zlacker

Zoom was proved as being dishonest and untrustworthy years ago (https://citizenlab.ca/2020/04/move-fast-roll-your-own-crypto...) but companies never cared about the privacy of the people they forced to use the software and all the security problems and leaks that followed still didn't discourage people from using it. I doubt their mining of personal data for AI will stop people from using it either.

Although there are a ton of alternatives out there they are all "too hard" or something, so since Zoom mostly works OK most of the time and is dead simple to use it will continue to win out over everything else.

My position on Zoom hasn't changed since 2020: Anyone using Zoom will continue to get exactly what they deserve.

>>autoex+(OP)
Well, there's a couple of reasons that people use it:

1) Until recently, Zoom's video/audio quality knocked everyone else's into a cocked hat. I don't think that's the case, anymore. Looks like a lot of folks got off their butts, and improved their quality, but I haven't seen this mentioned anywhere, by anyone.

2) Everyone else is using it.

#2 is a biggie. Monopoly inertia is pretty hard to overcome, for people not in the tech industry (we'll change on a whim).

Zoom is not easy to use. Its settings are a mess, but everyone is used to dealing with the Zoom pain, and don't want to switch.

We can be remarkably cavalier in dismissing non-tech folks, but I learned to stop doing that, many years ago. We're not the only smart people in the world.

People (in general) don't like getting sidetracked by their tools. They want to get a job done, and how they get it done is not irrelevant, but not that important to them. They develop and refine a workflow, which is usually heavily informed by their choice of tools, and that "wears a groove." They don't want to switch grooves; even if they are not enjoying their tool.

Most tech folks, on the other hand love tools. I had an employee that would stop his main project, and design a massive subsystem, just to make a simple command-line process a few seconds shorter. I had to keep on my toes. He was the best engineer I've ever worked with, but it was a chore to keep him focused.

Non-tech types are seldom like that, and we can sometimes miss it.

These are the folks that use our products, and we don't actually gain anything by disrespecting them, even when they really piss us off.

TL;DR: Want people to stop using Zoom? Produce something better, and make it something that non-tech folks will love.

That means easy to use, forget-about-it UX, and extremely high quality.

>>autoex+(OP)
> they are all "too hard" or something

Users vote with their feet based on cost and UX. While intertia is certainly a thing, there's a reason Zoom got a foothold while others didn't. The ability to send out links and having people join the meeting without creating accounts or manually installing clients first is huge in most real-world scenarios. Could you do that with... Teams? Skype? Hangouts if they weren't gmail users? Do those people know anyone with the knowledge and gumption to host something?

From the beginning of my involvement in FOSS like 25 years ago, developers have griped about non-technical users being intimidated, or even just really annoyed by UX resistance that we consider trivial. That's the primary reasons open source alternatives are alternatives rather than the standard in user-facing software.

>>ChrisM+Ib
What video platforms do you think improved their audio quality to be comparable to Zoom? Meet certainly hasn't, their noise cancelling is awful and isn't going to get better as long as they're stuck in the browser. (I'm fine with browser performance 99% of the time, but when I'm spending hours a day on calls I'm going to prefer Zoom and native-quality audio processing)

>>chefan+Fd
[The ability to send out links and having people join the meeting without creating accounts or manually installing clients first is huge in most real-world scenarios ]

this is how it used to be, until HTTPS and cloudflare-like hosting solutions, were guzzled back like electric kool-aid. all you really needed was an IP and perhaps a port number if endpoint was behind NAT.

>>nightp+Yg
I never liked Meet.

I was thinking of Bluejeans and Teams. GoToMeeting seems to have improved a lot, as well. WebEx is doing much better, but I have only used Bluejeans and Teams, in the last couple of years.

>>nightp+Yg
For some reason noise cancellation in Meet is gated by the tier of Google Workspace you’re on, it’s available on the $12/mo/user plan, but not on the $6 one.

This has always struck me as a weird business/product choice, since I imagine most users simply don’t know about this, assume Meet is just bad, and use other products, rather than having the idea to upgrade for better audio quality.

