5 ms·

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 workfl

by johnfn 6mo ago

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”.

embedding-shape 6mo ago
> 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. Yes, admittedly, the first time you do these things, they're difficult, hard and you have lots to learn. But as you do this more often, build up a knowledge base and learn about your users, you'll gain knowledge and experience you can reuse, and it'll no longer take you weeks or months of investigations to answer "Where should this button go?", you'll base it on what you already know.
- acedTrex 6mo ago
  So if you don't want to spend the time doing that, or as is more accurate in corporate settings, the general turnover of the team is high enough that no one is around long enough to build that deep foundational product knowledge, and to be frank most people do not care enough. This is why telemetry happens, its faster, easier and more resilient to organizational turmoil.
  - embedding-shape 6mo ago
    > This is why telemetry happens, its faster, easier and more resilient to organizational turmoil. I don't disagree with that, I was mainly talking about trying to deliver an experience that makes sense, is intuitive and as helpful and useful as possible, even in exchange for it taking longer time. Of course this isn't applicable in every case, sometimes you need different tradeoffs, that's OK too. But that some favor quality over shorter implementation time shouldn't drive people crazy, it's just making different tradeoffs.
    - acedTrex 6mo ago
      > even in exchange for it taking longer time. I think in terms of corporate teams this is the issue a lot of times, people just are not on the team long enough to build that knowledge. Between the constant reorgs, these days layoffs and other churn the no one puts in the years required to gain the implicit knowledge. So orgs reach for the "tenure independent knowledge base.
- deleted 6mo ago
  [deleted]
- hombre_fatal 6mo ago
  Asking users isn't a substitute for usage data. Usage data is the ground truth. Soliciting user feedback is invasive, and it's only possible for some questions. The HN response to this is "too bad" but it's a thought-terminating response.
  - AlotOfReading 6mo ago
    It goes the other way as well. Usage data isn't equivalent to asking users either. A solid percentage of bad decisions in tech can be traced to someone, somewhere forgetting that distinction and trusting usage data that says it's it's okay to remove <very important feature> because it's infrequently used.
    - junon 6mo ago
      This. If I'm forced to use a feature I hate because it's the only way to do something, the "ground truth" reflects that I like that feature. It doesn't tell the whole story.
      - groby_b 6mo ago
        Most metrics teams are reasonably competent and are aware of that. Excepting "growth hackers" I haven't been in a single metrics discussion where we didn't talk about what we're actually measuring, if it reflects what we want to measure, and how to counterbalance metrics sufficiently so we don't build yet another growthhacking disaster. Doesn't mean that metrics are perfect - they are in fact aggravatingly imprecise - but the ground truth is usually somewhat better than "you clicked it, musta liked it!"
        dpark 6mo ago
        Eh, there are a lot of cases where teams A/B test their way into a product that sucks.
        chillfox 6mo ago
        And yet, the observable evidence of changes in software that collect metrics directly contradict this.
- johnfn 6mo ago
  You seem to be interpreting my position as saying that one should only use telemetry to make decisions. Of course, no one reasonable would hold that position! What I’m saying is that only relying on user interviews without supplementing them with analytics would be knowingly introducing a blind spot into how you understand user behavior.
  - embedding-shape 6mo ago
    Yes, probably because someone else said "If you dont have analytics you are flying blind" which I initially replied to, then when you replied to my reply, I took that as agreeing with parent, which isn't necessarily true. > What I’m saying is that only relying on user interviews without supplementing them I also took your "spend the weeks to months of expensive and time consuming work [...] Or you can look at the analytics" as a "either this or that proposition", where if we're making that choice, I'd go with qualitative data rather than quantitative, regardless of time taken. But probably it comes down to what tradeoffs we're willing to accept.
    - johnfn 6mo ago
      Maybe it just comes down to how you interpret "flying blind", because I do tend to agree with that statement. Telemetry is one half of the puzzle, user interviews are the other. Without either I would argue you are flying blind; I think you agree here though.
      - zerkten 6mo ago
        In enterprise, you have little chance of getting the real story from end users in many cases. IT will also tell you that things are used one way, only for analytics to tell you it's the opposite. If you spend some of your UX research budget to deep dive on the area you can then finally get to the bottom of it. I think the root of the complaints here is prioritization. The things they care about are prioritized. Qualitative feedback is likely already telling PMs that something is wrong and really should be fixed, but other feedback has more data supporting it.
