> (And I didn't need analytics to understand something wasn't working lol.)
I mean, you did need feedback though - you read a comment on HN, which gave you the feedback, with upvotes on the comment indicating that it's probably an issue that more people care about.
One significant difference is that the feedback was "active", though: Someone actively decided to write the comment and other people probably actively decided to upvote it. I fully agree that this is a way better way of feedback than effectively putting up hidden cameras everywhere and surveiling every step of your users without them knowing.
you can't interpolate user behavior on something that isn't used, but you can pretty quickly find the most affected groups to further remediate why that'd be the case
it's been pretty disappointing recently reading comments around here and slowly building the understanding that resistance to these types of systems haven't come from old-school "freedom" driven mindsets that spot and call out patterns that obstruct user agency or security to enable a culture of accountability VS a slow crawl to glorifying luddism born from simple apprehension to understanding the use of any additional changes in how development is viewed today
this discussion chain of "stats=bad actually." makes that distinction a little more clear
I mean, you did need feedback though - you read a comment on HN, which gave you the feedback, with upvotes on the comment indicating that it's probably an issue that more people care about.
One significant difference is that the feedback was "active", though: Someone actively decided to write the comment and other people probably actively decided to upvote it. I fully agree that this is a way better way of feedback than effectively putting up hidden cameras everywhere and surveiling every step of your users without them knowing.