15 ms·

Stuff like this makes me downright angry. Because people not into IT think Zoom is now equivalent to online meetings and many events are held with Zoom too. Job

by frxx 4y ago

Stuff like this makes me downright angry. Because people not into IT think Zoom is now equivalent to online meetings and many events are held with Zoom too. Job interviews, etc. Most people don't have any idea that their software is so bad and they are a scummy company best avoided. I'm trying to let the people around me know, but mostly they don't care.

imron 4y ago
> but mostly they don't care Because the UX of other offerings is so poor and zoom for most part just works. I say this as someone who is aware of the security issues, but still prefer zoom over anything else.
- Schroedingersat 4y ago
  jitsi just worked every time i've used it
  - lokedhs 4y ago
    Quite honestly I would be love to hear an argument as to why anyone would use zoom over jitsi. I'm not trying to be controversial, and I readily admits I've only used zoom maybe twice, but I saw nothing that was better than jitsi. I also had performance issues on zoom, but I'm willing to ignore that since most other people don't seem to mention those issue so that's probably on me.
    - Schroedingersat 4y ago
      Main downsides I knw of are a slightly worse codec, and in webrtc mode bandwidth needs to scale with participants so for large meetings you need to pay for hosting somehow. Neither are reasons not to use it as a default first option. Also matrix has voice and video now and there's big blue button.
      - lokedhs 4y ago
        I've never used voice in Matrix, but I was sure that it was implemented using Jitsi on the backend?
        Schroedingersat 4y ago
        Element had a jitsi plugin i think. the matrix voice/video is new and i only used it once
    - fold3 4y ago
      My aunt that do remote conference a lot told me jitsi is slow and ureliable? She's not very tech savy so maybe she had a bad experience at the time when lockdown happen and the servers might have been overloaded.
    - Kwpolska 4y ago
      Previous job was using self-hosted Jitsi. And it was often a trainwreck, with random disconnections, terrible video quality (and we didn’t use it very often), some people ~always displaying "connection lost" even though we could hear each other fine, some people always having connection issues and being disconnected after a few seconds. Zoom and Teams are much more stable.
- FrenchDevRemote 4y ago
  how is it better than google meet? the few times I used zoom there always was problems with audio, camera or people struggled to join
  - Apocryphon 4y ago
    Google Meet? Which one?
  - ClassyJacket 4y ago
    Do you mean Google Meet, or Google Meet (Original), which are two seperate apps? Or were you you referring to Duo, which is also called Google Meet now. Or Hangouts, the other Google video chat app which also exists for some reason? Or Google Hangouts Meet, which also existed? Or Google Allo? It's better than Google Meet because Zoom won't shut itself down in 6 months, replace Zoom with a different app with a different name, change the name, change the name again, then shut that down and repeat the cycle 6 months later.
    - iainmerrick 4y ago
      Most people don’t actually care about or even notice that confusion. You go to meet.google.com and it works without too much hassle.
      - cerved 4y ago
        not on Firefox
      - lultimouomo 4y ago
        This is the one redeeming quality of Meet, and it's worth a lot. I can click on a link that was sent to me and all the essential videoconferencing stuff will just work in my browser. Also in Firefox, regardless of what sibling says (I use it regularly on Linux and macOS). This is a technical feat that somehiw still escapes most of the other videoconferencing platforms (except maybe Zoom, but then they try to hide it as much as possible).
- Biganon 4y ago
  But... Zoom's UX is absolutely terrible Half the options that should be on a meeting-basis are buried deep into the user settings, only accessible from the web interface, and they have confusing names and meanings. I've used lots of softwares, Zoom might be one of the worst when it comes to UX.
  - aidos 4y ago
    It’s horrible. Especially if you’re doing screen sharing / scribbling on screens all day. “The zoom dance” is my term for people constantly pushing those stupid little floating windows about. We switched to zoom though because the performance was just better than anything (we tried a boat load of tools - but most of them were just shiny saas offerings on top of Chrome). Now I’m on an M1 it doesn’t matter as much, but zoom was the only thing that didn’t totally kill our machines before that.
    - hamburglar 4y ago
      The zoom dance is real. I very frequently find myself pushing things around in vain because I am only dedicating a portion of my brain to the task and I can never quite believe that it’s impossible to lay things out in a way that is actually usable. So there’s like a 5% mental cpu task that’s just constantly pushing things around due to this vague feeling that obviously I will find the better arrangement. It must be there, right? Zoom UI is horrendous. But it’s also not quite as bad as teams, and everyone has learned to cope with it. So it’s the best of an absolute shitpile. Teams will remain a complete joke to me as long as I am forced to play the “try to map initials to names” game in order to figure out who is talking. I don’t know my coworkers by their initials, Microsoft. I don’t know why you can’t just show me actual names. Meeting UI people: here is a list of questions that I find myself constantly asking myself: who is talking? Who just finished talking? Who is in this meeting? Who just joined? Who just left? If you waste an entire screen on nearly information-free user tiles and make me open a separate window to answer these types of questions (or they are impossible to answer), I hate you.