ambicapter 6mo ago
> with perfect precision. Precision isn't accuracy and all that.
deleted 6mo ago
[deleted]
sdevonoes 6mo ago
Telemetry is the previous obvious step to surveillance. Not the telemetry you implement in your own small bus, but at the scale of microsoft, apple, meta… yeah
Lammy 6mo ago
> and sending it to the government It literally is. The network itself is always listening: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A The mere act of making a network connection leaks my physical location, the time I'm using my computer, and the fact that I use a particular piece of software. Given enough telemetry endpoints creates a fingerprint unique to me, because it is very unlikely that any other person at the same physical location uses the exact same set of software that I do, almost all of which want to phone home all the goddamn time. It's the metadata that's important here, so payload contents (including encryption) don't even matter.
graphememes 6mo ago
You're never going to win this argument, most of the people who post here have never actually shipped a product themselves and only work on isolated features and others have to handle / manage all of this for them so they have no real understanding of what it takes to do it the other crowd that pretends otherwise are larping or only have some generic open source project that only a handful of people use or they only update it every 6 years
- embedding-shape 6mo ago
  > You're never going to win this argument Probably because there is no "truth" here, only subjective opinion, there is no "winning", only "learning" and "sharing". I could ramble the same about how "people relying on data never shipped an enjoyable thing to people who ended up loving, only care about shipping as fast as possible" and yadda yadda, or I can actually make my points for why I believe what I believe. I do know what I prefer to read, so that's what I try to contribute back.
- codedokode 6mo ago
  You could hire people to be testers and pay them for the analytics, I think they would even allow you to record the screen if you paid well enough. The problem is that you do not want to pay or get consent, you want to grab the data for free and without permission and without people realizing what you do. And such kind of people deserve much worse treatment than they are treated today.
- matheusmoreira 6mo ago
  Nobody actually cares "what it takes to do it", that's not our problem. You're not entitled to knowing even a single bit of information about us without our consent. Try innovating a way to do it without spying on people.
- account42 6mo ago
  > You're never going to win this argument, most of the people who post here have never actually shipped a product themselves and only work on isolated features and others have to handle / manage all of this for them so they have no real understanding of what it takes to do it Have you asked those users or did you conclude this from (likely unrelated) "telemetry" you have gathered?
6r17 6mo ago
"You’d think telemetry is screen recording your every move" - that's literally what tracing and telemetry is about. "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." -> your analytics will never show what you didn't measure - it will only show what you already worked on - at best, it's some kind of validator mechanism - not a driver for feature exploration. This kind of monitoring need to go through the documented data exposure - and it's a sufficient argument for a company to stop using github immediately if they take security seriously. But I'd add that if you take security seriously you are not on Github anyway.
- johnfn 6mo ago
  No, telemetry is not "literally" about screen recording. Telemetry is metrics. That is why they invented a new word for it rather than calling it "screen recording".
deleted 6mo ago
[deleted]
xigoi 6mo ago
Many products would be much better if they listened to what people are saying on public forums instead of using telemetry. For example, Google Maps has a longstanding bug where it auto-translates all reviews even if they are in a language you speak. If Google cared about user feedback, they could’ve easily fixed it, but no amount of telemetry will tell them this.
- kelvinjps10 6mo ago
  I hate this feature. Google knows the languages I speak because I added them in my account, even with all the tracking they obviously know, but they keep messing it up in all their products, Google Search, YouTube (they add machine audio translations to videos and translate the thumbnails).
  - Avamander 6mo ago
    They even do it on Google Play. No, I don't want to buy books in a language I can't read, suggest me ones that I can. It's been like that for a decade now I think. I guess it doesn't make them lose a noticeable amount of money.
- zerkten 6mo ago
