no sh!t? 
Yes, this is what I mean by an incremental counter, was this confirmed?
I think that would be unfortunate, because it provides no value, as opposed to a live subscriber count (seems like that should be possible?) which would provide value. For example if your live subscriber count reduces after an update release it would seem safe to conclude the update was not appreciated by the userbase.
I’m not sure it’s been confirmed, but its a number I have only ever seen go up FWIW.
No absolutely not, has someone suggested this? I don’t want to post “reviews” of my own plugin, I want my users to post reviews of my plugin so that I can get some form of feedback.
And of course, reviews are always going to be contentious, this is part of the reason I said such data should be 3rd party to this VCV community.
I look at all YouTube videos daily that are tagged with VCV Rack. If my Meander is used in the patch, I can tell at a glance as the circle of 5ths panel display looks like a target 
I also look to see what YouTube videos are tagged with “Meander” or “PurrSoftware”. It is always fun to find someone doing something creative with my module (now 3 modules as soon as the my library build is processed). Unfortunately, it has been many months since someone has tagged a YT video with “Meander”.
I especially like when someone posts a patch that uses my modules as I like to download it and play with it to see what people are doing that sometimes I have never imagined.
These days I just look at the number of VCV installs to get an idea if new people are still installing my software.
SoundCloud has a number of “analytics” reporting. It is an ego boost to see my VCV music listened to in just about every country. Feedback there is useless to me since it is invariably someone offering to make me rich by distributing my music
BTW, my SoundCloud music has been listened to 8,686 times 
Hmmmm, I have realised that it is not necessarily obvious what my intention was with posting that “popularity” list, apologies for being ambiguous.
To clarify, I have no interest in comparing other plugins to my own, of creating any sort of leader board, or data related to competition between plugins.
The purpose of the list was to understand the current usage of my plugin, so that after my next release I can determine if the release was received positively or negatively by users.
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What about embedding a ‘most used broadcast’ into your modules?
You could get a logfile about the modules that are used with your modules in the same patch and possibly could log the frequency of usage.
Technically possible, but:
I don’t think that would be a popular feature, plus it wouldn’t work for any users that are offline, there are more than a few issues to overcome with this type of thing…
Yeah, gathering user and usage info. Always tempting because it’s possible and under the assumption of benign intent and use.
Also…’
“Most used” assumes that module wowuld need knowledge of all modules used by a user in all patches. At any time? That would therefore be a higher lever aggregate function, I guess. Say, for the VCV Rack application to gather and report info on. From either actual use or scanning th users preset files.
Anyway…
An explicit opt-in switch would be applicable. And opt-out the Default setting.
And not opt-in/out in the Cookie kind of way (e.g. when opt-out limits functionality and/or store/gather/share/send all sorts of user/usage information). That could really hurt the whole VCV Rack initiative.
Essentially the same problem to solve. Just narrower scope. Just your modules instead of all modules. Effectively just discriminating/selecting/limiting on the “Maker” dimension. A subset of all.
Technically could be based on module / plugin proporties like slug, name, brand, author).
About a more technical data based approach:
A(nother) way to determine usage/frequency is to (have an AI) find and analyze VCV Rack patch files. E.g. from VCV Rack | Patchstorage and such sources. The VCV Rack patch files contain information on all modules and all relations/connections (for that patch). So could also be used for correlation analysis.
Getting quantitative information seems quite achievable.
Getting subjective information might be harder. Like the kind you could get from product reviews/demos and such. Subjective information could also be helpful as feedback for product development. E.g. it could be about specific “disappointing” or “missing” features. Either as compared to some other implementation, or just as a “I wish it could or wouldn’t do x or y”.
The birth of the current AI’s (e.g. LLM’s) was very much about sentiment analysis. Scraping and analyzing reviews and other product related user generated web content. To determine what users/consumers were happy with and what not. Mainly for advertisements purposes (of course…). But the same information can also be used as feedback for product development.
Anyway…
AI’s can be pretty good at gathering and analyzing subjective information. Gathered from multiple modalities and many sources.
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Yes, I agree there is definitely something here that’s worth a little bit of effort to see if it will produce useful data.
