Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

A theory of Zoom fatigue

theconvivialsociety.substack.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 213 posts

Re: A theory of Zoom fatigue

#141

Post by Wowfunhappy »

londons_explore wrote: post #133
saurik wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Landlines were so fast and so "direct" in their latency (where distance correlates very directly with time, due to a lack of "hops") that local phone calls were faster than the speed of sound across a table, and for a bit after they came out--before people generally got used to seemingly random latency--local calls felt "intimate", like as if you were talking to someone in bed with their head right next to you; I als…

You should note that most landlines have significantly more delay than they used to have 50 years ago. All landlines now get digitised and packetized, and usually go over an IP network, frequently via the landline companies HQ hundreds of miles away, before heading back to your neighbours house who you were calling... Data is the same - If I ping my next door neighbor, from my broadband connection to his, it goes via…

> Data is the same - If I ping my next door neighbor, from my broadband connection to his, it goes via London (my ISP's headquarters) and Manchester (his ISP's headquarters) before coming back to him, with a round trip latency of >20ms. In sound terms, that delay is like him standing in the next room over.

I feel like that would be enough to be basically perfect, though. If only we could cut down on everything else in the chain adding its own latency.

Re: A theory of Zoom fatigue

#142

Post by ubermonkey »

dylan604 wrote: post #40
lostdog wrote: post #18

Lots of normal things about human interaction are broken in Zoom meetings. * You can't have a normal conversation with that much delay. Every time you talk you're probably interrupting someone, and that starts to wear on you. * You can't have any side chats with your neighbors before and after the meeting, making everyone seem less like a person. * You can't tell who's looking at you, so you always feel like you have…

So why the fixation on a video call? I'm probably just an old curmudgeon, but to me the benefits do not out weigh the oddities being discussed. Everyone wearing their pieces of flair with their "personalized" backgrounds are tiresome. I can see the benefits of a screen share/presentation, but I really don't need to see the other people involved. I don't care about tone of voice. I get sarcasm. For the people that don…

I have absolutely no use for videoconferencing professionally (and I work remotely, and have for nearly 20 years), but in the era of Corona I find we're doing Facetime or Zoom with friends and family for social reasons, and enjoying it for the most part.

I still find a video call more draining than physical interaction, but in the absence of the latter I'll take this in order to visit with our friends. We have a standing Friday happy hour with 2 other couples we used to see "in real life" all the time, and we look forward to it. My cycling group has taken to setting up "training Zooms" we can join so we can all suffer together on our indoor trainers, and that's nice, too.

What's interesting to me is that, now that video calling is becoming more mainstream, I wonder how much of it will stay after Corona, and how that will affect long-distance friendships.

Re: A theory of Zoom fatigue

#143

Post by noirbot »

ken wrote: post #140
zdragnar wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could it be an issue with microphones or speaker quality? My fully remote team has used zoom for all of our meetings, and unless someone is calling in from a cell phone in a busy area, I don't recall a time when I have had difficulty understanding someone. If anything, the fact that everyone has their own microphone makes it better than in person meetings, because you never have to struggle with that one person who d…

It’s possible, but then why is it $1000 smartphones are struggling with this, and $5 landline phones from 1993 did just fine? Did Apple skimp on audio hardware that bad? That’s a little hard to believe.

My guess would be that most people calling in to a call on Zoom from their phone are leaving it on speakerphone and not holding it up to their ear/mouth like you would with an old land-line phone. Opening up an omni-directional mic that has to pick up someone from 1-2 feet away from their mouth is a lot different than an old-school phone that you pick up and hold an inch away from your lips.

You're not paying Apple $1000 for a microphone on a stick when you buy an iPhone, you're buying a computer that has a tiny microphone that works well enough for most normal phone calls to your doctor or whichever. If you care about audio quality as a foremost feature, you do what business people have been doing for years and buy a wireless headset/in-ear with a directional mic that's built for comfort and tuned to pick up audio in the exact distance range of your ear to your mouth.

Re: A theory of Zoom fatigue

#144

Post by alharith »

lostdog wrote: post #18

Lots of normal things about human interaction are broken in Zoom meetings. * You can't have a normal conversation with that much delay. Every time you talk you're probably interrupting someone, and that starts to wear on you. * You can't have any side chats with your neighbors before and after the meeting, making everyone seem less like a person. * You can't tell who's looking at you, so you always feel like you have…

> * You can't tell who's looking at you, so you always feel like you have to remain presentable and vigilant.

