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Stop using Zoom, Hamburg’s data protection agency warns state government

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Re: Stop using Zoom, Hamburg’s data protection agency warns state government

#141

Post by ratww »

taf2 wrote: post #114
KronisLV wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Offer a comparable alternative, then Here's a few: - https://meet.jit.si/ which you can also self host https://github.com/jitsi - https://bigbluebutton.org/ which you can also self host https://github.com/bigbluebutton I've found that they're especially useful, when integrated with Rocket.Chat https://rocket.chat/ which you can also self host https://github.com/RocketChat That way you have an experience that's a lo…

I like your line reasoning… but the problem with video conferencing isn’t really technical- IMO it’s all about the User experience (UX). Zoom by far beats the competition in this regard. It’s UI could be better but compared the mess of competitors it’s far more straightforward … just my opinion…

I don't think Zoom "beats" anyone in UX, especially with the dark patterns. They're just popular. I've seen countless times hundreds of people unable to activate the "Computer Audio" option on company-wide meetings because it's in a secondary tab with zero-affordance. Recently they made it very hard to find the "gallery mode" icon (you have to hover a dark area). They also make it borderline impossible to open it on the browser, forcing multiple reloads or whatnot (the method it changes all the time). Honestly Jitsi, BBB and even Teams are all better IMO.

Re: Stop using Zoom, Hamburg’s data protection agency warns state government

#142

Post by artursapek »

acdha wrote: post #123
sombremesa wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Zoom has fixed the UX in this business, which is the one thing that matters most™, and which is why they will continue to be successful. It's like a restaurant which has the absolute best food by a mile, so they remain in business despite the cockroaches and unfriendly waitstaff. Most customers don't really care about privacy and security, they just want to pretend, and as long as they can easily pretend they're happ…

Which UX problem do you think it fixed? If I had to rate by the ability to successfully start a call and not have technical issues interrupt it, I'd rank Zoom, Teams, Slack, and Google Meet roughly equivalent — the quality isn't as good or robust as Facetime but that's also not designed for meetings or cross-platform. I'd accept Google self-selecting out of the market with their incoherent messaging strategy but that…

The reason Zoom won is their meeting URLs which open their app, combined with no registration requirement. It's just a very viral product.

Re: Stop using Zoom, Hamburg’s data protection agency warns state government

#143

Post by ratww »

saurik wrote: post #90
KronisLV wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Offer a comparable alternative, then Here's a few: - https://meet.jit.si/ which you can also self host https://github.com/jitsi - https://bigbluebutton.org/ which you can also self host https://github.com/bigbluebutton I've found that they're especially useful, when integrated with Rocket.Chat https://rocket.chat/ which you can also self host https://github.com/RocketChat That way you have an experience that's a lo…

AdmiralAsshat's point was that all of the alternatives sucked because they were difficult or flakey to use: they weren't "comparable". Notably, the alternatives being mentioned as non-comparable weren't even trying to be local: they were remote service/ (which if you think Zoom is particularly bad, is still an improvement) built by giant companies that have tons of resources to have an army working on just these tool…

I disagree that alternatives are flakey or difficult to use. If anything it's the opposite. I use BBB daily (and sometimes Jitsi) with a very varied group (including people who never had a computer before) and the results are much better than with Zoom. Maybe Zoom is intuitive if you grew up with computers and with bad software, but honestly the quasi-requirement of installation (it's non-trivial to use the web version) and the dark patterns galore are hard to navigate for non-techy people.

Re: Stop using Zoom, Hamburg’s data protection agency warns state government

#144

Post by netr0ute »

CabSauce wrote: post #128
sombremesa wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Zoom has fixed the UX in this business, which is the one thing that matters most™, and which is why they will continue to be successful. It's like a restaurant which has the absolute best food by a mile, so they remain in business despite the cockroaches and unfriendly waitstaff. Most customers don't really care about privacy and security, they just want to pretend, and as long as they can easily pretend they're happ…

Really? Their UI/UX within a call is the worst of the major video conferencing tools, IMO.

I think it's because we power users want more from a UI, but to Average Joe, Zoom is great because all the simple stuff is easy to understand.

Re: Stop using Zoom, Hamburg’s data protection agency warns state government

#145

Post by yibg »

baja_blast wrote: post #14
AdmiralAsshat wrote: post #6

Offer a comparable alternative, then. I spend half my day on meetings either internally or with clients, and every time I have to jump on a client meeting with Microsoft Teams/Google Hangouts/WebEx/GotoMeeting because their company bans Zoom, it's a recipe for a fruitless meeting. Someone will fumble the sharing controls; screens will take forever to present; at least one person's microphone will become inaudible, st…

As someone how uses both Zoom and Google Hangouts, there is nothing Zoom offers that Google hangouts does not provide. The quality is the same for both, but at least Hangouts does not install a sketchy client on my machine that constantly runs in the background.

