The great irony here is that the better your do your job as an Open Source maintainer, the less feedback you get that you're doing anything worthwhile at all. Thousands could be using your tool, and you hear nothing... because the tool Just Works.

I really wish there was a better way to get this sort of usage feedback without earning the ire of the special kind of advocate who insists that registration or user tracking is an evil that must be opposed at all costs.

@glyph @freakboy3742 there's a huge difference between "this app collects no telemetry" and anything else.

In the "else" case I have to understand all the data that's collected (or not) and when and how that's communicated, aggregated and stored and what privacy implications that may have.

I'd way rather be asked to do a short survey. From the other side, the results of surveys seem better than concluding things from telemetry data.

@glyph @freakboy3742 "The application will now send the following information when reporting this bug" is not what I would really call "telemetry", but instead something like opt-in, automatically collected crash data.

So that's already way, way better than "telemetry". It's still a little harder to audit / understand than "this app never phones home". Maybe there's already a better word for this (vs. "telemetry")?

@meejah @freakboy3742 I was trying to make a slightly more general point. Self-reported data is notoriously unreliable; users attempting to describe bugs is just a particularly visible and visceral example of that unreliability that developers almost universally experience.

As I highlighted in the article, there are also huge problems with self-selection bias with opt-in schemes.