>>autoex+(OP)
Let's also not forget that Zoom's internal processes and engineering standards for security were so poor that Apple implemented the rarely-used malware removal tool, because they screwed up their client software so badly:

https://techcrunch.com/2019/07/10/apple-silent-update-zoom-a...

https://www.theverge.com/2019/7/10/20689644/apple-zoom-web-s...

https://www.macrumors.com/2019/07/10/apple-update-remove-zoo...

>>nightp+Yg
WebEx certainly is.

>>rolph+Js
I worked in technical support when techniques like that were de rigeur. Your average adult would be exponentially less likely to navigate that process successfully than a zoom invite. Sure, it's more simple from a technical perspective, but not even close to as simple from a user flow standpoint.

>>ChrisM+Ib
Not to mention other super-important features like background blurring. It has very recently become available with in-browser solutions, but still not exactly on par, and with less options (e.g. no green screen support). That alone justifies using Zoom.

>>chefan+hP
I notice in these comments it’s really hard to drive home User Experience and friction (sometimes!) and what seems easy to you (just an IP address!) is really like talking magic to your average user.

>>chefan+Fd
You can do that in Google Meet. I just checked in an incognito window, the only thing I needed to enter to join a meeting was a name.

I never really understood why people like Zoom's UX, I find it unintuitive and awkward.

>>prox+vw1
Yeah, and that makes sense to some extent. We often understand that it's hard to think like someone without our knowledge when writing docs for other developers, and that's more extreme with end users. The hubris is what kills me, though. Empathy is hard, but developers tend to be so arrogant and dismissive, sometimes even disgusted by others not knowing what they know. It's kind of funny: on one hand, many people in tech-- developers, ops, IT, etc.-- have an intense feeling of superiority based on their knowledge, but act like people without that knowledge are imbeciles.

Even worse, it tends to go hand-in-hand with astonishing overconfidence in their understanding of other fields. I've had two other primary careers-- designer, and chef-- and I can't count how many developers have "explained" parts of those fields to me despite knowing I'm a subject matter expert. Like their astonishing intellect and that related Metafilter thread they skimmed makes them authoritative. I get supernova-intensity cringe when I hear other developers shoot off Dunning-Kruger-esque oversimplifications of other fields' genuinely hard problems.

When I hear developers talk about the arrogance of designers, I can't help but laugh... then maybe cry. Many seem genuinely aggrieved that interface designers have more input on the interface design than they do.

>>bspamm+hL1
Smart update. At the beginning of the pandemic-- the most critical time for Zoom's ramp-up-- Google Meet was only available to Google Workspace users. Their userbase is currently about half of Zoom's, which is a pretty impressive ramp-up. Looks like users have voted with their feet to put it in that position, but that's where intertia does actually make a difference. People aren't constantly evaluating all of their options to see which one works best in case they should switch; they use whatever solution works best when they're evaluating solutions and then stick with that until there's a problem or someone informs them of something better with minimal switching cost.

>>ChrisM+Ib
I find that the issue with "Produce something better, and make it something that non-tech folks will love." is just that you get the "Twitter to Threads" sort of thing where you still have the centralized / walled garden / new boss same as the old boss problem.

Or you inherently can't make it "forget about it UX and extremely high quality" as most non techies define it. Because you have the issue that even if a company self hosts a meeting tool, they likely can't get the backbone connections Zoom etc can get. They at least need someone to use a URL to get there. It can be made mostly simple, but then you're back to some company running it - works for corporate use maybe, not for your home user. Even Signal lags compared to Zoom. And people really dislike Signal's phone number requirement, but it's what makes it somewhat possible to route connections for users.

What's a system that a home person could use that's not going to get them routing through one companies servers, but is actually simple enough to use?

The place where I do get somewhat exasperated as a techie is that the equivalent of asking for a phone number or address in any program that isn't an e-mail website is seen as "too hard". This makes pretty much any privacy respecting design impossible to scale beyond nerds.

>>prox+vw1
Those in HN even today continue to echo the famous Dropbox comment with gusto.

>>satvik+pb3
Indeed