Screen sharing on hangout (a year or so ago) has been terrible for me, especially for text dense screens like code. Pair programming on hangouts I can't even read the other person's code a lot of the time. Also hangout quality for video and audio drops really fast on relatively poor quality network. I've had a few cases where the quality on hangout was too poor so we switch over to zoom.

Re: Stop using Zoom, Hamburg’s data protection agency warns state government

#146

Post by azalemeth »

AdmiralAsshat wrote: post #6

Offer a comparable alternative, then. I spend half my day on meetings either internally or with clients, and every time I have to jump on a client meeting with Microsoft Teams/Google Hangouts/WebEx/GotoMeeting because their company bans Zoom, it's a recipe for a fruitless meeting. Someone will fumble the sharing controls; screens will take forever to present; at least one person's microphone will become inaudible, st…

I very much agree with this.

Zoom may be terrible from a security point of view; I dislike the fact that I may well have installed spyware on my machines; and I have absolutely no idea why in the nine hells the Android version complains that my phone is rooted (it should exist in a chroot!) but --- despite all of that --- it works.

Teams, in particular comparison, is like DIY dentistry with kitchen implements as surgical tools. It lags; it doesn't have a native client on any devices and turns them all into heaters; its codecs are nowhere near as good, and it can't display as many people on screen at one point in time -- and there's no private chat. I understand on one level why most organisations seem to want to force their staff to use Teams – it's "free" (if you already pay the microsoft tax) and comes with the corporation (±NSA) being the spying overlord, rather than "E2EE" (+China). However, I completely also understand why most users prefer Zoom. Frankly, I do too!

Re: Stop using Zoom, Hamburg’s data protection agency warns state government

#147

Post by ubermonkey »

AdmiralAsshat wrote: post #6

Offer a comparable alternative, then. I spend half my day on meetings either internally or with clients, and every time I have to jump on a client meeting with Microsoft Teams/Google Hangouts/WebEx/GotoMeeting because their company bans Zoom, it's a recipe for a fruitless meeting. Someone will fumble the sharing controls; screens will take forever to present; at least one person's microphone will become inaudible, st…

I've been a heavy user of GoToMeeting for over a decade. It works very, very well for us, and our use case is entirely multi-org meetings.

If someone has shitty home internet (a COVID-era problem), then they should probably dial in separately and not use the meeting audio, but that's going to hurt you no matter what meeting tool you use.

Re: Stop using Zoom, Hamburg’s data protection agency warns state government

#148

Post by gtsteve »

caseydm wrote: post #75

Anybody else prefer Google meet over zoom lately? I feel like it's a cleaner layout.

I'll give it another shot, but every time I do I'm not impressed.

I'd love to use Google Meet and save some money but the audio and video quality looks like a cheap trick compared to Zoom. My users complain endlessly about this. We discovered Zoom a few years back because we were desperate to get away from Hangouts.

I expect their client does a lot of work around clearing up audio and similar whereas you'd need to do that on the server-side (and accept the lag) for Google Meet unless you can use WebAsm to clean up the audio stream possibly. I don't know if developers have that access.

I guess Google could solve this but it would require some considerable resources. I think this is one of those situations where video calls are a hobby for Google but they're the entire business for Zoom.

Re: Stop using Zoom, Hamburg’s data protection agency warns state government

#149

Post by 8ytecoder »

cannabis_sam wrote: post #121

I feel like I live in a bizzaro world... First, I’ve been working remotely over skype, audio-only, for over a decade. Yet in 2020 and with the emergence of zoom, it’s suddenly become an expectation that everyone is incessantly and awkwardly staring at each other through screens for the whole workday. Second, the few times I’ve used Zoom it’s been absolutely garbage, with video and sound dropping or just not there (th…

I don't know - my company/team (except for one or two instances of introductions) never expect us to turn on video. Some people do; other don't; just do your thing. Turning on the video is especially hard on women. From what I have heard from friends they have to get ready and put on makeup as if they're going to work simply because they're expected to be on zoom video all day long.

Re: Stop using Zoom, Hamburg’s data protection agency warns state government

#150

Post by rand_r »

aqme28 wrote: post #105
rand_r wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sorry, but Hangouts is terrible. It sucks on every level. The UI is so bad it's hard to believe. I wish I could sit down with their product team to get an explanation for how badly Hangouts is designed. Takes about 10s to see all the problems with it compared to Zoom.

Can you be more specific about the UI problems? It seems pretty equivalent to Zoom to me.

Two words: Gallery view.

Like what in the actual fuck. How are they unable to do a simple grid properly? It’s just rectangles. The UI is there to copy from Zoom even.

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