useful decisions without first "asking users" by experimenting on them.

Used to be you built up an intuition for your user base, but considering everyone is changing jobs every year, I guess people don't have time for that anymore, so literally every decision is "data driven" and no user is super happy or not anymore, everyone is just "OK, that's fine".

The impact of a few more network calls and decreased privacy is basically never felt by users beyond this abstract "they're spying on me" realization. The impact of this telemetry for a product development team is material.

Not saying that telemetry more valuable than privacy, just that it's a straightforward decision for a company to make when real benefits are only counterbalanced by abstract privacy concerns. This is why it's so universally applied across apps and tools developed commercially.

For most CLIs, I definitely feel extra network calls because they translate to real latency for commands that _should_ be quick.

If I run "gh alias set foo bar", and that takes even a marginally perceptible amount of time, I'll feel like the tool I'm using is poorly built since a local alias obviously doesn't need network calls.

I do see that `gh` is spawning a child to do sending in the background (https://github.com/cli/cli/blob/3ad29588b8bf9f2390be652f46ee...), which also is something I'd be annoyed at since having background processes lingering in a shell's session is bad manners for a command that doesn't have a very good reason to do so.

If it's done in a background process then it won't impact the speed of the tool at all. When the choice is between getting data to help improve the tool at the cost of "bad manners" whatever that means, the choice is pretty easy.

It isn't only corporate development teams — open source development teams want to spy on their users, too. For instance, Homebrew: "Anonymous analytics allow us to prioritise fixes and features based on how, where and when people use Homebrew." [1]

[1] https://docs.brew.sh/Analytics

Is it spying if:

1. It's anonymous

2. They're telling you they're doing it

3. You can opt out of it

"I'am watching you" is neat way to communicate with people?

Yes!

> I'm curious why corporate development teams always feel the need to spy on their users?

I've repeatedly talked about this on HN; I call it Marketing Driven Development. It's when some Marketing manager goes to your IT manager and starts asking for things that no customer wants or needs, so they can track if their initiatives justify their job, aka are they bringing in more people to x feature?

Honestly, with something as sensitive as software developer tools, I think any sort of telemetry should ALWAYS be off by default.

> ...our team needs visibility into how features are being used in practice. We use this data to prioritize our work and evaluate whether features are meeting real user needs.

You should be able to see what features are being used by seeing what server endpoints are being hit and how often. Don't need intrusive telemetry. Yes, it's not perfect. Many features could use the same endpoint. You could totally anonymise this and you could still get a great understanding what features users are using by looking at endpoint stats.

Companies need to decide whether they want customer goodwill or very detailed insight into what they are doing. By having invasive telemetry you may have less customers (people leaving for github competitors). Is it worth it ?

Git relatively recently got an `--i-still-use-this` option for two deprecated commands that you have to run if you want to use them. The error you get tells you about it and that you should "please email us here" if you really am unable to figure out an alternative.

I guess that's the price of regular and non-invasive software.

Anonymous telemetry isn't necessarily spying, though "pseudoanonymous" sounds about as well protected as distinguishing between free speech and "absolutism." Github also wouldn't be tracking git use here, but the `gh` CLI that you don't need to install.

All that said, having been in plenty of corporate environments I would be surprised if the data is anonymized and wouldn't be surprised if the primary motivator boils down to something like internal OKRs and politics.

Arguably yes. git has a terrible developer experience and we've only gotten to this point where everyone embraces it through Stockholm syndrome. If someone had been looking at analytics from git, they'd have seen millions of confused people trying to find the right incantation in a forest of confusing poorly named flags.

Sincerely, a Mercurial user from way back.

https://xkcd.com/1597/

Perhaps the more interesting question is why these companies feel the need to "explain" why they are collecting telemetry or "disclose" how the data is used

The software user has no means to verify the explanation or disclosure is accurate or complete. Once the data is transferred to the company then the user has no control over where it goes, who sees it or how it is used

When the company states "We use the data for X" it is not promising to use the data for X in the future, nor does it prevent the company, or one of its "business partners", from using the data additionally for something else besides X

Why "explain" the reason for collecting telemetry

Why "disclose" how the data is used

What does this accomplish

> I'm curious why corporate development teams always feel the need to spy on their users?

