alt Hacker News> I'm curious why corporate development teams always feel the need to spy on their users? Is it not sufficient to employ good engineering and design practices?
No, because users have different needs and thoughts from the developers. And because sometimes it's hard to get good feedback from people. Maybe everyone loves the concept of feature X, but then never uses it in practice for some reason. Or a given feature has a vocal fan base that won't actually translate to sales/real usage.
> Would Git have been significantly better if it had collected telemetry, or would the data not have just been a distraction?
I think yes, because git famously has a terrible UI, and any amount of telemetry would quickly tell you people fumble around a lot at first.
I imagine that in an alternate world, a git with telemetry would have come out with a less confusing UI because somebody would have looked at the stats and for instance have added "git restore" right from the very start, because "git checkout -- foo.txt" is an absolutely unintuitive command.
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Didn't Go propose opt-out telemetry but then the community said no?
Compilers and whatnot seem to suffer from the same problem that programs like git(1) does. Once you've put it out there in the world you have no idea if someone will still use some corner of it thirty years from now.
> because git famously has a terrible UI
Thankfully, github has zero control over git. If they did have control they would have sank the whole operation on year one
> because somebody would have looked at the stats and for instance have added "git restore" right from the very start, because "git checkout -- foo.txt" is an absolutely unintuitive command.
How is git restore any better? Restoring what from when? At least git checkout is clear in what it does.
A more intuitive git UI would reduce engagement. Do you really want to cut a 30 minute git session down to five minutes by introducing things like 'git restore' or 'git undo'? /s
> I think yes, because git famously has a terrible UI, and any amount of telemetry would quickly tell you people fumble around a lot at first.
1. git doesn’t have a UI, it’s a program run in a terminal environment. the terminal is the interface for the user.
2. git has a specific design that was intended to solve a specific problem in a specific way. mostly for linux kernel development. so, the UX might seem terrible to you — but remember that it wasn’t built for you, nor was it designed for people in their first ever coding boot camp. that was never git’s purpose.
3. the fact that every other tool was designed so poorly that everyone (eventually, mostly) jumped on git as a new standard is an expression of the importance of designing systems well.
I think the big problem with Telemetry is that it's too much of a black box. There is 0 transparency on how that data it really used and we have a long history of large corporates using this data to build prediction products that track people by finger printing behavior though these signals. There is too much at stake right now around this topic for people to trust any implementation.