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Comment by umvi | Hacker News Reader

Have any zealous "opt in" folks ever been in a position where they need to somehow obtain statistical information about their user base (to raise funding, to make business decisions, to know what features are most being used, etc)? Opt in is like hard mode and practically worthless, <1% of your user base will opt in.

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Yes, as an academic and a co-creator of the de-facto annotation tool in my field [1] I certainly have (although having Google Analytics for the website is something I regret…). Now, we have the “luxury” of citation counts as a proxy for academic usage, but I know next to nothing about how our tool is/has been used in industry apart from what pops up on the mailing list. To be fair though, I suspect we could have had bigger impact and maybe keep the project more “alive” with both more efforts on our part and if we had decided to raise funds additional user metrics could have helped, but I am not shedding tears over this.

[1]: http://brat.nlplab.org/

Now, I absolutely sympathise with any developers in this situation. But I think the underlying issue is that we lack a good way to give consent and are stuck with awful solutions like opt-out and ridiculous pop-ups. Is there not good work on this out there or are we forever going to have to endure sub-optimal solutions?

Hi, I'm Kili's CTO. We have a free version of our annotation tool: https://kili-technology.com/. It's the most versatile tool on the market (text, image, video, voice), with native python integration, the ability to use ML to speed up annotation, and great support. Let me know if we can help. Edouard

Wow… Just wow… The Internet these days is just a cesspool at times due to this kind of behavior and I wish I could downvote this into oblivion. Your attempt at marketing disgusts me and know that I now have an awful impression of Kili as a company. Your need to drive customers to your company does not justify this kind of behavior, no matter the quality of your product.

What are you talking about?

The comment by edarchimbaud that I replied to? Where he blatantly inserted himself into a discussion about telemetry, package development, funding based on concrete metrics, etc. Just to namedrop his company and tool?

I didn't see anything blatant. What was blatant about it?

Imagine the following exchange:

A: “Recently I have been thinking about personal responsibility.”

B: “Why so?”

A: “I believe there is a strong correlation between a sense of personal responsibility and success later in life.”

C: “That is interesting, I think I read a study about this once. Here is a link!”

B: “Myself, I learned about personal responsibility – in particular financial – when I as a child ran my own little business. What I did was to deliver apples and later fruit for a small fee to the neighbourhood on my bike when I was about twelve. It did not make me rich of course, just enough to buy a video game in the end. But I do think it gave me solid experience in life. Later on in high school I started designing local webpages.”

D: “Hi! I am D, I am head of research at Foobar Corp and we have a new apple breed: http://foo.bar/baz It is the best apple on the market: crisp, juicy, and perfect for pies! Let me know if we can help!”

A, B, and C: “Eh?!”

Now, you are perfectly in your right to disagree. But I think D is being a dick here and inserting themselves blatantly solely to attract attention to their product and adding nothing to the discussion or the community as a whole – possible because D has signed up for some god awful “business intelligence” tool that just scans various websites for mentions of “apples” so that they can insert a generic, re-usable message.

Regardless, I will not monitor this conversation further as I feel we are at this point deviating far far from the topic of this “dead” thread. If you still feel the need to discuss this matter, feel free to dig up my e-mail on my personal website. Trust me, I am fairly easy to locate with my username and a keyword or two from my profile – or just look at the about page using the link to the tool I mentioned earlier in this conversation.

If you ask nicely and don't pretick the yes or no box I have a hard time believing <1% would opt-in.

This is just excuses. Usage statistics could be tied to downloads or public source code analysis. No need for tracking.

You can have a hard time believing it, but it’s still true. And the point still stands if it’s 5%.

Most people just don’t care, and will go with the defaults.

My point is if there is not default no-one will go with the default. Just force an active choice e.g. the first time the package manager is invoked from CLI and assume opt-out for scripts running it to not break scripts.

Yes. And that 1% is still plenty if you only need to know aggregate usage patterns necessary for the examples you gave.

Now if your goal was to collect personalized data in order to get targeted ad revenue...

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