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Comment by stavrus | Hacker News Reader

Why would you consider these analytics scripts useless? The article mentioned several reasons they want to be tracking this timing information (monitoring of slow backends/CDNs and the performance of their own scripts) - having that information is vital for ensuring the usability of the site [1]. If a portion of your userbase all of a sudden starts loading the webpage much slower than usual (e.g. from issues as diverse as bad network routing or just a specific browser choking on your scripts), having the information available to you to quickly diagnose and fix the problem is a lifesaver. After all, the website is their product, so they need to ensure it's always available and usable for all their customers.

[1] http://timkadlec.com/2014/01/fast-enough/

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All that is nice, but simply stating the reasons does not cause me to think that something is actually beneficial in a way thats real and tangible to me. In practice, I often find that disabling analytics scripts improves the performance of many websites. My RAM and CPU usage goes down, and the site feels much more responsive. Other times, disabling JS completely causes websites to fall back to their html/non-js pages, which are significantly better to me from a performance standpoint. YMMV.

Nothing against websites who are trying to improve user experience, but if I'm donating my CPU time and RAM for someone else's business needs, I'd want a way for me to opt out of that.

To piggyback on this, does anyone have any metrics on how much time is taken up by restaurant servers asking me how my food is today? I'm paying for the food and drinks, not to be spammed for analytics by the server.

It seems like they could collect those metrics on the back-end (kitchen / food processor(s)) too, or use tip % as a proxy metric for QoS. Not sure how they'd track e.g. CTR, but straight conversions could be easy enough if you instrument the servers such that they're tracking clients per table. Of course, if you're trying to solve for optimal Drink Refresh Rate, you might need something more granular along the lines of sugar.

The proxy metric you're looking for is - did the bar have multiple hot women present at the same time as the customer.

Sure, but those are not the same. "Did you like the food?" can be met with "Could you take it back and add some more salt" or "The steak seems a bit raw, could you fix that?"

Web analytics OTOH, are just aggregations. All the company cares about is some random metric like bounce rate or some "engagement" metric or click through rate or what have you. You can supply a horrible product and still get a temporary boost on any of those metrics. e.g. Redirect 10% of all users to full Page modal ads without a continue button and see the CTR spike. Disallow/hinder copy-paste functionality on the text and watch as people keep coming back.

But you can't bring out a turd on a plate and have the customer be excited about it. If a site I frequented could (impractical, I know) ask me for some direct piece of feedback, and which also had a reasonable chance of being taken seriously, I'd be all for it.

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