cross-posted from: https://lemmy.bestiver.se/post/1210182
Building relationships with customers through support didn’t turn out as hoped
Telemetry is fine, it’s the abuse of it that is the problem.
If a project is clear about it, takes the minimum necessary data, and anonymizes it, make a clear and reasonable retention policy, then I am all for it.
very reasonable take. I work in games and some companies just use telemetry to keep activity logs sorted into neat buckets for the purpose of debugging, or recognizing patterns that lead to issues. Other’s will use it excessively, with a heavy focus on marketing and store fronts and use that to shovel more product to a consooomer (which I hate).
It’s a very useful tool though for debugging when used properly.
Yeah, when I play tested games game when I was younger it was a part of it. I’m fine with telemetry if it’s only used for testing, fixing issues, game balance, ect. When it’s used for selling stuff or tracking me across the Internet or irl is where I have an issue.
In a meeting, asked a big multinational appliance company what all the connected device data collection was for.
Not a single person had an answer that benefited the customer.
I get why they want telemetry a lot of the time. Of course it’s helpful. But often times you can’t trust them with that sort of information. I don’t have any problem sending a 1-time log to a trustworthy organization but how many of those are there? And that’s a big ask for a normie.
Also Windows sends a ton of telemetry and its still shit.
Yeah. Ever tried to search a windows problem code. Best case its a red herring.
Just run ‘sfc /scannow’, it fixes everything.
If you don’t believe me, just ask your friendly local volunteer Microsoft customer service agent, they’ll tell you.
“Could be a hardware or software issue. It may go away after a restart”
Lot of fucking help there. Thanks.
On a system I designed, we had a dedicated button, labeled Problem, to transmit log data to support. It was a popular feature.
Can I have a portable version of that button for my life?
Telemetry is a useful technology that’s abused, like how recommendation feeds eventually turned into hate video broadcasts.
Opt-out telemetry is the only way to reliably get useful data from the silent majority. MS Office menus are better than others because Microsoft actually knows what normal people use. Paste was immediately promoted to be the first big button in the first tab after they sorted through Office 2003 telemetry data and saw the popularity of the feature.
I don’t think I can think of a software where I find the menu more confusing than in MS office products. But then again I’m probably not using computers like the average person.
Ok, maybe blender, but that also has so many more options that it’s not a fair comparison
Unpopular
truthopinionTelemetry exists to aid enshittification. Widely hated update that has loads of people complaining online but causes no change in usage? Keep it. Update causes dip in usage? Post generic “we hear your concerns” statement, backpedal slightly and try again in 6 months. Beloved feature is only actually utilised by 5% of your users? Get rid of it.
Beloved feature is only actually utilised by 5% of your users?
I mean, there is a pretty strong argument that if 95% of users don’t use a function, then it is not actually beloved and just more of a niche thing that the vast majority don’t care about.
The core design philology of windows is cobbling together thousands of niche use case features and set ups that have accumulated from their all their previous versions. That’s why it’s so janky.
That 5% is 5% of the users who don’t turn the telemetry off.
And if use of that feature is strongly correlated with the type of person who also turns off telemetry…
– Frost
It also happens because error reporting in applications is garbage in general
Agreed. As a software dev, a huge portion of my job has been fixing exception handling and adding centralized error handling to figure out what bugs my users are experiencing. Many devs I worked with seemed to only care about the happy path.
It also happens because error reporting in applications is garbage in general
Which is because error trapping in applications is garbage in general. Seriously, how many fucking times have you gotten an error ranging from “unexpected error occurred” to the ever helpful “something went wrong. Try again later.”
I mean yeah, to some extent you’re right.
But it is also due to telemetrics being helpful in diagnosing issues before users even report them, measuring their business effects, or even doing A/B tests to see how a new feature may affect the user experience.
Problem is that companies realised this info can also be used for other purposes - such as, datamining the users - to create another lucrative revenue source…
A/B testing without consent is unethical. This doesn’t fly in any scientific fields, yet the technology industry doesn’t think twice about experimenting on users without consent.
I think it’s a bit of a stretch to consider A/B testing under the same umbrella as subjecting somebody to a scientific study. A/B testing can be selling different products in different stores or trying different pricing strategies. There are certainly shady things you can do with A/B testing, like trying out dark patterns, but require consumers give consent for any kind of market experimentation?
There is a research paper on this topic here: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11023-023-09644-y
No one at Microsoft gives a shit about what you are doing, they want to know what updates broke.
No one at Microsoft gives a shit about what you are doing
Maybe, but 834 of their business partners are very interested in what I’m doing, and how much they should bid for Copilot ad slots on my computer.