      - Kwpolska 4y ago
- thesumofall 4y ago
  Their UX seems really bad. E.g., they changed the default behavior of the title bar, auto-hide critical buttons such as mute/unmute, etc.
- shaan7 4y ago
  Yup. The thing I absolutely love about Zoom is how easy it is to switch between mics and output device. Every other conferencing tool needs you to go to Settings > Voice and then change it. With Zoom, just click the arrow next to the mute button, select device and voila!
  - m1gu3l 4y ago
    Really don’t know why this setting isn’t always up front and center just like the mute button. With just the default audio interface i have a few options and a lot of us have more than just the default interface. While we are at it why can’t I control what audio interfaces are available to a specific program on a program by program basis? No, I will never want to use Steam Streaming Audio or my Oculus quest mic on a webex/zoom. Ever.
  - MereInterest 4y ago
    I can't stand this feature, because it overrides my OS-level choice. If I select my headset as the microphone to use, then I expect it to be used. But Zoom might use a different microphone, so I need to change it there as well. In addition, even if I select "System default microphone", that doesn't always work correctly. As far as I can tell, that option doesn't mean to attach to the default source. Instead, it means to attach to the same source that is currently bound to the default source. If I change the default source later, Zoom doesn't get moved along with it.
    - wil421 4y ago
      Same issues here. I don’t care that my dock has a mic port that Zoom and Teams think they should automatically use. Use the damn system setting for my hardwired headset mic.
      - shaan7 4y ago
        Yeah the dock thing sucks. My workaround is to permanently disable the dock (and the webcam's) mic device.
    - 4y ago
- christkv 4y ago
  Try out whereby.com the company is Norwegian as well so you avoid the ccp issues with zoom
  - vnm 4y ago
    +1 whereby is absolutely amazing, no-crap UX and great performance
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- rvnx 4y ago
  There is Google Hangouts and it works well The main "advantage" that I can see to prefer Zoom is that Zoom ("Zhumu") is considered by the authorities in China as safe, so it's not blocked there (which is convenient if you speak to people in China).
  - ISL 4y ago
    It may actually be a negative sign for security if the maintainers of the Great Firewall regard an application as safe.
- eastbound 4y ago
  WhereBy is no-login, no-plugin conferencing tool. Albeit expensive now (They’ve been jacking up the prices regularly and show no sign of stopping), but it is entirely possible to make extremely simple webconf UX.
- grumple 4y ago
  Ironic that you say this. I have a MacBook pro and the zoom application just wouldn't start successfully one day, reinstalling doesn't help. But the web version and other video apps work fine.
- benreesman 4y ago
  There is no panacea here that I’m aware of. We’ve been getting pretty good mileage out of a mix of Telegram, Discord, and Google Meet, all of which I prefer to Zoom, but none are crushing this and none are optimized for big video calls like Zoom is. Not surprisingly given it’s gamer heritage, Discord is slick and fast for many-party voice and the present/screen-share is better than I expected, but video chat needs work and there are other nags. I have somewhat high hopes for Telegram because it usually does things well or not at all, but I also wouldn’t want to try getting 20 people in a videoconference. I never liked in-person meetings with tons of people in the room, and one presenter, many listener video/screen broadcast is very achievable today without Zoom. Maybe it’s a hard UX problem because it’s a fundamentally flawed collaboration model, who knows.
  - bombcar 4y ago
    Zoom seems to be absolute tops in "join without having to fight with accounts" which is a huge feature.
- christophilus 4y ago
  I’m one of those who hates Zoom’s UX. They use dark patterns to try to trick you into installing rather than using the web client. And their web UI is… not great. I’ve had better experiences as an attendee on other software. (I think one was Gotomeeting). Works flawlessly in the browser. No dark patterns like the way Zoom tries to trick you into downloading their malware. And the interface was superior, in my opinion. No idea how good / bad the presenter UX is, though.
  - okamiueru 4y ago
    Wait. Is it possible to use the Web client? I asked external people who had set up a zoom meeting to reschedule on Google meet, because I couldn't for the life of me figure out how to use their web ui.
    - tomsmeding 4y ago
      It is possible, but it misses features. For example, the thing that I ran into recently is that web zoom cannot switch between multiple camera's of another person on the call -- e.g. if they have some fancy conference room setup.