  The reality is that most product leaders only care about the feedback that has visible consequences. If users aren't performing some action like quitting the app that shows in the telemetry, then they aren't going to pay attention. They'd probably call the issue you see a "craft" issue. Some PM is likely raising it. What happens is that leaders in big companies want perspectives based on data. You can go in with issues like yours but if you don't have clear data that shows significant numbers of users leaving, or users piling in, then you might as well not show up. People care about craft primarily will really struggle in these large organizations. That's not a good thing but how it is. In large organizations, you'll see a lot of A/B testing or experimentation. Some of the worst decisions from a craft perspective are ones where they only look for "did this cause some kind of negative impact on numbers?" situation. If your feature is neutral (on abandons, uninstalls, or whatever negative outcome), then it can get shipped which overrides any qualitative question around "should we ship this in this state?". Doesn't matter too much according to these folks because it's not making things worse (in terms of numbers.) There is probably more to explore in modern "product management" that's at the root of many of these problems. HN tends to focus on engineering but within large companies there is now a bifurcation and development of a field that forgets lots of PM was already invented.
codedokode 6mo ago
Why do you need to collect hardware fingerprint, IMEI, phone number, geolocation, list of nearby wifi access points, list of installed applications, selfie and passport photo when you can simply count how much times a server route was called?
- mynameisvlad 6mo ago
  That's a slippery slope and we both know it. Telemetry does not automatically include those things.
  - Barbing 6mo ago
    Indeed it's not fair in discussion context, so wonder if it was meant as a statement on the ills of telemetry as a whole.
- johnfn 6mo ago
  My comment explicitly uses "how many people clicked the secondary button on the third tab" as an example, not any of that nonsense -- you are not responding in good faith.
matheusmoreira 6mo ago
> From this thread you’d think telemetry is screen recording your every move > it’s more along the granularity of “how many people clicked the secondary button on the third tab?” You don't see the contradiction here?
paulddraper 6mo ago
> Sometimes HN drives me crazy. You can tell the difference between those who build businesses and those who simply use them.
- embedding-shape 6mo ago
  I was gonna say it's a difference between producing something to make money, and producing something meant for people to like and perhaps love, but same thing :)
johannes1234321 6mo ago
There are two aspects of that: 1) Metrics lead to wrong conclusion. There is software which has extremely rarely used features, I need it once or twice a year only, but the ability is why I use the software to begin with. If metrics get too much attention such things are removed as being unimportant ... 2) a lot of the tracking happening is way too intrusive and intransparent. There are valid use cases, however some large corporations especially, in the last had cases where they collected way too much, including private information, without really giving information about it. That overshadows good cases.
atoav 6mo ago
Yes, but the answer to "how many people clicked that button" is irrelevant if it describes the outside world. This id like concluding something is wrong with umbrellas because none of the users in the desert opened them. If the questions you have can be answered by simple telemetry you are likely asking the wrong questions. E.g. a confused user will click all the buttons, while one thst efficiently uses your software to solve a very specific problem may always ever press the ssme ones. The actually interesting questions are all about how your software empowers users to deal with the things they have to deal with. Ideally with as little buttons as possible. And if once a year they need that other button it will be there. It is very easy to draw the wrong conclusions from telemetry.
thwarted 6mo ago
> Or you can look at the analytics, which tell you everything you need to know immediately, always up to date, with perfect precision. Analytics do not tell you everything you need to know immediately. The analytics may say that no one is using a given feature, but they don't necessarily tell you why. Maybe they don't use it because they're not aware of it, marketing is presenting it wrong, or sales isn't selling against it. Maybe they've tried to use it and it doesn't work for them and they never tried it again. Maybe the call to action to bring them to it doesn't work or directs them wrong. Maybe it gets used by 1% of the users who happen to be power users. You might look at that 1% and conclude that it's not getting enough use to warrant supporting it or keeping it around.
skywhopper 6mo ago
The problem is that, without the context of actually talking to and observing users in the real world, software teams have repeatedly misinterpreted telemetry. Even the description of how they use telemetry to decide which features need investment or improvement shows this. In the face of huge data with no context, they make bad assumptions rather than talking to actual users. Over and over again.