Cause the alternative is viewing all of your app as one opaque blob - you don't know exactly how it's being used, which features actually need your attention, especially if you're spread thin. If you're in consulting or something like that and the clients haven't let you configure and/or access analytics (and the same goes for APM and log shipping), it's like flying blind. Couple that with vague bug reports instead of automated session recording and if you need to maintain that, you'll have gray hairs appearing by the age of 30.

Take that disregard of measurement and spread it all across the development culture and you'll get errors in the logs that nobody is seeing and no insights into application performance - with the system working okay at a load X, but falling over at X+1 and you having to spend late evenings trying to refactor it, knowing that it needs to be shipped in less than a week because of client deadlines. Unless the data is something that's heavily regulated and more trouble than it's worth, more data will be better than less data, if you do something meaningful with it.

> Would Git have been significantly better if it had collected telemetry, or would the data not have just been a distraction?

Knowing the most common fuck ups and foot guns might inform better CLI design. Otherwise people saying that it's good have about as much right to do so as saying that it's bad (at least in regards to UX), without knowing the ground level truth about what 90% of the users experience.

> you don't know exactly how it's being used, which features actually need your attention, especially if you're spread thin.

Why not conduct a survey?

> vague bug reports instead of automated session recording and if you need to maintain that, you'll have gray hairs appearing by the age of 30.

If it's a customer, why not reach directly to him?

> with the system working okay at a load X, but falling over at X+1 and you having to spend late evenings trying to refactor it,

No one is talking about telemetry on your servers. We're talking about telemetry on client's computers.

> Why not conduct a survey?

Large amounts of time before getting feedback, low percentage of people responding, not an accurate sample of all users (you will get signal from the loudest ones) and inaccurate data (biases in perception) instead of measurable reality. Not useless, but not a full replacement for telemetry.

> If it's a customer, why not reach directly to him?

Layers of indirection (and also the slowness of getting through them). You might not control the processes and approvals needed to do that in a non-startup environment. You will probably control enough of the app to add various technical solutions to aid you in collecting information.

> No one is talking about telemetry on your servers.

I am. Culture of not collecting client side data also often comes together with a culture of not collecting server side data properly either. Competent teams will evaluate both. My argument is that all of this data can meaningfully help in development and that other approaches don't replace it well enough.

> Large amounts of time before getting feedback […]inaccurate data (biases in perception) instead of measurable reality.

I think perception is more valuable because that is the only way of measuring frustration with the UX of the software. Something may be used a lot, but is painful to everyone.

> You might not control the processes and approvals needed to do that in a non-startup environment

In such environment, it’s often true that features are governed by third parties as well. You collect telemetry, but have no say in what user will get and experience.

> Culture of not collecting client side data also often comes together with a culture of not collecting server side data properly either

I strongly doubt that. We have way more tools for collecting data on servers than on doing telemetry.

——

As a user, I essentially want my software to stay the same as long as possible. If I really need a new feature or am struggling with a bug, that’s when I contact the developers. If the developers are dogfooding their own software, new feature can be quite a delight especially when their profile is similar to yours.

But telemetry driven development is how you get features no one asked for.

Very reasonable arguments!

> As a user, I essentially want my software to stay the same as long as possible. If I really need a new feature or am struggling with a bug, that’s when I contact the developers.

I largely agree and think that if the world had more users like you, it would be a better place, with more stable software. Unfortunately, in any industry with competing solutions, your users probably won't go through all that trouble and will just pick another product, alongside companies having all sorts of incentives to ship stuff (sometimes the deadlines being made up) and therefore needing to make informed decisions about what to build and what to maintain ASAP. I think we'll get features nobody asked for, telemetry or no telemetry. As for everything else, it depends.

You have three features, A, B, and C. They are core features. Two of the features break. How do you prioritize which feature gets fixed first? With telemetry its obvious, without it, you're guessing.

