I am a bit surprised at the extreme negativity here. Obviously, this was mismanaged on many fronts [1], however the idea of tracking product usage in order to improve the product is generally a good thing, not a bad thing.
Hacker News likes to complain about how bad the Gitlab UI is compared to Github, or how slow things are on Gitlab, or how they are doing too many things and need to focus their product better. Well, knowing how their users are using the product is one key part to improving all these things and delivering a better product.
As a paid user of the Gitlab.com product, I am fine having them carry out analytics on user behavior like my own. That said, I do use an ad blocker and if they use 3rd party trackers I'll definitely be blocking those trackers.
[1] E.g. the use of third parties for the telemetry. They should definitely be using in house systems for something like this not 3rd parties in order to protect their user data. Also, they should not be rolling this out to self-hosted versions.
>Obviously, this was mismanaged on many fronts [1], however the idea of tracking product usage in order to improve the product is generally a good thing, not a bad thing.
Disagree. The kind of client-side hyper granular tracking being discussed here is not a good thing. It encourages micro optimization for metrics over maintaining a good big-picture architecture. I've seen no evidence whatsoever that software is any better now than it was in the days when applications were off-line only.
Hacker News likes to complain about how bad the Gitlab UI is compared to Github, or how slow things are on Gitlab, or how they are doing too many things and need to focus their product better. Well, knowing how their users are using the product is one key part to improving all these things and delivering a better product.
As a paid user of the Gitlab.com product, I am fine having them carry out analytics on user behavior like my own. That said, I do use an ad blocker and if they use 3rd party trackers I'll definitely be blocking those trackers.
[1] E.g. the use of third parties for the telemetry. They should definitely be using in house systems for something like this not 3rd parties in order to protect their user data. Also, they should not be rolling this out to self-hosted versions.