    - kevincox 4y ago
      Yes. The join via web button should join after you click the regular "join" link once. If you don't have zoom installed it will just pop up not working then you can join via web. I also use https://addons.mozilla.org/en-CA/firefox/addon/zoom-redirector https://addons.mozilla.org/en-CA/firefox/addon/zoom-redirect... to fix up the URL automatically.
      - okamiueru 4y ago
        It's been a little while since then, but I remember downloading at least three executables, getting annoyed, And setting up a google meet event instead.
- designium 4y ago
  I just use Zoom with Chrome via browser. No need to install it.
  - fishywang 4y ago
    I only use Zoom with chrome (because I don't allow their apps anywhere near me) and they are just barely usable there. They made that very hard by pushing their desktop app. They also broke audio on Linux very often. Another long running bug is that after you've muted yourself in the meeting for long enough they start to think you did not give them microphone access and refuse to let you unmute yourself.
- tails4e 4y ago
  Yes, we're transition firm zoom to teams, and as we're engineers, I'll sorely miss the screen annotation feature which works so well. Teams just added active anntoation and it totally sucks, the presenter can't interact with the screen while annotation is on. Sweet jesus why do that?
  - rampatra 4y ago
    You can give Presentify (screen annotation) app on Mac a try and see how it works for you. Link: https://apps.apple.com/app/presentify/id1507246666 https://apps.apple.com/app/presentify/id1507246666 Disclosure: I made this app.
    - tails4e 4y ago
      How is interactive annotation handled? The zoom annotation let's amy meeting attendee annotate the presenters screen.
ajkjk 4y ago
It seems fine to me. Good, even. It's not crap like video chat apps used to be.
- atoav 4y ago
  As a media tech guy at an university: everybody keeps saying that, but most other systems we tried are also not crap like they used to be.
guiriduro 4y ago
> Stuff like this makes me downright angry. Why? Just uninstall Zoom.
- npteljes 4y ago
  That doesn't fix any of the problems OP has.
JumpCrisscross 4y ago
I install it on my iPad for video and otherwise dial in. Haven’t found the need to install it on my computer.
- beagle3 4y ago
  FYI, it also works on modern Chrome and Firefox (but not Safari last I checked). More CPU intensive and a few missing features compared to the native client - but does work, and even works well.
gfxgirl 4y ago
That's why I don't install the app. It works fine in the browser and I don't have to install anything.
- lokedhs 4y ago
  On the desktop perhaps, but I tried for the longest time to connect using a mobile browser and it just wouldn't let me. I ended up having to go to a computer to connect with using a browser.
  - hef19898 4y ago
    The anti pattern of forcing apps down tge throats of mobile users should be illegal. Looking at you LinkedIn, Instagram and those others I missed.
    - madeofpalk 4y ago
      No, it should not be illegal.
      - hef19898 4y ago
        Why not? So that tech companies can collect more data? Because I don't see any reason why browser solutions aren't viable in the age of overpowered smartphones and 5g networks.
        mhluongo 4y ago
        Just because you don't like something doesn't mean it should be illegal? Pretty obvious.
        hef19898 4y ago
        I gave you a reason why I think this pattern should be illegal under, e.g., the EU privacy laws. So what's your reason for believing it should be legal to force people to use an app tgat collects all kinda of tracking data about users over an equally fine browser solution?
amelius 4y ago
How did Zoom defeat Skype in terms of userbase?
- klausjensen 4y ago
  By Skype getting gradually worse with every release. It is mindboggling how it is WORSE than the Skype I used 15 years ago in every way I can think of.
- Arbortheus 4y ago
  It’s kind of incredible, Skype had a 10 year head-start and still lost. But really, much of Teams was built upon Skype, and that is the dominant market player by a long shot.
  - pier25 4y ago
    Teams is dominant? Do you have any source on that?
    - MiyamotoAkira 4y ago
      This graph did the rounds on Friday, comparing it to Slack on daily users: https://twitter.com/Carnage4Life/status/1558054445237149697?s=20&t=QzuciZmJ0MN9-SCZa58dWQ https://twitter.com/Carnage4Life/status/1558054445237149697?... The graph doesn't include Zoom or Google Meet, so is not a perfect representation.
  - int_19h 4y ago
    Why do you think that Teams was built on Skype? Technologically, even the stack is completely different.
    - mnw21cam 4y ago
      Until fairly recently, if you opened the PulseAudio volume control app while in a Teams call, the volume slider for the call would be labelled as Skype. That's a name that the sound-producing software hands to PulseAudio, and is reasonable evidence that Microsoft basically ripped the back-end out of Skype and shoved it into Teams and forgot to change what it thought its name was.
comboy 4y ago