Also, gh cli is not about git, its about the github api. In theory the app has its own user agent and of course their LB is tracking all http requests, so not anonymous ever.

While I agree, I personally always opt out if I'm aware, and hate it when a tool suddenly gets telemetry, I don't think Git is comparable, same with Linux.

Linux and Git are fully open source, and have big companies contribute to it. If a company like Google, Microsoft etc need a feature, they can usually afford to hire someone and develop _and_ maintain this feature.

Something like gh is the opposite. It's maintained by a singular organisation, the team maintaining this has a finite resources. I don't think it's much to ask for understand what features are being used, what errors might come up, etc.

Good news! gh is actually a client of a web API so they can just read their logs to know what's being used!

Especially true because it has also been proved that these telemetry tools often picture a distorted reality.

My "telemetry" check is Windows. I does the same, forced it on users and it certainly didn't get better from it. The correlation with quality decline might be independent, but I would wager some shitty manager put up a shitty metric, everything got optimized towards that and leadership has lost the bigger picture because these numbers cannot transport general understanding.

> I'm curious why corporate development teams always feel the need to spy on their users?

This isn’t that surprising to me. Having usage data is important for many purposes. Even Debian has an opt-in usage tracker (popcon) to see wha packages they should keep supporting.

What I’m curious about is why this is included in the CLI. Why aren’t they measuring this at the API level where they wouldn’t need to disclose it to anyone? What is done locally with the GH CLI tool that doesn’t interact with the GitHub servers?

"Real" numbers make it easier for them to lie to leadership who then use or ignore those lies to justify decisions they were already going to make in spite of users.

This is where (surprise surprise) I respect Valve. The hardware survey is opt in and transparent. They get useful info out of it and it’s just..not scummy.

There are all sorts of best practices for getting info without vacuuming up everyone’s data in opaque ways.

To be fair, you can be pretty sure they're heavily leveraging all their store data, in loads of ways. They probably sit on the biggest dataset of video game preferences for people in general, and I'm betting they make use of it heavily.

If you have details on what they’re collecting and how they’re using it/if they’re selling it to advertisers/etc, I’m happy to make a judgment.

I’m not saying they don’t engage in any of those practices, I am specifically talking about the hardware survey.

> If you have details on what they’re collecting

Well, you can start with everything a typical HTTP request and TCP connection comes with, surely they're already storing those things for "anti-fraud practices", wouldn't be far to imagine this data warehouse is used for analytics and product decisions as well.

>wouldn’t be far to imagine

I explicitly said I agree it’s a distinct possibility, but that’s not proof. If you have actual info on what they collect and how it’s used I can assess it. As it is we don’t know the extent or uses at all, we are speculating.

Personally if I don't have any evidence of something, I'll leave it unsaid if I like what Valve is doing about that something or not. Saying "We don't have evidence either way, we're just speculating, so therefore I respect what Valve does" feels like the wrong way around. But you do you :)

>But you do you :)

This was unnecessary and patronizing. Clearly this won't be productive as it's clear what I am trying to say, but you seem to intent on taking a narrow interpretation of my point to paint me as someone who blindly trusts Valve (I don't). Have a good one man.

And you think microsoft isn't already doing that?

Of course they do, why would I believe otherwise?

They are analyzing absolutely every click you make, I can guarantee it.

And if you provide evidence of this (and yes I think it is possible) then I will say it’s bad.

The hardware survey is not that.

I'm curious why people think this is in the same ballpark as that something like a private investigator can do. This isn't spying at all.

"oh no, they're aware of someone at the computer 19416146-F56B-49E4-BF16-C0D8B337BF7F running `gh api` a lot! that's spying!"

To state the obvious, "good engineering/design practices" will not tell you what features are used or not.

> Git has served us well for 20+ years

Funny. I think that, but the usual HN narrative is that Git is UX hostile.

It's not the devs themselves, but the team/project/product management show that needs to pretend they are data driven, but then resort to the silliest metrics that are easy to measure.

I’m curious as well. Github is one of the rare products out there that get actual valuable user feedback. So why not just ask the users for specific feedback instead of tracking all of them.

