CollectorVision Part 9: Tracking Usage

One of my favorite things about CollectorVision is that it runs entirely offline with local inference + lookup. The only time it needs to make a network request is look up card names and prices.

However, one drawback from that is that I don't have an easy way to tell how many people are using the library. Is the library growing in popularity? Stagnating? Other than tracking things like Github stars or how many people join the Discord, I don't have many other signals.

If one goes onto HuggingFace, it doesn't even show usage stats currently:

Why doesn't HuggingFace track my model downloads by default? Well, as this page explains, because models often come in multiple files, tracking clean download stats isn't always easy.

However, there is a way to specify to HF how to track stats for your models, and so that's what this PR does:
https://github.com/huggingface/huggingface.js/pull/2178#event-25706124853

It took a few rounds (of my coding-bot answering the concerns of their coding bot), but eventually -- good news -- HuggingFace accepted / merged my PR, and soon we'll have real download stats on HuggingFace for the CollectorVision models.

Once HuggingFace begins tracking download stats, I'm looking forward to getting a rough idea of how many people are using the library.

Note that for wrapped / bundled versions of the app (such as the version that people load up when they go to my simple web demo or from using EchoMTG's website or iOS or Android apps), then those sorts of deployments (generally) include the weights on their own, and those won't show up on the HuggingFace tracker -- the only time those usages will show up is when the app maintainers (such as my pipeline or Teeg's pipeline for EchoMTG) pulls a new version of the model to bundle into that deployment.

Still, it should give me a decent signal for the number of people who are integrating / experimenting with the app, and I can hardly wait to see those graphs.