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Comment by stavros | Hacker News Reader

They're looking for things like "how much usage does X thing get?", and this is hard to get from users for various reasons. You need lots of fine-grained feedback like menu clicks and things like that, you can't discover whether a button is easily discoverable from GitHub issues.

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"how much usage does a feature have" is a wrong question. It is unqualified.

In an audio program one often uses a set of filter by default, which aren't that important.

Important is the filter I use once in a while and in that specific situation is making a huge difference.

Unqualified usage counters lead t wrong conclusions.

One way to do this is to make it a part of a beta program rather than baked into the main app. That makes it slightly more manageable for the developers too.

That's true, but I don't know how many would bother installing the beta, especially given that most distributions use stable. This would be the same as opt-in telemetry.

Windows Insider already had over 10 million users 4 years ago[0]. I'd say that approach works well enough. I myself used it on Windows Phone 8, because some upcoming updates came with cool features and being in the Insider program gave me earlier access.

I also used Firefox Nightly for a while because of the massive performance improvements at that time. As Audacity claims they're doing it for UX improvements, it would be easy to get frequent Audacity users interested in a beta build featuring tracking but also all the improvements being tested.

[0] https://www.networkworld.com/article/3185461/windows-insider...

I wish Musescore did this...

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