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Comment by jpdus | Hacker News Reader

The main reasons for Zooms popularity (and in general the most important features of a videoconferencing software) are accessibility and reliability.

Same as with Slack/IRC - privacy is not the most important features in that space. If I have the choice of a working solution with some minor privacy issues and a solution which will never be adopted b/c half of the people will not be able to join or their experience is miserable, I will gladly take the former (except for the most delicate conversations maybe).

(And I am someone who takes privacy serious in most cases...)

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Exactly this. Zoom is crushing it here. Whatever negatives they are doing privacy side is paying of BIG time in ease of use.

Did a call recently, host wanted to google hangouts. 50% could not get in. Finally someone else said let's just use Zoom. 1 minute later we are all in. I think google doesn't work well with domains with hangouts meet blocked if you invite folks on those so they need to spin up a different account. Or people don't know meets is restricted to domain users only? Or get confused between hangouts / chat / meets etc. Something is wonky sometimes with google in terms of 5 solutions to one problem.

Zoom’s privacy issues are more than minor, if my friends started using it and I couldn’t get the web version to work I wouldn’t do a conference call with them.

Can I ask if you are using video conferencing in a business setting?

When folks are trying to get stuff done in tough circumstances NO ONE has ANY patience for the home built / funky / privacy enhanced multi-click setup. Especially not the top executives now dialing in from home who aren't tech forward. IT doesn't want to trouble shoot things either - all of a sudden you have 1000+ folks video conferencing.

I'd be interested in these dealbreaker privacy problems in the current client.

We're using webex at work but I've used half a dozen different tools so far with friends (no FOSS ones unfortunately) and they all work about as well.

I used to use webex more, but zoom just had had some incredible mindshare growth. Its literally the first suggestion it seems when there is a problem with a conference setup. Latency is also good on zoom which makes the audio side nicer in my experience.

Super reliable. Our rather large company was all Skype all the time, but people started doing Zoom because it worked all the time. Now we're almost fully Zoom.

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