It's a standard sequence for years now. Docker, rails, ring.. most popular things. Make it work anyhow, optimizing for best user experience, do all the bad things along. It gains popularity, some reasonable people join in making insides better. Then because of popularity it gets some scrutiny and some security holes are getting fixed. Of course, only those which could negatively impact its image. Sometimes you end up with something quite decent, sometimes there's no one with enough power in the company who can rebuild it properly and it's just trying to make a stone out of sh.t. If you are trying to do it properly from the start you are in a lost position. You need way more time, more money and better people to end up with something that looks the same for an average user (in most cases, for a few products it may pay off). You iterate more slowly, and you can be copied before you acquired enough user base. I hate it. Marketing wins over merit everywhere currently.
- shuntress 4y ago
  You are discounting the "merit" of simply existing. Bad software that solves my problem now is almost always going to beat great software that might eventually solve my problem.
  - comboy 4y ago
    Many people choose worse reward rather now than better reward later. It's rational in many contexts. The problem is that we are unable to jump out of these local minima. Just as in coding, when you have a problem and you're stuck, you look for a solution. But it's very hard to learn that there's some better solution to a problem that you've already solved.
  - int_19h 4y ago
    That depends on whether said bad software solves your problem now by creating even more problems in the future. For example, through lax security.
coffeeblack 4y ago
I never used Zoom. Why does Zoom need to be “installed”? Isn’t it a web application? There are many video chat sites, all free for small groups and without the need to trust some random company that wants to execute code on your machine.
- kibwen 4y ago
  It is a web app, there's no reason whatsoever to install the native version aside from the fact that the website uses dark patterns to obscure the existence of the web version.
  - smallerfish 4y ago
    The downloaded version has slightly different video processing to make you look better. It may be that it's not possible to do on webrtc.
  - tiagod 4y ago
    The native version is definitely more performant, from my experience.
- Arbortheus 4y ago
  Zoom actually has in-browser WebRTC support, but they make such a concerted effort to hide this option. I can only assume they have some kind of incentive for wanting people to install a client on their machine. Tracking, analytics, metadata, who knows? If when you join a call (without zoom installed) you click the download button, then let the zoom installer start downloading, then press the “I had problems installing” (or some phrasing to that effect) button, finally the join through the browser button appears. Yes, you have to download the zoom installer executable every time you want to join a call.
  - kevincox 4y ago
    The more a company insists that I must use their native app the more I am convinced that I should stick with the safe web-app. Also to make the join via web easier you can try something like https://addons.mozilla.org/en-CA/firefox/addon/zoom-redirector/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-CA/firefox/addon/zoom-redirect...
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
m-p-3 4y ago
I live somewhere where bilingualism is really strong and we need to offer simultaneous/live audio interpretation in both languages for some important meetings, and for now Zoom is mostly the best option on the market for that, nothing comes really close. We use Google Meet for everything but those meetings, because Google is still lacking on that aspect. At least they added breakout rooms and polls, but there's still work to do, like preconfiguring polls before the actual meeting takes place, etc.
imgabe 4y ago
Google Meet has never worked for me. Not once. Across many browsers, OSes whatever. It simply does not work. MS teams I think worked once. Skype is ok. Zoom works every time. Want people to use something else? Make a thing that works. Edit: if you have also had problems with everything besides Zoom have you also ever held a security clearance with the US government?
- fezfight 4y ago
  Not to be antagonistic, but what the hell is wrong with your computer? In the old days, we'd say PEBCAK.
  - imgabe 4y ago
    Honestly, no idea. People keep suggesting Google, so it must work for some people. But every time I try it, different computers, different locations, no matter what, it’s so laggy it’s unusable.
    - fezfight 4y ago
      Do yourself, friends and family a favour and stop trying on different computers. You're installing spyware on all those machines.
      - Kaze404 4y ago
        Google Meet is a browser app.
    - rnk 4y ago
      Sorry but it's likely something is messed up with your computer or your internet connection. It works for billions of people, something is off. Google meets is not some inherently not-working piece of software.
      - imgabe 4y ago
        Different computers, different internet connections, even in completely different parts of the world. Maybe Google just has a vendetta against me.
AuthorizedHelp 4y ago
pokstad 4y ago
I remember the first time I used Zoom years ago. I was interviewing with a company and they asked me to join a Zoom call. When I went to the website to install it, it seemed like a poorly branded product and I had this concern I was installing malware. When I opened it for the first time the UI felt mediocre and I was sure at the time that I had compromised my computer.

