Hacker News Reader

A random sample – sure, if you have enough traffic to still get decent sample size, but a sample obtained by users opting in is often close to worthless because it's not random and so not representative of your userbase.

I don't think people who opt-in for such a telemetry is as equally distributed as totally random people who didn't opt-out.

The average users that you want to target don't really change those settings.

For websites and online businesses yes you need as much data as possible. For free software I agree, I don't see a use case