On the other hand, I have used and perused Patch Storage a fair amount and very rarely seen any of my modules, I just don’t think the data is out there at this stage of my plugins life. I imagine plugins with a higher profile or longer life might have success though.
Personally, I think for me and my plugin specifically, I would get more value from a 3rd party community “review” effort. In addition, my employment contract places restrictions on what I can do in a computing sense, in a public setting. Sadly this means I am unlikely to follow the AI route no matter how interested in it I am…
PSA: clicking on a users avatar brings up a profile dialogue, some forum users even put pertinent information there… 
Yeah, finding relevant information where there’s relatively little available in huge quantities of irrelevant data is definitely a thing. But, hey, machines can work 24/7 on finding needles in haystacks.
Having said that…It might even be that there are AI models currently available that have all this info already available as part of their training set.
So…you would need someone else to do your biddings for you?
Is that an offer? 
I’m just the Stooge here
I’m pretty sure calling home is expressly prohibited for plugins in the library Check out the documentation for “how to get in the library”. Pretty sure it says “don’t do that”.
Going all the way back to your initial post - I think many of us developers share your frustration to some degree. I think the scarcity of positive feedback and visibility of plugin use is at least partially what led to Bruce (Squinky) dropping out of the plugin game (at least temporarily).
I also have gotten very few inquiries about usage, and rarely see my modules in the wild. But then there aren’t that many patches posted to the community, and only a few post at least semi-regularly. Patch Storage does have more VCV patch posts, but I haven’t followed it regularly.
Most of my encouragement comes from seeing likes on my announcement posts, plus a few actual responses (they have been pretty rare since my initial release). I have had a handful of people tell me they find the Harmonic Quantizer very useful, yet I don’t think I have actually seen a patch that uses it (besides my own).
The number of active users within the VCV Community pales in comparison to the number of total VCV users. So rightly or wrongly, I am assuming (hoping) that for every person that posts a message, or like, or posts a video/patch with one of my modules, that there are many many more that use my plugin in a non-public way.
I also followed the “popularity” metric. For the first 6 months or so Venom was averaging 1000 subscriptions per month. I was a bit worried that most of that could be people that simply subscribe to just about anything, yet may never use it. But then I also monitored another plugin that was released around the same time, and was encouraged that my subscriptions/month rate was about double. So I know that there was something specific to my plugin that made people at least curious to subscribe and presumably test it out. But I have no idea if any modules get regular use.
I recently checked my subscription rate after 10 months, and it had dropped to an average of 900/month. But then a couple days ago I got to experience my first Omri Cohen video featuring one of my modules! That definitely was special!
It definitely caused a spike in my subscription rate. I have gotten nearly 400 plugin subscriptions within 2 days. It will be interesting to see how long that lasts.
Like most, I would love to see a more accurate measure of usage. But I am not hopeful.
For now there is just enough encouragement, coupled with my own module wish list for my own use, to keep me interested in development. Hopefully I don’t get burned out too soon.
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We discussed “popularity” extensively here:
Oh, and https://library.vcvrack.com/plugins?query=&sort=popularity works 
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Doh 
thanks for that
I put some subconscious thought into this last night as I slept…
My conclusion is that in the absence of community members with the ability/motivation to create/maintain such a project, our next best option would be to subvert some existing tool.
Being a mid-40s curmudgeonly sarcastic British male, I am staunchly anti social media, and only give exceptions to things like this community or YouTube and Reddit because I can keep my interactions strictly synth focused 
and ignore everything else.
However, maybe there lies the answer. I am no expert, but perhaps it would be possible, for example, to create a new subreddit that aims to provide a thread per plugin, and members of this subreddit may then post their reviews/tips/guides/feedback/feature requests to those threads, and even vote the threads up and down. There are perhaps mod tools that could help?
An alternative thought I had was, create a new Discord server, and then build a Bot (the backend could be built on glitch.com perhaps) which can keep track of plugin votes/reviews/comments etc
Obviously a solution such as this would still require some significant time and effort, but at least not a financial burden. And I realise it won’t suit everyone, might take time to get anywhere close to being useful…
Anyway, that was my idea, time for a snooze 
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Hooray! I’m still 125th! Consistency, baby!