by johnfn 6mo ago

embedding-shape 6mo ago

> 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. Yes, admittedly, the first time you do these things, they're difficult, hard and you have lots to learn. But as you do this more often, build up a knowledge base and learn about your users, you'll gain knowledge and experience you can reuse, and it'll no longer take you weeks or months of investigations to answer "Where should this button go?", you'll base it on what you already know.

acedTrex 6mo ago
So if you don't want to spend the time doing that, or as is more accurate in corporate settings, the general turnover of the team is high enough that no one is around long enough to build that deep foundational product knowledge, and to be frank most people do not care enough. This is why telemetry happens, its faster, easier and more resilient to organizational turmoil.
- embedding-shape 6mo ago
  > This is why telemetry happens, its faster, easier and more resilient to organizational turmoil. I don't disagree with that, I was mainly talking about trying to deliver an experience that makes sense, is intuitive and as helpful and useful as possible, even in exchange for it taking longer time. Of course this isn't applicable in every case, sometimes you need different tradeoffs, that's OK too. But that some favor quality over shorter implementation time shouldn't drive people crazy, it's just making different tradeoffs.
  - acedTrex 6mo ago
    > even in exchange for it taking longer time. I think in terms of corporate teams this is the issue a lot of times, people just are not on the team long enough to build that knowledge. Between the constant reorgs, these days layoffs and other churn the no one puts in the years required to gain the implicit knowledge. So orgs reach for the "tenure independent knowledge base.
deleted 6mo ago
[deleted]
hombre_fatal 6mo ago
Asking users isn't a substitute for usage data. Usage data is the ground truth. Soliciting user feedback is invasive, and it's only possible for some questions. The HN response to this is "too bad" but it's a thought-terminating response.
- AlotOfReading 6mo ago
  It goes the other way as well. Usage data isn't equivalent to asking users either. A solid percentage of bad decisions in tech can be traced to someone, somewhere forgetting that distinction and trusting usage data that says it's it's okay to remove <very important feature> because it's infrequently used.
  - junon 6mo ago
    This. If I'm forced to use a feature I hate because it's the only way to do something, the "ground truth" reflects that I like that feature. It doesn't tell the whole story.
    - groby_b 6mo ago
      Most metrics teams are reasonably competent and are aware of that. Excepting "growth hackers" I haven't been in a single metrics discussion where we didn't talk about what we're actually measuring, if it reflects what we want to measure, and how to counterbalance metrics sufficiently so we don't build yet another growthhacking disaster. Doesn't mean that metrics are perfect - they are in fact aggravatingly imprecise - but the ground truth is usually somewhat better than "you clicked it, musta liked it!"
      - dpark 6mo ago
        Eh, there are a lot of cases where teams A/B test their way into a product that sucks.
      - chillfox 6mo ago
        And yet, the observable evidence of changes in software that collect metrics directly contradict this.
johnfn 6mo ago
You seem to be interpreting my position as saying that one should only use telemetry to make decisions. Of course, no one reasonable would hold that position! What I’m saying is that only relying on user interviews without supplementing them with analytics would be knowingly introducing a blind spot into how you understand user behavior.
- embedding-shape 6mo ago
  Yes, probably because someone else said "If you dont have analytics you are flying blind" which I initially replied to, then when you replied to my reply, I took that as agreeing with parent, which isn't necessarily true. > What I’m saying is that only relying on user interviews without supplementing them I also took your "spend the weeks to months of expensive and time consuming work [...] Or you can look at the analytics" as a "either this or that proposition", where if we're making that choice, I'd go with qualitative data rather than quantitative, regardless of time taken. But probably it comes down to what tradeoffs we're willing to accept.
  - johnfn 6mo ago
    Maybe it just comes down to how you interpret "flying blind", because I do tend to agree with that statement. Telemetry is one half of the puzzle, user interviews are the other. Without either I would argue you are flying blind; I think you agree here though.
    - zerkten 6mo ago
      In enterprise, you have little chance of getting the real story from end users in many cases. IT will also tell you that things are used one way, only for analytics to tell you it's the opposite. If you spend some of your UX research budget to deep dive on the area you can then finally get to the bottom of it. I think the root of the complaints here is prioritization. The things they care about are prioritized. Qualitative feedback is likely already telling PMs that something is wrong and really should be fixed, but other feedback has more data supporting it.