by frxx 4y ago

imron 4y ago

> but mostly they don't care Because the UX of other offerings is so poor and zoom for most part just works. I say this as someone who is aware of the security issues, but still prefer zoom over anything else.

Schroedingersat 4y ago
jitsi just worked every time i've used it
- lokedhs 4y ago
  Quite honestly I would be love to hear an argument as to why anyone would use zoom over jitsi. I'm not trying to be controversial, and I readily admits I've only used zoom maybe twice, but I saw nothing that was better than jitsi. I also had performance issues on zoom, but I'm willing to ignore that since most other people don't seem to mention those issue so that's probably on me.
  - Schroedingersat 4y ago
    Main downsides I knw of are a slightly worse codec, and in webrtc mode bandwidth needs to scale with participants so for large meetings you need to pay for hosting somehow. Neither are reasons not to use it as a default first option. Also matrix has voice and video now and there's big blue button.
    - lokedhs 4y ago
      I've never used voice in Matrix, but I was sure that it was implemented using Jitsi on the backend?
      - Schroedingersat 4y ago
        Element had a jitsi plugin i think. the matrix voice/video is new and i only used it once
  - fold3 4y ago
    My aunt that do remote conference a lot told me jitsi is slow and ureliable? She's not very tech savy so maybe she had a bad experience at the time when lockdown happen and the servers might have been overloaded.
  - Kwpolska 4y ago
    Previous job was using self-hosted Jitsi. And it was often a trainwreck, with random disconnections, terrible video quality (and we didn’t use it very often), some people ~always displaying "connection lost" even though we could hear each other fine, some people always having connection issues and being disconnected after a few seconds. Zoom and Teams are much more stable.
FrenchDevRemote 4y ago
how is it better than google meet? the few times I used zoom there always was problems with audio, camera or people struggled to join
- Apocryphon 4y ago
  Google Meet? Which one?
- ClassyJacket 4y ago
  Do you mean Google Meet, or Google Meet (Original), which are two seperate apps? Or were you you referring to Duo, which is also called Google Meet now. Or Hangouts, the other Google video chat app which also exists for some reason? Or Google Hangouts Meet, which also existed? Or Google Allo? It's better than Google Meet because Zoom won't shut itself down in 6 months, replace Zoom with a different app with a different name, change the name, change the name again, then shut that down and repeat the cycle 6 months later.
  - iainmerrick 4y ago
    Most people don’t actually care about or even notice that confusion. You go to meet.google.com and it works without too much hassle.
    - cerved 4y ago
      not on Firefox
    - lultimouomo 4y ago
      This is the one redeeming quality of Meet, and it's worth a lot. I can click on a link that was sent to me and all the essential videoconferencing stuff will just work in my browser. Also in Firefox, regardless of what sibling says (I use it regularly on Linux and macOS). This is a technical feat that somehiw still escapes most of the other videoconferencing platforms (except maybe Zoom, but then they try to hide it as much as possible).
Biganon 4y ago
But... Zoom's UX is absolutely terrible Half the options that should be on a meeting-basis are buried deep into the user settings, only accessible from the web interface, and they have confusing names and meanings. I've used lots of softwares, Zoom might be one of the worst when it comes to UX.
- aidos 4y ago
  It’s horrible. Especially if you’re doing screen sharing / scribbling on screens all day. “The zoom dance” is my term for people constantly pushing those stupid little floating windows about. We switched to zoom though because the performance was just better than anything (we tried a boat load of tools - but most of them were just shiny saas offerings on top of Chrome). Now I’m on an M1 it doesn’t matter as much, but zoom was the only thing that didn’t totally kill our machines before that.
  - hamburglar 4y ago
    The zoom dance is real. I very frequently find myself pushing things around in vain because I am only dedicating a portion of my brain to the task and I can never quite believe that it’s impossible to lay things out in a way that is actually usable. So there’s like a 5% mental cpu task that’s just constantly pushing things around due to this vague feeling that obviously I will find the better arrangement. It must be there, right? Zoom UI is horrendous. But it’s also not quite as bad as teams, and everyone has learned to cope with it. So it’s the best of an absolute shitpile. Teams will remain a complete joke to me as long as I am forced to play the “try to map initials to names” game in order to figure out who is talking. I don’t know my coworkers by their initials, Microsoft. I don’t know why you can’t just show me actual names. Meeting UI people: here is a list of questions that I find myself constantly asking myself: who is talking? Who just finished talking? Who is in this meeting? Who just joined? Who just left? If you waste an entire screen on nearly information-free user tiles and make me open a separate window to answer these types of questions (or they are impossible to answer), I hate you.
    - Kwpolska 4y ago
thesumofall 4y ago
Their UX seems really bad. E.g., they changed the default behavior of the title bar, auto-hide critical buttons such as mute/unmute, etc.
shaan7 4y ago
Yup. The thing I absolutely love about Zoom is how easy it is to switch between mics and output device. Every other conferencing tool needs you to go to Settings > Voice and then change it. With Zoom, just click the arrow next to the mute button, select device and voila!
- m1gu3l 4y ago