Feel free to hit that "Turn off Video" button from time to time. I make liberal use of it.

Re: A theory of Zoom fatigue

#145

Post by Wowfunhappy »

gmtx725 wrote: post #87
stainforth wrote: post #17

I was on a partially-remote team for years, with bi-weekly team conference calls - webcam was possible but we all never used it, not even the manager. Screenshare was used for presentations. But audio was enough. Why is everyone defaulting to video calls for things? It adds so much "noise" and cognitive load on things.

1. Body language- it's important to be able to see people's facial expressions etc to gauge their reactions to things you're saying 2. Avoiding interrupting one another- being able to see other people's faces means you can see when they're about to start speaking. That means you're less likely to talk over each other 3. Keeping focused- for me at least. If i'm on an audio only call i'm tempted to zone out or do some…

> 1. Body language- it's important to be able to see people's facial expressions etc to gauge their reactions to things you're saying

> 2. Avoiding interrupting one another- being able to see other people's faces means you can see when they're about to start speaking. That means you're less likely to talk over each other

Do you find this works in practice?

I don't think your average video call setup is good enough for it to make a difference. There's no eye contact, video quality is usually questionable, etc.

If I was a professional negotiator who knew how to read body language in an academic sense, then maybe I could get some use out of video calls. But I don't think I'm able to get the "instinctual" benefits.

Re: A theory of Zoom fatigue

#146

Post by wenc »

amelius wrote: post #69
StefanKarpinski wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That and you’re constantly struggling to decipher audio and make yourself understood. Much like talking in a bar that’s too loud is exhausting. A lot of the exhaustion seems like it’s the difficulty of compensating for a high latency, low-bandwidth, low quality experience. We’re just not evolved for it—reality is the opposite of all of those things.

I get a similar kind of exhaustion when talking to assistants like Siri.

Siri has a huge latency problem. I say "Hey Siri" and its' precious seconds before she's listening (articles online tell us that it's possible to just ask the entire question without waiting for the beep -- but doesn't work, sometimes Siri's just not ready.). Someone at Apple clearly needs to reengineer Siri -- I say this as someone who's bought into the Apple ecosystem.

Siri is the like the Apple Maps of voice assistants.

Alexa (at least Echo gen 3) doesn't have this delay. I can talk with Alexa without getting frustrated at the latency. (unfortunately Alexa doesn't handle pauses or stumbles in sentences well)

Re: A theory of Zoom fatigue

#147

Post by cosmodisk »

To me, physical meetings are as draining as the ones using zoom. If it's a meeting,where you just sip coffee, listen to others who do all the taking,then it's easy, however beimg actively involved in a convo,while trying to come up with some useful stuff,can be draining.

Re: A theory of Zoom fatigue

#148

Post by rootusrootus »

stainforth wrote: post #17

I was on a partially-remote team for years, with bi-weekly team conference calls - webcam was possible but we all never used it, not even the manager. Screenshare was used for presentations. But audio was enough. Why is everyone defaulting to video calls for things? It adds so much "noise" and cognitive load on things.

We do standups on video because we have a team split between the west coast of the US and Hyderabad. We get to see teammates from the other office once every couple years maybe, so we use video to maintain a personal connection. We've found it really helps us work better as a team.

So I'd say it's really situational. I'd prefer not to try and coordinate development sprints between two sub-teams offset by 12.5 hours from each other, but if I can't avoid that, then it sure helps to see faces to keep people feeling connected.

Obviously everyone will have their own personal experience. This is what worked for us.

Re: A theory of Zoom fatigue

#150

Post by skyros »

Long time lurker, first time commenter.

The original post and the comments here are interesting and intriguing, but many points raised here (a) assume that the initial proposition is in fact true, and (b) don't ask as to what evidence is available in support of the proposition (or indeed whether there is evidence that might appear to contradict it) beyond our own individual experience:

'Why is video-conferencing so exhausting?'

This is not to say that Zoom (etc.) isn't tiring to use, simply that it's sensible first to ask questions such as:

- is it particularly tiring to use? How do we know? - if Zoom etc. is particularly tiring, for what proportion of users is this the case? - are some types of users more affected than others? Why? - is fatigue related specifically to video (as opposed to audio) use? - is fatigue related to the number of concurrent users in a given call? - is all video-conferencing similarly tiring, or are some platforms more so than others, and if so, why? UI? Latency? Some other reason? - are Zoom meetings any more tiring than traditional face-to-face meetings? - etc.

Post reply on HN