ambicapter 6mo ago

> with perfect precision. Precision isn't accuracy and all that.

deleted 6mo ago

[deleted]

sdevonoes 6mo ago

Telemetry is the previous obvious step to surveillance. Not the telemetry you implement in your own small bus, but at the scale of microsoft, apple, meta… yeah

Lammy 6mo ago

> and sending it to the government It literally is. The network itself is always listening: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A The mere act of making a network connection leaks my physical location, the time I'm using my computer, and the fact that I use a particular piece of software. Given enough telemetry endpoints creates a fingerprint unique to me, because it is very unlikely that any other person at the same physical location uses the exact same set of software that I do, almost all of which want to phone home all the goddamn time. It's the metadata that's important here, so payload contents (including encryption) don't even matter.

graphememes 6mo ago

You're never going to win this argument, most of the people who post here have never actually shipped a product themselves and only work on isolated features and others have to handle / manage all of this for them so they have no real understanding of what it takes to do it the other crowd that pretends otherwise are larping or only have some generic open source project that only a handful of people use or they only update it every 6 years

embedding-shape 6mo ago
> You're never going to win this argument Probably because there is no "truth" here, only subjective opinion, there is no "winning", only "learning" and "sharing". I could ramble the same about how "people relying on data never shipped an enjoyable thing to people who ended up loving, only care about shipping as fast as possible" and yadda yadda, or I can actually make my points for why I believe what I believe. I do know what I prefer to read, so that's what I try to contribute back.
codedokode 6mo ago
You could hire people to be testers and pay them for the analytics, I think they would even allow you to record the screen if you paid well enough. The problem is that you do not want to pay or get consent, you want to grab the data for free and without permission and without people realizing what you do. And such kind of people deserve much worse treatment than they are treated today.
matheusmoreira 6mo ago
Nobody actually cares "what it takes to do it", that's not our problem. You're not entitled to knowing even a single bit of information about us without our consent. Try innovating a way to do it without spying on people.
account42 6mo ago
> You're never going to win this argument, most of the people who post here have never actually shipped a product themselves and only work on isolated features and others have to handle / manage all of this for them so they have no real understanding of what it takes to do it Have you asked those users or did you conclude this from (likely unrelated) "telemetry" you have gathered?

6r17 6mo ago

"You’d think telemetry is screen recording your every move" - that's literally what tracing and telemetry is about. "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." -> your analytics will never show what you didn't measure - it will only show what you already worked on - at best, it's some kind of validator mechanism - not a driver for feature exploration. This kind of monitoring need to go through the documented data exposure - and it's a sufficient argument for a company to stop using github immediately if they take security seriously. But I'd add that if you take security seriously you are not on Github anyway.

johnfn 6mo ago
No, telemetry is not "literally" about screen recording. Telemetry is metrics. That is why they invented a new word for it rather than calling it "screen recording".

deleted 6mo ago

[deleted]

xigoi 6mo ago

Many products would be much better if they listened to what people are saying on public forums instead of using telemetry. For example, Google Maps has a longstanding bug where it auto-translates all reviews even if they are in a language you speak. If Google cared about user feedback, they could’ve easily fixed it, but no amount of telemetry will tell them this.