  Really don’t know why this setting isn’t always up front and center just like the mute button. With just the default audio interface i have a few options and a lot of us have more than just the default interface. While we are at it why can’t I control what audio interfaces are available to a specific program on a program by program basis? No, I will never want to use Steam Streaming Audio or my Oculus quest mic on a webex/zoom. Ever.
- MereInterest 4y ago
  I can't stand this feature, because it overrides my OS-level choice. If I select my headset as the microphone to use, then I expect it to be used. But Zoom might use a different microphone, so I need to change it there as well. In addition, even if I select "System default microphone", that doesn't always work correctly. As far as I can tell, that option doesn't mean to attach to the default source. Instead, it means to attach to the same source that is currently bound to the default source. If I change the default source later, Zoom doesn't get moved along with it.
  - wil421 4y ago
    Same issues here. I don’t care that my dock has a mic port that Zoom and Teams think they should automatically use. Use the damn system setting for my hardwired headset mic.
    - shaan7 4y ago
      Yeah the dock thing sucks. My workaround is to permanently disable the dock (and the webcam's) mic device.
  - 4y ago
christkv 4y ago
Try out whereby.com the company is Norwegian as well so you avoid the ccp issues with zoom
- vnm 4y ago
  +1 whereby is absolutely amazing, no-crap UX and great performance
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
rvnx 4y ago
There is Google Hangouts and it works well The main "advantage" that I can see to prefer Zoom is that Zoom ("Zhumu") is considered by the authorities in China as safe, so it's not blocked there (which is convenient if you speak to people in China).
- ISL 4y ago
  It may actually be a negative sign for security if the maintainers of the Great Firewall regard an application as safe.
eastbound 4y ago
WhereBy is no-login, no-plugin conferencing tool. Albeit expensive now (They’ve been jacking up the prices regularly and show no sign of stopping), but it is entirely possible to make extremely simple webconf UX.
grumple 4y ago
Ironic that you say this. I have a MacBook pro and the zoom application just wouldn't start successfully one day, reinstalling doesn't help. But the web version and other video apps work fine.
benreesman 4y ago
There is no panacea here that I’m aware of. We’ve been getting pretty good mileage out of a mix of Telegram, Discord, and Google Meet, all of which I prefer to Zoom, but none are crushing this and none are optimized for big video calls like Zoom is. Not surprisingly given it’s gamer heritage, Discord is slick and fast for many-party voice and the present/screen-share is better than I expected, but video chat needs work and there are other nags. I have somewhat high hopes for Telegram because it usually does things well or not at all, but I also wouldn’t want to try getting 20 people in a videoconference. I never liked in-person meetings with tons of people in the room, and one presenter, many listener video/screen broadcast is very achievable today without Zoom. Maybe it’s a hard UX problem because it’s a fundamentally flawed collaboration model, who knows.
- bombcar 4y ago
  Zoom seems to be absolute tops in "join without having to fight with accounts" which is a huge feature.
christophilus 4y ago
I’m one of those who hates Zoom’s UX. They use dark patterns to try to trick you into installing rather than using the web client. And their web UI is… not great. I’ve had better experiences as an attendee on other software. (I think one was Gotomeeting). Works flawlessly in the browser. No dark patterns like the way Zoom tries to trick you into downloading their malware. And the interface was superior, in my opinion. No idea how good / bad the presenter UX is, though.
- okamiueru 4y ago
  Wait. Is it possible to use the Web client? I asked external people who had set up a zoom meeting to reschedule on Google meet, because I couldn't for the life of me figure out how to use their web ui.
  - tomsmeding 4y ago
    It is possible, but it misses features. For example, the thing that I ran into recently is that web zoom cannot switch between multiple camera's of another person on the call -- e.g. if they have some fancy conference room setup.
  - kevincox 4y ago
    Yes. The join via web button should join after you click the regular "join" link once. If you don't have zoom installed it will just pop up not working then you can join via web. I also use https://addons.mozilla.org/en-CA/firefox/addon/zoom-redirector https://addons.mozilla.org/en-CA/firefox/addon/zoom-redirect... to fix up the URL automatically.
    - okamiueru 4y ago
      It's been a little while since then, but I remember downloading at least three executables, getting annoyed, And setting up a google meet event instead.
designium 4y ago
I just use Zoom with Chrome via browser. No need to install it.
- fishywang 4y ago
  I only use Zoom with chrome (because I don't allow their apps anywhere near me) and they are just barely usable there. They made that very hard by pushing their desktop app. They also broke audio on Linux very often. Another long running bug is that after you've muted yourself in the meeting for long enough they start to think you did not give them microphone access and refuse to let you unmute yourself.
tails4e 4y ago
Yes, we're transition firm zoom to teams, and as we're engineers, I'll sorely miss the screen annotation feature which works so well. Teams just added active anntoation and it totally sucks, the presenter can't interact with the screen while annotation is on. Sweet jesus why do that?
- rampatra 4y ago
  You can give Presentify (screen annotation) app on Mac a try and see how it works for you. Link: https://apps.apple.com/app/presentify/id1507246666 https://apps.apple.com/app/presentify/id1507246666 Disclosure: I made this app.
  - tails4e 4y ago
    How is interactive annotation handled? The zoom annotation let's amy meeting attendee annotate the presenters screen.