I'm curious why corporate development teams always feel the need to spy on their users?

Because they're too shy, lazy, or socially awkward to actually ask their users questions.

They cover up this anxiety and laziness by saying that it costs too much, or it doesn't "scale." Both of these are false.

My company requires me to actually speak to the people who use the web sites I build; usually about every ten to twelve months. The company pays for my time, travel, and other expenses.

The company does this because it cares about the product. It has to, because it is beholden to the customers for its financial position, not to anonymous stock market trading bots a continent away.

Respectfully I think your argument defeats itself. If you can only speak to your users once every 10-12 months it means your process doesn't scale by definition. Good analytics (not useless vanity metrics) should allow you to spot a problem days after it was launched not wait 3 quarters for a user to air their grievances.

Ah yes, all the spyware on Windows 11 really helped Microsoft scale up development and make it the best Windows version ever.

Now, let's replicate this with GitHub. What can go wrong?

You're describing a different problem.

Bug fixing absolutely gets taken care of immediately, and our customers are very active in telling us about them through these strange new feedback mechanisms known as "e-mail" and "a telephone."

But we don't spy on people to fix bugs.

Nothing that the big tech "telemetry" is doing is about bug fixes. In the article we're all talking about the spying that Microsoft proposes isn't to fix bugs. Re-read what it wrote. It's all for things that may not appear for weeks, months, or years.

And to think that a trillion-dollar company like Microsoft can't figure out how, or doesn't have the money available to scale real customer feedback is just sticking your head in the sand and making excuses.

Microsoft doesn't need people to apologize for its failure.

Microsoft has a horde of developers that fit the entire breadth of gh usage. They could fix issues prior to a release if they wished to without opt-out client side telemetry.

> Why we collect telemetry ...our team needs visibility into how features are being used in practice.

This was Microsoft's mantra, while bugs were not fixed for months.

Product work can be counterintuitive. An engineer / PM might think that a design or feature “makes sense”, but you don’t actually know that unless you measure usage.

When allocating engineering spend you need to predict impact. If you know how features of GitHub CLI are used and how you can do this more easily.

> Would Git have been significantly better if it had collected telemetry

Yes, probably. Git is seriously hard to use beyond basic tasks. It has a byzantine array of commands, and the "porcelain" feels a lot closer to "plumbing" than it should. You and I are used to it, but that doesn't make it good.

I mean, it took 14 years before it gained a `switch` command! `checkout` and `reset` can do like six different things depending on how your arguments resolve, from nondestructive to very, very destructive; safe(r) operations like --force-with-lease are made harder to find than their more dangerous counterparts; it's a mess.

Analytics alone wouldn't solve the problem - you also need a team of developers who are willing to listen to their users, pore through usage data, and prioritize UX - but it would be something.

Because dashboard need to show number go up

Come on, do you actually think "corporate engineers" care about what you are doing individually? Do you think they look specifically for you and make fun at your individual usage pattern? Do you think it gives them interesting information about your private life?

No one cares, there are millions of users, no one is going to look at your data, and even less be able to actually know which person a given user is.

We legit just want to know aggregated and objective information about how people use our products so we can make it better for you.

"Why do all corporate try to spy on our usage patterns?" Because the ones who don't have a crap product and all died long ago.

The current IA boom is entirely based on data . The more data you have the more you can train and the more money you make

> always feel the need to spy on their users?

If it's truly pseudoanonymous then it's hardly spying, just sayin'...

Others have answered your actual question better than I could have.

The language used in statements like this always annoys me. "We want visibility", ok fine. "We need"...the hell you don't.

git is terrible from ux perspective

>Would Git have been significantly better if it had collected telemetry, or would the data not have just been a distraction?

Definitely

Git notoriously has had performance issues and did not scale and has had a horrible user interface. Both of these problems can be measured using telemetry and improvements can be measured once telemetry is in place.

How was it notorious if git has no telemetry? According to you without telemetry nothing can be known, and nothing can become notorious.

Because you already have a general idea by just using it. "Oh wow this is slow." Telemetry gives you hard data.

He did not write that.

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