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”.

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.

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.

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.

> 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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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!

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