ajkjk 4y ago

It seems fine to me. Good, even. It's not crap like video chat apps used to be.

atoav 4y ago
As a media tech guy at an university: everybody keeps saying that, but most other systems we tried are also not crap like they used to be.

guiriduro 4y ago

> Stuff like this makes me downright angry. Why? Just uninstall Zoom.

npteljes 4y ago
That doesn't fix any of the problems OP has.

JumpCrisscross 4y ago

I install it on my iPad for video and otherwise dial in. Haven’t found the need to install it on my computer.

beagle3 4y ago
FYI, it also works on modern Chrome and Firefox (but not Safari last I checked). More CPU intensive and a few missing features compared to the native client - but does work, and even works well.

gfxgirl 4y ago

That's why I don't install the app. It works fine in the browser and I don't have to install anything.

lokedhs 4y ago
On the desktop perhaps, but I tried for the longest time to connect using a mobile browser and it just wouldn't let me. I ended up having to go to a computer to connect with using a browser.
- hef19898 4y ago
  The anti pattern of forcing apps down tge throats of mobile users should be illegal. Looking at you LinkedIn, Instagram and those others I missed.
  - madeofpalk 4y ago
    No, it should not be illegal.
    - hef19898 4y ago
      Why not? So that tech companies can collect more data? Because I don't see any reason why browser solutions aren't viable in the age of overpowered smartphones and 5g networks.
      - mhluongo 4y ago
        Just because you don't like something doesn't mean it should be illegal? Pretty obvious.
        hef19898 4y ago
        I gave you a reason why I think this pattern should be illegal under, e.g., the EU privacy laws. So what's your reason for believing it should be legal to force people to use an app tgat collects all kinda of tracking data about users over an equally fine browser solution?

amelius 4y ago

How did Zoom defeat Skype in terms of userbase?

klausjensen 4y ago
By Skype getting gradually worse with every release. It is mindboggling how it is WORSE than the Skype I used 15 years ago in every way I can think of.
Arbortheus 4y ago
It’s kind of incredible, Skype had a 10 year head-start and still lost. But really, much of Teams was built upon Skype, and that is the dominant market player by a long shot.
- pier25 4y ago
  Teams is dominant? Do you have any source on that?
  - MiyamotoAkira 4y ago
    This graph did the rounds on Friday, comparing it to Slack on daily users: https://twitter.com/Carnage4Life/status/1558054445237149697?s=20&t=QzuciZmJ0MN9-SCZa58dWQ https://twitter.com/Carnage4Life/status/1558054445237149697?... The graph doesn't include Zoom or Google Meet, so is not a perfect representation.
- int_19h 4y ago
  Why do you think that Teams was built on Skype? Technologically, even the stack is completely different.
  - mnw21cam 4y ago
    Until fairly recently, if you opened the PulseAudio volume control app while in a Teams call, the volume slider for the call would be labelled as Skype. That's a name that the sound-producing software hands to PulseAudio, and is reasonable evidence that Microsoft basically ripped the back-end out of Skype and shoved it into Teams and forgot to change what it thought its name was.

