The average user doesn't submit, comment, or vote all that often. Those are certainly strong signals, and yes - they can probably capture that data through api

The average user doesn't submit, comment, or vote all that often. Those are certainly strong signals, and yes - they can probably capture that data through api interactions. That's not what they're after. They're after - how long did the user view X, which item did they pause on, what did they hover over, how long do they scroll, etc... I'd be willing to bet good money the reason one of the complaints against Apollo was them being "inefficient" is a result of basically exactly the following conversation between product/engineering: --- Product: Can't we just capture exactly what the user is doing through the API? Engineering: Sort of - we have some idea, but clients tend to load comments/posts in batches. We don't know exactly which one the user is looking at, or for how long. Product: So the client is pulling more information than it needs? And that's causing us problems with our analytics? Engineering: umm ... We can capture that data if the user is on the official client.