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Zoom needs to clean up its privacy act

(blogs.harvard.edu)
1597 points seapunk | 2 comments | 27 Mar 20 14:18 UTC | HN request time: 0.001s | source
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Tokkemon ◴[27 Mar 20 14:46 UTC] No.22703216[source]▶
Is Zoom the best though? Google Hangouts seems to be just as good.
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buro9 ◴[27 Mar 20 14:55 UTC] No.22703294[source]▶
Try it at 12 people.

Try it when you want to control who is speaking and when.

Try it when you want to co-ordinate hundreds of participants and still want to track who has a question so you can hand the virtual mic / airtime to them.

Try it when you want breakout groups and to determine who is in which group, and after a set time for the groups to return to the main space.

What is good enough for 2 people facing each other, and appears to work perfectly well for a group of 5 or 6... doesn't quite scale to a company all-hands, or giving a lecture or seminar.

Tools fit a scale, and Zoom is excessive for the small and simple use-case but excels at the large and complex.

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1. Spivak ◴[27 Mar 20 15:11 UTC] No.22703441[source]▶
Which is a long way of saying that Zoom is one the few companies that has been around long enough to deal with all the edge cases. Throw a few devs in a room for a bit and you'll get a perfectly usable video chat for 1-1 or a small group, but you won't get Zoom.
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2. Wowfunhappy ◴[27 Mar 20 18:55 UTC] No.22705679[source]▶
Wikipedia says Zoom was founded in 2011. Google Hangouts has been around for about the same amount of time, and Skype predates them by quite a bit.

I don't quite understand why Hangouts and Skype aren't more robust than they are. I'm sure this is indeed a hard problem, but the utility of getting it right is obvious, and these are massive companies.