comboy 4y ago

It's a standard sequence for years now. Docker, rails, ring.. most popular things. Make it work anyhow, optimizing for best user experience, do all the bad things along. It gains popularity, some reasonable people join in making insides better. Then because of popularity it gets some scrutiny and some security holes are getting fixed. Of course, only those which could negatively impact its image. Sometimes you end up with something quite decent, sometimes there's no one with enough power in the company who can rebuild it properly and it's just trying to make a stone out of sh.t. If you are trying to do it properly from the start you are in a lost position. You need way more time, more money and better people to end up with something that looks the same for an average user (in most cases, for a few products it may pay off). You iterate more slowly, and you can be copied before you acquired enough user base. I hate it. Marketing wins over merit everywhere currently.

shuntress 4y ago
You are discounting the "merit" of simply existing. Bad software that solves my problem now is almost always going to beat great software that might eventually solve my problem.
- comboy 4y ago
  Many people choose worse reward rather now than better reward later. It's rational in many contexts. The problem is that we are unable to jump out of these local minima. Just as in coding, when you have a problem and you're stuck, you look for a solution. But it's very hard to learn that there's some better solution to a problem that you've already solved.
- int_19h 4y ago
  That depends on whether said bad software solves your problem now by creating even more problems in the future. For example, through lax security.

coffeeblack 4y ago

I never used Zoom. Why does Zoom need to be “installed”? Isn’t it a web application? There are many video chat sites, all free for small groups and without the need to trust some random company that wants to execute code on your machine.

kibwen 4y ago
It is a web app, there's no reason whatsoever to install the native version aside from the fact that the website uses dark patterns to obscure the existence of the web version.
- smallerfish 4y ago
  The downloaded version has slightly different video processing to make you look better. It may be that it's not possible to do on webrtc.
- tiagod 4y ago
  The native version is definitely more performant, from my experience.
Arbortheus 4y ago
Zoom actually has in-browser WebRTC support, but they make such a concerted effort to hide this option. I can only assume they have some kind of incentive for wanting people to install a client on their machine. Tracking, analytics, metadata, who knows? If when you join a call (without zoom installed) you click the download button, then let the zoom installer start downloading, then press the “I had problems installing” (or some phrasing to that effect) button, finally the join through the browser button appears. Yes, you have to download the zoom installer executable every time you want to join a call.
- kevincox 4y ago
  The more a company insists that I must use their native app the more I am convinced that I should stick with the safe web-app. Also to make the join via web easier you can try something like https://addons.mozilla.org/en-CA/firefox/addon/zoom-redirector/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-CA/firefox/addon/zoom-redirect...

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

m-p-3 4y ago

I live somewhere where bilingualism is really strong and we need to offer simultaneous/live audio interpretation in both languages for some important meetings, and for now Zoom is mostly the best option on the market for that, nothing comes really close. We use Google Meet for everything but those meetings, because Google is still lacking on that aspect. At least they added breakout rooms and polls, but there's still work to do, like preconfiguring polls before the actual meeting takes place, etc.

imgabe 4y ago

Google Meet has never worked for me. Not once. Across many browsers, OSes whatever. It simply does not work. MS teams I think worked once. Skype is ok. Zoom works every time. Want people to use something else? Make a thing that works. Edit: if you have also had problems with everything besides Zoom have you also ever held a security clearance with the US government?

fezfight 4y ago
Not to be antagonistic, but what the hell is wrong with your computer? In the old days, we'd say PEBCAK.
- imgabe 4y ago
  Honestly, no idea. People keep suggesting Google, so it must work for some people. But every time I try it, different computers, different locations, no matter what, it’s so laggy it’s unusable.
  - fezfight 4y ago
    Do yourself, friends and family a favour and stop trying on different computers. You're installing spyware on all those machines.
    - Kaze404 4y ago
      Google Meet is a browser app.
  - rnk 4y ago
    Sorry but it's likely something is messed up with your computer or your internet connection. It works for billions of people, something is off. Google meets is not some inherently not-working piece of software.
    - imgabe 4y ago
      Different computers, different internet connections, even in completely different parts of the world. Maybe Google just has a vendetta against me.

AuthorizedHelp 4y ago

pokstad 4y ago

I remember the first time I used Zoom years ago. I was interviewing with a company and they asked me to join a Zoom call. When I went to the website to install it, it seemed like a poorly branded product and I had this concern I was installing malware. When I opened it for the first time the UI felt mediocre and I was sure at the time that I had compromised my computer.