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The telemetry-driven desire to redesign everything and remove lots of 'infrequently used' features is a real plague on software and it really sucks that it seem

The telemetry-driven desire to redesign everything and remove lots of 'infrequently used' features is a real plague on software and it really sucks that it seems to have infested the web because of the amount of novelty-obsessed designers, PMs and engineers who move from one company to another. Lots of chrome, firefox and safari devs are people who previously worked on a different browser or a company with this culture and eventually your team has enough people like that to push through things like 'remove this important low-cost feature because only 1% of our billion users are impacted', as if 1% of a billion isn't a significant number of people. It used to be that even minor web platform changes wouldn't go through if they would break 0.1% of webpages, but we don't live in that world anymore.

Gigachad 5y ago
>but we don't live in that world anymore. And I'm glad. I'm sick of using software that has 2 trillion toolbars, menus and settings. I want something which sets the defaults to be pretty much what I want and makes the settings all the common things I might need to change. Telemetry driven design lets designers build what the majority like rather than the most vocal bug tracker using power users who want exactly the opposite of the average user.
- vvillena 5y ago
  Must be nice to always live in the middle of the bell curve.
  - Gigachad 5y ago
    The defaults aren’t always exactly what I want but I find it is preferable to just accept them as they are than to have a billion customisation options. I pick the best bit of software that works for me and then just change my workflow to fit it.
PragmaticPulp 5y ago
> The telemetry-driven desire to redesign everything and remove lots of 'infrequently used' features is a real plague on software I disagree. Maintaining features requires engineering overhead. It sucks to have to maintain features that barely anybody uses when you have a backlog of features that are in demand by a large number of your users.
- marginalia_nu 5y ago
  Right, but not all features need to be used often to be useful. This is a great example of such a feature.
  - PragmaticPulp 5y ago
    That is the core problem with product management: Presumably every feature is useful to someone, somewhere, but you don't have infinite engineering resources to ship and maintain them all. No one is suggesting the feature isn't ever useful. The issue is that they've reached a point where they have to choose what stays and what goes, and the least frequently used features are obviously at the top of the list for what to cut. You can't make everyone happy in these scenarios, just as you can't deliver everything.
    - marginalia_nu 5y ago
      Right, but I'm challenging the notion that use means usefulness. I don't think that can be assumed to correlate without further justification, especially given the ease of producing counterexamples and scenarios where this is not true. Some features are used a lot because some other features are inefficient. Sometimes a feature is very useful in some rare situations (compare with seatbelts).
    - kevingadd 5y ago
      To make a concrete argument here: If Mozilla has the sweng resources to devote to their frequent frontend redesigns, they can keep the encoding menu working. And the encoding menu has a significant, difficult-to-replace function to serve for people from non-english-speaking nations who want to consume content in their native language. For reference, I worked on Firefox. Removing something like the encoding menu is a choice, not a necessity.

Gigachad 5y ago

>but we don't live in that world anymore. And I'm glad. I'm sick of using software that has 2 trillion toolbars, menus and settings. I want something which sets the defaults to be pretty much what I want and makes the settings all the common things I might need to change. Telemetry driven design lets designers build what the majority like rather than the most vocal bug tracker using power users who want exactly the opposite of the average user.

vvillena 5y ago
Must be nice to always live in the middle of the bell curve.
- Gigachad 5y ago
  The defaults aren’t always exactly what I want but I find it is preferable to just accept them as they are than to have a billion customisation options. I pick the best bit of software that works for me and then just change my workflow to fit it.

PragmaticPulp 5y ago

> The telemetry-driven desire to redesign everything and remove lots of 'infrequently used' features is a real plague on software I disagree. Maintaining features requires engineering overhead. It sucks to have to maintain features that barely anybody uses when you have a backlog of features that are in demand by a large number of your users.

marginalia_nu 5y ago
Right, but not all features need to be used often to be useful. This is a great example of such a feature.
- PragmaticPulp 5y ago
  That is the core problem with product management: Presumably every feature is useful to someone, somewhere, but you don't have infinite engineering resources to ship and maintain them all. No one is suggesting the feature isn't ever useful. The issue is that they've reached a point where they have to choose what stays and what goes, and the least frequently used features are obviously at the top of the list for what to cut. You can't make everyone happy in these scenarios, just as you can't deliver everything.
  - marginalia_nu 5y ago
    Right, but I'm challenging the notion that use means usefulness. I don't think that can be assumed to correlate without further justification, especially given the ease of producing counterexamples and scenarios where this is not true. Some features are used a lot because some other features are inefficient. Sometimes a feature is very useful in some rare situations (compare with seatbelts).
  - kevingadd 5y ago
    To make a concrete argument here: If Mozilla has the sweng resources to devote to their frequent frontend redesigns, they can keep the encoding menu working. And the encoding menu has a significant, difficult-to-replace function to serve for people from non-english-speaking nations who want to consume content in their native language. For reference, I worked on Firefox. Removing something like the encoding menu is a choice, not a necessity.