kelvinjps10 6mo ago
I hate this feature. Google knows the languages I speak because I added them in my account, even with all the tracking they obviously know, but they keep messing it up in all their products, Google Search, YouTube (they add machine audio translations to videos and translate the thumbnails).
- Avamander 6mo ago
  They even do it on Google Play. No, I don't want to buy books in a language I can't read, suggest me ones that I can. It's been like that for a decade now I think. I guess it doesn't make them lose a noticeable amount of money.
zerkten 6mo ago
The reality is that most product leaders only care about the feedback that has visible consequences. If users aren't performing some action like quitting the app that shows in the telemetry, then they aren't going to pay attention. They'd probably call the issue you see a "craft" issue. Some PM is likely raising it. What happens is that leaders in big companies want perspectives based on data. You can go in with issues like yours but if you don't have clear data that shows significant numbers of users leaving, or users piling in, then you might as well not show up. People care about craft primarily will really struggle in these large organizations. That's not a good thing but how it is. In large organizations, you'll see a lot of A/B testing or experimentation. Some of the worst decisions from a craft perspective are ones where they only look for "did this cause some kind of negative impact on numbers?" situation. If your feature is neutral (on abandons, uninstalls, or whatever negative outcome), then it can get shipped which overrides any qualitative question around "should we ship this in this state?". Doesn't matter too much according to these folks because it's not making things worse (in terms of numbers.) There is probably more to explore in modern "product management" that's at the root of many of these problems. HN tends to focus on engineering but within large companies there is now a bifurcation and development of a field that forgets lots of PM was already invented.

codedokode 6mo ago

Why do you need to collect hardware fingerprint, IMEI, phone number, geolocation, list of nearby wifi access points, list of installed applications, selfie and passport photo when you can simply count how much times a server route was called?

mynameisvlad 6mo ago
That's a slippery slope and we both know it. Telemetry does not automatically include those things.
- Barbing 6mo ago
  Indeed it's not fair in discussion context, so wonder if it was meant as a statement on the ills of telemetry as a whole.
johnfn 6mo ago
My comment explicitly uses "how many people clicked the secondary button on the third tab" as an example, not any of that nonsense -- you are not responding in good faith.

matheusmoreira 6mo ago

> From this thread you’d think telemetry is screen recording your every move > it’s more along the granularity of “how many people clicked the secondary button on the third tab?” You don't see the contradiction here?

paulddraper 6mo ago

> Sometimes HN drives me crazy. You can tell the difference between those who build businesses and those who simply use them.

embedding-shape 6mo ago
I was gonna say it's a difference between producing something to make money, and producing something meant for people to like and perhaps love, but same thing :)

johannes1234321 6mo ago

There are two aspects of that: 1) Metrics lead to wrong conclusion. There is software which has extremely rarely used features, I need it once or twice a year only, but the ability is why I use the software to begin with. If metrics get too much attention such things are removed as being unimportant ... 2) a lot of the tracking happening is way too intrusive and intransparent. There are valid use cases, however some large corporations especially, in the last had cases where they collected way too much, including private information, without really giving information about it. That overshadows good cases.

atoav 6mo ago

Yes, but the answer to "how many people clicked that button" is irrelevant if it describes the outside world. This id like concluding something is wrong with umbrellas because none of the users in the desert opened them. If the questions you have can be answered by simple telemetry you are likely asking the wrong questions. E.g. a confused user will click all the buttons, while one thst efficiently uses your software to solve a very specific problem may always ever press the ssme ones. The actually interesting questions are all about how your software empowers users to deal with the things they have to deal with. Ideally with as little buttons as possible. And if once a year they need that other button it will be there. It is very easy to draw the wrong conclusions from telemetry.

thwarted 6mo ago

> Or you can look at the analytics, which tell you everything you need to know immediately, always up to date, with perfect precision. Analytics do not tell you everything you need to know immediately. The analytics may say that no one is using a given feature, but they don't necessarily tell you why. Maybe they don't use it because they're not aware of it, marketing is presenting it wrong, or sales isn't selling against it. Maybe they've tried to use it and it doesn't work for them and they never tried it again. Maybe the call to action to bring them to it doesn't work or directs them wrong. Maybe it gets used by 1% of the users who happen to be power users. You might look at that 1% and conclude that it's not getting enough use to warrant supporting it or keeping it around.

skywhopper 6mo ago

The problem is that, without the context of actually talking to and observing users in the real world, software teams have repeatedly misinterpreted telemetry. Even the description of how they use telemetry to decide which features need investment or improvement shows this. In the face of huge data with no context, they make bad assumptions rather than talking to actual users. Over and over again.