Comment by willsmith72 5 days ago
"not breaking things they like" is a very low bar for building a great product
To be honest building things this way seems like such a competitive disadvantage I don't see how it could ever work at scale. Certainly all the big players are using them. If we shake our heads at the little players doing the same, we're just going to widen the moat
> Spying on your users does not give better feedback than simply asking your users
If that's true, there are many companies paying thousands -hundreds of thousands unnecessarily. Why are they choosing to throw away their money?
It is not an either or. Surveys are almost always ignored. Micro improvements cannot be done with just surveys and asking users. Often users do not know how to describe a problem. Product analytics, if anonymized with opt-out gives a pretty good picture of intent, especially in B2B software.
Isn't that an argument against any piece of ethics? Am I missing something or are you arguing that gaining an advantage by being a bad actor means you shouldn't be a good actor because then you'd be at a disadvantage?
I get that I am making a general statement from your original narrow scope so correct me if I'm wrong that you mean THIS bad thing is fine but other bad things are still bad.
Spying on your users does not give better feedback than simply asking your users (surveys, focus groups) and responding to the considered comments you receive. Spying and trying to infer intent is such a low bar to improve upon.