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I'm sure people will praise this, but how do you run a modern website with no analytics? How do you know if people use the features you build?

by notJim 6y ago

hundchenkatze 6y ago
You could still self-host an analytics solution. Just don't share that data with 3rd parties.
firloop 6y ago
I’m sure that GitHub certainly has analytics; they just don’t use third-party analytics. This means that either they’ve built their own tool or are self hosting someone else’s. I imagine that GitHub has some amount of internal tooling here out of necessity, e.g for metrics about how people use GitHub over SSH.
- tyrion 6y ago
  However they cannot use data that allows to identify an user (such as an IP address) in their analytics, unless the user has granted them explicit consent to use that data for the purpose of analytics. So my understanding is that there is a big difference between this and "they just don't use third-party analytics". It would be super nice if they clarified this in the blog post. Maybe by adding something like "We do not use personal data in our analytics".
- Dirlewanger 6y ago
  Or they just send the data to the 3rd parties on the back-end.
nalekberov 6y ago
It doesn’t mean no analytics, it’s about including third-party analytics scripts. You can still do analytics.
tannhaeuser 6y ago
By looking at http access logs, like since the beginning of times? Note if by modern sites you mean SPAs, you could still make HTTP pings for those features; might not make much sense to use SPAs for content-driven sites though.
mschoening 6y ago
Good question! We just shipped GitHub Discussions to millions of developers and we can learn whether people use and like the product by looking at whether people are creating discussions, customizing categories, and answering questions. The argument that you need to follow users around every step of the way to build great products is simply untrue.
joshmanders 6y ago
You can use analytics programs without needing cookies. I use Fathom (usefathom.com) and they are compliant.

I'm sure people will praise this, but how do you run a modern website with no analytics? How do you know if people use the features you build?

by notJim 6y ago

I'm sure people will praise this, but how do you run a modern website with no analytics? How do you know if people use the features you build?

hundchenkatze 6y ago

You could still self-host an analytics solution. Just don't share that data with 3rd parties.

firloop 6y ago

I’m sure that GitHub certainly has analytics; they just don’t use third-party analytics. This means that either they’ve built their own tool or are self hosting someone else’s. I imagine that GitHub has some amount of internal tooling here out of necessity, e.g for metrics about how people use GitHub over SSH.

tyrion 6y ago
However they cannot use data that allows to identify an user (such as an IP address) in their analytics, unless the user has granted them explicit consent to use that data for the purpose of analytics. So my understanding is that there is a big difference between this and "they just don't use third-party analytics". It would be super nice if they clarified this in the blog post. Maybe by adding something like "We do not use personal data in our analytics".
Dirlewanger 6y ago
Or they just send the data to the 3rd parties on the back-end.

nalekberov 6y ago

It doesn’t mean no analytics, it’s about including third-party analytics scripts. You can still do analytics.

tannhaeuser 6y ago

By looking at http access logs, like since the beginning of times? Note if by modern sites you mean SPAs, you could still make HTTP pings for those features; might not make much sense to use SPAs for content-driven sites though.

mschoening 6y ago

Good question! We just shipped GitHub Discussions to millions of developers and we can learn whether people use and like the product by looking at whether people are creating discussions, customizing categories, and answering questions. The argument that you need to follow users around every step of the way to build great products is simply untrue.

joshmanders 6y ago

You can use analytics programs without needing cookies. I use Fathom (usefathom.com) and they are compliant.