I don't find it ironic at all. The purpose of telemetry is to be able to obtain information about the user population at large. It's anonymous and the data only flows one way (i.e. you don't see personalized ads based on telemetry data), but of course some data about your browsing behavior is being sent somewhere, yes.
It's a trade-off: You sent some anonymous usage data but in turn that contributes to decisions made about the product. If you opt-out of sending this data, obviously, it does not contribute to the pool of data from which decisions are being made.
Now, that a small group of people with very specific opinions and preferences is the same that disproportionally also opt out of sending telemetry... I don't see how that is Mozilla's problem.
You can't have your cake and eat it too, as the saying goes.
> Now, that a small group of people with very specific opinions and preferences is the same that disproportionally also opt out of sending telemetry... I don't see how that is Mozilla's problem.
I disagree. If you create a piece of software and develop a userbase that disproportionately opts out of telemetry relative to your software's alternatives, congratulations, you won. You got the power users, the developers, the people who care enough to submit quality bug reports, they're all on your side. Game over.
You don't need telemetry to understand what features these users need because they will tell you - loudly and forcefully - in bug reports filed if you break something. Assuming we're talking about open source software, and we are, they may also be the people sending you patches and improvements for these features.
Telemetry is what you need if you're making a mass market product that meets the needs of 80% of users. It isn't necessary, and in fact may not be useful, if you're developing software designed around the needs of the people contributing to the software. Some software tries to do both. But the way you do that isn't by looking exclusively at telemetry and then pretending that what you see there describes the behavior of all user categories, at least when it comports with the plans of your UX team. It's by listening to the people who are most passionate about the software.
The users who opt out of telemetry are a very tiny minority barely worth considering in terms of numbers. Further, they are explicitly saying "I don't value my vote on feature usage as much as I value turning off this data report which contains zero personal information and is used for no other purposes than changing the product. Again, don't want a voice in how the product evolves, cool, just don't complain about not having a voice down the road when something you don't like happens. It's like people who don't like their local politician who spent the year before bragging about how voting was stupid and just a way for the government to track you so you weren't going to do it.
An idea can be good regardless of telemetry, telemetry is descriptive and not prescriptive. Telemetry is inherently reductive in that sense. You're making a leap of logic that's genuinely unfounded - an idea can be good or bad and this is wholly independent of telemetry unless your only concern is maximising or minimising use of some kind of feature. I would never dismiss an idea because someone has telemetry disabled and it seems like a genuinely disturbing idea to even hold the position that a user with telemetry disabled is lacking value.
A user with telemetry disabled isn't lacking value, it's throwing away its vote. Plain and simple, if you want a vote that tells the software maker how you think the product is best used, that's telemetry. If you don't care about that vote, throw it away by turning off telemetry. Now, telemetry is only one (small) input into whether a feature warrants maintenance in a codebase of over 20 million lines, but it is one input that you have involvement in. As I said, up to you if you want to use your vote or throw it away but it's silly to complain about not having a voice after tossing yours in the dumpster.
It's a trade-off: You sent some anonymous usage data but in turn that contributes to decisions made about the product. If you opt-out of sending this data, obviously, it does not contribute to the pool of data from which decisions are being made.
Now, that a small group of people with very specific opinions and preferences is the same that disproportionally also opt out of sending telemetry... I don't see how that is Mozilla's problem.
You can't have your cake and eat it too, as the saying goes.