You need to contain this disaster now by showing unambiguously that you've heard the community and announcing that you're simply not going to do this. This is an existential risk for you. You've just unintentionally shot your own brand; it needs more than a little first aid. Talking evasively ("concerns") is undermining you further.
These things have a super short half life before people just write you off as untrustworthy. But if you reverse it quickly enough, you can turn it into a win. Do it now! The hourglass is getting to that point where there's just a little sand left and it feels like it's starting to accelerate.
Please listen to these comments. There are a lot of them:
There are multiple decisions: opt-in vs. opt-out, GitLab.com vs. self-hosted, DNT vs. in-app, first-party vs. third-party, aggregated data vs. user data.
As an example that we won't do opt-out self-hosted third party with user data doesn't mean we can't do opt-in GitLab.com first party with aggregated data.
Almost every SaaS company uses telemetry in some form to improve their product. We need it too to improve the the user experience of the product.
But we clearly made the wrong trade-offs so we'll go back to square one and make a new plan.
That makes sense, but from a communication point of view it doesn't connect with what people are feeling. The community has a strong emotional bond with you. You need to respond on that level so people feel like they've been heard. You don't need to make all those decisions first in order to do that. Maybe you should do an Ask HN about how to proceed with these options. At least announce that you fucked up, apologize, and say that however you go forward will be crafted together with the community.
As far as I'm concerned, there's only one decision and it's clear that you've already made it. Client-side telemetry is a hard no-go for me. Not that my opinion matters much. I've deleted my account and will be reversing my attempts to secure funding for my organization to move to Gitlab. This is a bridge that can't be un-burned as far as I'm concerned.
> We need it too to improve the the user experience of the product.
I really appreciate you guys engaging in this public discussion. I hope you take what follows in the friendly spirit I intend:
> We need it too to improve the the user experience of the product.
This ^^^^ sounds like exaggeration to me. Taken literally, you're saying that the gitlab user experience could not be meaningfully improved without adding telemetry.
I'm not a UI designer, but I'm fairly sure that before telemetry existed, product-improving iterations were a thing.
But based on other people's comments, I think this is a tangent. I suspect that 99% of people's upset is making the telemetry something other than opt-in. I suspect that if gitlab would just commit to making telemetry opt-in and GDPR-compliant, all would be right with the world.
Should have passed an A/B test on your headline with a focus group. Everything with all the Facebook privacy issues it's getting much harder to push tracking on the technically literate.
I personally don't care if your hosted one takes telemetry as but if it ever makes it to CE I'm dropping gitlab in favor of I guess paying for some other hosted service. That or I'll patch out the telemetry.
don't take these comments on HN seriously. there are 100 trolls that wine on here daily because you want to track if a button is in an optimal place. ignore it and keep building great products.
Alternatively, please _do_ take these comments seriously, since some of the people reading this post and following this discussion are the ones who help their organizations make purchasing decisions about on-prem VCS solutions. I'll certainly be making sure that the people at my organization who are evaluating which VCS to buy are aware of Gitlab's choices regarding telemetry.
Yes, this. As it happens, I am currently tasked with selecting a system like this to replace what we currently use. I was strongly leaning toward recommending Gitlab, but am no longer. (To be clear, I haven't ruled it out, either, despite the fact that I've stopped using it personally -- it's just that it's not the leading contender anymore.)
