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A theory of Zoom fatigue

theconvivialsociety.substack.com

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Re: A theory of Zoom fatigue

#51

Post by jsilence »

rhplus wrote: post #48

I find leaving a call to be difficult. In the real world, someone just “dropping in” to a meeting room can nod, wave, or gesture to say hi, find the right moment to enter the conversation, make a point and then leave with the same nod, wave or gesture. You can’t do that on a video call without either seeming rude (“Foo has left the call”) or breaking the main conversation flow (“Hey everyone, I’m gonna leave now”). I…

I usually leave message in the chat like "sorry, gotta go" and wave into the camera when exiting.

Don't have the impression that this is disrupting the conversation too much.

Re: A theory of Zoom fatigue

#52

Post by mixonEPA »

ars wrote: post #20
solidasparagus wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You do curls on video?

I'm not the person you replied to, but I never turn on my video.

Do you ever feel pressured to turn it on when everyone else in the call has their video on? I know I do and it's something I need to work on cause I find myself more productive and engage with the camera off for myself.

Re: A theory of Zoom fatigue

#53

Post by smilespray »

ryandrake wrote: post #35

“Kevin, you’re muted. Unmute and say that again, please” “Sara, your voice cut out for 30 seconds and we didn’t hear any of that, can you please repeat?” Two people talking: “Bfrhtxhlcyfoydoyd... oh, you go ahead” “no, you go ahead” “OK like I was saying, cofhlflydhlbdfykdjtxtc...” “Hang on, I think Kumar just disconnected. We need him to continue.” “Can someone text Kumar and see if he can rejoin?” “I can’t see more…

Yup, that's pretty much every videoconference meeting.

Re: A theory of Zoom fatigue

#54

Post by qppo »

ken wrote: post #33

I’m surprised this didn’t mention the elephant in the room: the audio quality is terrible. I simply can’t hear half of what is said, even at full volume in a quiet room. Either I ask for repetition all the time (and walk over whatever the next person said), or I assume it from context and let it go. Even when I can pick up all the sounds, it’s so different from hearing voice in person that I have to concentrate just…

The only thing really terrible is their (lack of) echo cancellation. Otherwise I'm about 90% sure it's just off the shelf OPUS with next to no DSP on top. It's not that bad on its own.

What is terrible is audio hardware on laptops. MacBooks are alright, but just $50 on a headset will go a long ways to solving your problems. Consumers haven't given a shit about audio fidelity for decades honestly, it's just showing today when you are listening to unprocessed audio streams that haven't been optimized for your laptop or phone's fundamentally inferior transducers.

This is a solved problem, for what it's worth. The major audio manufacturers sell products for these use cases. It's not the software at this point, it's actually decent. It's the input and output devices. Thank god for gamers buying these things and driving economies of scale.

Re: A theory of Zoom fatigue

#55

Post by ars »

mixonEPA wrote: post #52
ars wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not the person you replied to, but I never turn on my video.

Do you ever feel pressured to turn it on when everyone else in the call has their video on? I know I do and it's something I need to work on cause I find myself more productive and engage with the camera off for myself.

I do sometimes feel that pressure, but my laptop is in a docking station, so the camera is not near me.

And I have no motivation to get an external camera :)

Re: A theory of Zoom fatigue

#56

Post by qppo »

I think the problem is that Zoom hasn't solved any of the hard problems with scheduling and holding meetings remotely. They got decent/reliable multimedia multicast, and I'll give them that.

Talk to anyone in process management/optimization and they'll probably rant to you about how bad most people are at holding and attending meetings. The "one page memo" at Amazon is kind of famous.

Zoom (and all its competitors) could do a lot to solve these problems and doesn't. That's the source of Zoom fatigue. People are bad at meetings, don't know they're bad at them, and hold bad meetings. It's stressful and tiring. Maybe Zoom just makes it more obvious when you can't easily joke around or grab a coffee. To me it seems that all these remote meeting software solutions are only focused on the purely technical problems, because they're really easy to specify and measure improvement. I haven't really seen anyone use technology to really go after the social problems of video conferencing yet, at least not like how Discord and Slack have done in their domains.

Re: A theory of Zoom fatigue

#57

Post by hnzix »

mixonEPA wrote: post #52
ars wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not the person you replied to, but I never turn on my video.

Do you ever feel pressured to turn it on when everyone else in the call has their video on? I know I do and it's something I need to work on cause I find myself more productive and engage with the camera off for myself.

Turn the camera off after introductions, then only turn it back on when you want to make an important point or the convo is about a very specific work item related to you.

If someone complains, you can say you don't want to clutter up the video feed or that you're having latency issues (also, they're a dick).

Re: A theory of Zoom fatigue

#58

Post by hnzix »

ryandrake wrote: post #35

“Kevin, you’re muted. Unmute and say that again, please” “Sara, your voice cut out for 30 seconds and we didn’t hear any of that, can you please repeat?” Two people talking: “Bfrhtxhlcyfoydoyd... oh, you go ahead” “no, you go ahead” “OK like I was saying, cofhlflydhlbdfykdjtxtc...” “Hang on, I think Kumar just disconnected. We need him to continue.” “Can someone text Kumar and see if he can rejoin?” “I can’t see more…

Or that one person who refuses to mute while typing loudly and sniffling and slurping their coffee and making wet sloppy mouth noises.

Re: A theory of Zoom fatigue

#59

Post by firecall »

sudosteph wrote: post #14

Any other Autism Spectrum or ADHD people who feel less fatigued by video meetings compared to IRL? The things I like: - having the range of activity during a meeting constrained to one area in front of me so I don't have to look around the room to make sure I'm not missing something / get overstimulated by too much stuff happening. - Boxes with borders lighting up when someone is making noise / talking so I know wher…

I'm ADHD / Introvert.

And by introvert, I mean I can very confidently conduct meetings, conversations and socialise well, but it wears me down.

I find phone calls and video meetings somewhat more exhausting minute by minute.

So much so that I tend to have much shorter phone calls and video meetings. I cant go more than about 30 minutes before I have to stop.

Some people in my office however can seemingly go for hours! Literally 2 to 3 hours of a phone/video meetings and they seem engaged and energised. They love talking!

For me, just give me the facts and lets move on to some actual work.

Re: A theory of Zoom fatigue

#60

Post by justincormack »

qppo wrote: post #54
ken wrote: post #33

I’m surprised this didn’t mention the elephant in the room: the audio quality is terrible. I simply can’t hear half of what is said, even at full volume in a quiet room. Either I ask for repetition all the time (and walk over whatever the next person said), or I assume it from context and let it go. Even when I can pick up all the sounds, it’s so different from hearing voice in person that I have to concentrate just…

The only thing really terrible is their (lack of) echo cancellation. Otherwise I'm about 90% sure it's just off the shelf OPUS with next to no DSP on top. It's not that bad on its own. What is terrible is audio hardware on laptops. MacBooks are alright, but just $50 on a headset will go a long ways to solving your problems. Consumers haven't given a shit about audio fidelity for decades honestly, it's just showing to…

Macs have hardware echo cancellation, and most software appears to enable it.
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