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Comment by almostjazz | Hacker News Reader

You could survey a representative sample

Not really. (a) People hate responding to surveys and hate emails, you're more likely to lose users than to get data (b) there's no way you're surveying people's in a way that gets you information like "time spent on a page" or "time between commits" or whatever.

This is just nonsense tbh. Surveys and customer outreach solve completely different problems from analytics.

I agree you can't practically get the same information as you could with telemetry.

Survey data is still real data that can be used for "analytics".

Some people also hate telemetry. It feels invasive. I have a guess about what direction the percentage of consumers who hate telemetry is moving toward.

You can hire people to test your product and provide analytics. But not try to siphon the data for free.

I'm not taking a side on whether a product should add telemetry. I'm rejecting the absurd notion that these suggestions are at all giving the same information.

No one claimed that they give the same information, only that it's viable to produce a good product that solves your user's needs without using telemetry. The whole point is that you don't get the same information, e.g. no private data that the users haven't provided informed consent for upload to your servers.

If people feel like their feedback is valued you don't even need to ask them for it, they will come to you.

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