I am pretty excited about doing something more in-house, but it’s much easier to get data about how promising this direction is by using some third-party services that already have all the infrastructure.
If it turns out to be a core part of LW, it makes more sense to in-house it. It’s also really valuable to have an relatively validated baseline to compare things to.
There are a bunch of third-party services we couldn’t really replace that we send user data to. Hex.tech as our analytics dashboard service. Google Analytics for basic user behavior and patterns. A bunch of AWS services. Implementing the functionality of all of that ourselves, or putting a bunch of effort into anonymizing the data is not impossible, but seems pretty hard, and Recombee seems about par for the degree to which I trust them to not do anything with that data themselves.
GDPR is a giant mess, so it’s pretty unclear what it requires us to implement. My current understanding is that it just requires us to tell you that we are collecting analytics data if you are from the EU.
And the kind of stuff we are sending over to Recombee would be covered by it being data necessary to provide site functionality, not just analytics, so wouldn’t be covered by that (if you want to avoid data being sent to Google Analytics in-particular, you can do that by just blocking the GA script in uBlock origin or whatever other adblocker you use, which it should do by default).
drat, I was hoping that one would work. oh well. yes, I use ublock, as should everyone. Have you considered simply not having analytics at all :P I feel like it would be nice to do the thing that everyone ought to do anyway since you’re in charge. If I was running a website I’d simply not use analytics.
back to the topic at hand, I think you should just make a vector embedding of all posts and show a HuMAP layout of it on the homepage. that would be fun and not require sending data anywhere. you could show the topic islands and stuff.
I have been employed making websites like this many times before. The analytics were extremely useful. It would have been much harder without it. Also, I have come to the opinion that one should not use analytics despite this.
I am pretty excited about doing something more in-house, but it’s much easier to get data about how promising this direction is by using some third-party services that already have all the infrastructure.
If it turns out to be a core part of LW, it makes more sense to in-house it. It’s also really valuable to have an relatively validated baseline to compare things to.
There are a bunch of third-party services we couldn’t really replace that we send user data to. Hex.tech as our analytics dashboard service. Google Analytics for basic user behavior and patterns. A bunch of AWS services. Implementing the functionality of all of that ourselves, or putting a bunch of effort into anonymizing the data is not impossible, but seems pretty hard, and Recombee seems about par for the degree to which I trust them to not do anything with that data themselves.
I’d like to opt out of all analytics. I believe the GDPR requires you to implement this?
GDPR is a giant mess, so it’s pretty unclear what it requires us to implement. My current understanding is that it just requires us to tell you that we are collecting analytics data if you are from the EU.
And the kind of stuff we are sending over to Recombee would be covered by it being data necessary to provide site functionality, not just analytics, so wouldn’t be covered by that (if you want to avoid data being sent to Google Analytics in-particular, you can do that by just blocking the GA script in uBlock origin or whatever other adblocker you use, which it should do by default).
drat, I was hoping that one would work. oh well. yes, I use ublock, as should everyone. Have you considered simply not having analytics at all :P I feel like it would be nice to do the thing that everyone ought to do anyway since you’re in charge. If I was running a website I’d simply not use analytics.
back to the topic at hand, I think you should just make a vector embedding of all posts and show a HuMAP layout of it on the homepage. that would be fun and not require sending data anywhere. you could show the topic islands and stuff.
My bet is if you were running a website like this you’d see how useful analytics are for making complex websites better.
I have been employed making websites like this many times before. The analytics were extremely useful. It would have been much harder without it. Also, I have come to the opinion that one should not use analytics despite this.