privacy first. Which is why I love parts of this idea.

seeing this "disabled by default and not installed on the site. If the admin chooses to take part, a plugin is installed that can be removed at any time"
come from someone who is involved in wp made me almost shed a tear. That's exactly what I've been saying about every new 'feature' since about 2.5

I'd also add in to this optional, off by default idea, that it's also optional what gets shared, and clearly shown what is shared.. and that consideration about other users of said install not giving permission could be affected, (mutlti-author / user blogs) and if visitors to said web site could be affected at all - even comment spammers have privacy rights in some parts of the world I guess - so make it clear, and maybe make parts optional - like only stuff done in admin area, by admin..

The reason I would share this data - to show that just about every hour spent developing features since 2.5 has been for the very few - a complete waste that is not only ignored by the masses, but does nothing but slow it down and add security problems.

I'd love the stats to show how many of us are actively using rest api, gravatar, embeds, and trackbacks, xmlrpc..

I try to keep up with wp - and I run a bunch of 'turn these things off plugins' - and didn't know until last week, that if you make a private page, password protected, with 100 links to your enemies' web sites, and publish that password protected just for your evil twin to read.. it pings and tries to embed all your enemies and tells them where you are on the web.. ugh!

so a plugin to disable embeds.. try it again.. nope - still sucking down server resources and crashes browser.. looks like it's still pinging..
more research.. oh! a plugin to silent publish..

silent publish plugin! woo hoo! wait, looks like that breaks the password protection feature for some reason.. unpublish. trash. empty trash.

a plugin needed to publish silently.. even though it's marked private, password protected, and settings in discussion to block search spiders is checked and the rpc pingomatic is removed..

maybe the user stats sent back would convince the team to release wp basic? remove all the stuff that should be plugins - I mean it's nice to have the hooks you'd need to run rest api in core.. but most of us will never use it.

maybe user stats would get gravatar taken out? emoji crap removed? These things could be plugins, not core :))

now I install more plugins to block wp functionality with a new install than I add plugins to add features..

disable g fonts, disable xmlrpc, disable trackbacks, disable embeds, disable gravatar (which doesn't work as well as I'd like) - still need..

anyway, I would share the data on several sites to add to the knowledge that the justify and underline buttons are used more than 95% of the features added since 2.5 ;)

oh, and the stupid video that loads when you update to new versions - can we please.. I mean usage stats should show - I've updated 20 sites and not watched the vid once.. multiply that by the thousands of other updates that never watch it.. and can we please stop with that!

I mean, add a graphic with a play button to show there is a cool video to watch - but pre loading; wasteful! It crashed my browser three times the past week.. it's partially too many tabs in firefox and browser plugins - but geeze! something else wasting resources, and sending data to third parties that I'd prefer it didn't - such a waste..

Especially since it appears that that data is not being used to make a good decision about whether to keep this awesome feature that took so much time and creativity - I mean everyone should be force fed this 4.7 video!

I saw @Gaurav says he knows users who are using rest, embed - etc. I would posit that users who use that kind of thing have no problem installing a plugin to add those functions - I mean if you are using rest you probably know how to add a plugin.

Of course it does not go the other way -
- most users that are forced to give up privacy and resources to ggl fonts, gravatar, and the places they link to in private posts, are generally not aware that these things are happening, and are likely not aware that they can add a plugin to remove them.

Any chance this data collection would get akismet and hello dolly removed as well? perhaps show 20% of admins visit the editor / footer.php and realize there is no way to get to the sub folders of themes where the powered by stuff is hidden these days.

There is no good way to know what the users don't know.. but maybe less core features and more plugins..

the buddypress crew seems to do well with adding hooks and stuff for plugins, although I'd like to see more features that users scream for there, at least they are not adding tons of third party stuff into the core of it every few months.

hooks for plugins to do things is nice.. plugins forced in that are never used - that let your site get hacked next month - not the best thing.

removing the ability of the old theme options to work.. I wonder if the anonymous stats would show how much time was spend going from screen to screen in the back end - looking for how in the heck we added those cusotm css things back in the day.. to change. them.. and could not find them.. then back and forth time and time again.. to not find what we were looking for.

We know it was there - we can see the custom code on the site.. no note saying "hey this was taken away because you upgraded wordpress" - no clue at all.

those kind of stats I'd gladly share.

I'd prefer no embeds and pings to sites - but if you all think it's really that awesome - then it would be easy to have wp pop up when it detects that you posted something with a link in - pop up and say should we ping that site and check for cool embed code? Then 'your post would look good and pull the data like this - showing it - and slaying your privacy and that of your visitors any time the page is viewed.. but it's ready.. and you can't align it left.. that's not the way themes work.. and if they change their page next year, you could have some stuff on your page that instead says 'hacked by WJEKRE' - but that's because you are embedding from a site that has no ability to update plugins automatically..

Or maybe the site is unusual and setup to auto update plugins, but they have one that's no longer in our repo - even though 10,000 people are still using it, cuz they liked how things were in those ancient times of 2010.

yep, embeds, love them!

my usage stats may show that - and that would not be cool, because I don't check for that when I write a post - I'd be horrified if I saw an embed when I published. What's worse is all those people that don't know how it works (the privacy / lack of control) - although you might see people hunting for ways to style the embeds.. sees embedded content, looks for styling options, clicks kitchen sink.. hovers...