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Comment by chronofar | Hacker News Reader

> The answer is: It just works. It's easy. It does what we want it to, with a minimum of fuss.

I think the real reason is "it's just what everyone else was doing." All of these apps "just work," as someone who has used a veritable gaggle let me tell you there's scarce difference between them. Except zoom makes it more difficult to join without the app (others work in the browser outright, zoom tricks you into installing).

Zoom I think just happens to be one of the trendiest. But with this kind of behavior there's really no reason to use them.

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> I think the real reason is "it's just what everyone else was doing."

I can't speak for others. But for me, using Zoom is really because it worked better than everything else I'd tried (Skype, Google Hangouts, WebEx, rolling my own SIP server). That was parts: Linux software reliability (WebEx, Skype), limits on the number of people that could join meetings (Hangouts), and effort to talk my collaborators into installing new software (SIP+Jitsi). A bonus is that my employer had an institutional Zoom account. I've been happily using Zoom for 2-3 years now. I'm unhappy about these privacy issues that are being discovered/discussed now and I kinda feel like I should have looked into it. I'm sure there is a bandwagon effect happening, but there was also a real component of it working better than other solutions.

I hear people talk about meetings not working for them. I can't understand the issue. I've used it for many years across groups that are small or large, personal, commerical, whatever, macs, all phones, linux, windows.

At my new company they wanted to pay a license to use zoom. I asked why don't we just use meetings for free? The answer was it makes us look professional. That's where zoom is. There are dozens are alternatives.

I think zoom's secret sauce is meeting reliability and quality. You can consistently communicate without audio hiccups and other issues more vs others. Otherwise, why would zoom get so popular with the word of mouth of 'it just works'?

What you're saying is basically a form of 'works on my machine'.

Somehow Zoom has become the Facebook of videoconferencing services.

Zoom, Facebook, Microsoft, and Google could all learn a thing or two from Apple with regard to privacy policy.

They record and transcribe all calls why? Where do they store it? Why do they store it?

Why would your collaborators have to install any software to use Jitsi? (It should work in a browser AFAIK)

> Why would your collaborators have to install any software to use Jitsi? (It should work in a browser AFAIK)

Honestly, I didn't know that there was in-browser capabilities. The last time I used jitsi was via the java desktop client, probably 3-4 years ago. It was a year or so later that I started using Zoom, so I didn't revisit jitsi.

At my previous company there was no official VC app. Zoom was used the most across multiple years even after trying every other app often. Personally, I didn't like Skype because it seemed heavy and they kept making the things in the UI I liked more difficult to use. Google Meet wouldn't work in my default browser. Both required accounts to sign into a meeting.

We were all over the world and using Mac/Win/Linux. So latency was high and bandwidth was often narrow. We also did company meetings every month or so. We pushed in a bunch of different directions. Often apps are only good at one or two of these scenarios, but Zoom was good enough at all of them.

I had no clue until this week there was a web version, but after using all of the others I'm glad it heavily prefers a standalone app. I do wish they had less scummy practices or there were better alternatives.

> We were all over the world and using Mac/Win/Linux. So latency was high and bandwidth was often narrow

for me, i think this is key. I've used skype, hangouts, and gotomeeting over the years. only zoom works this well, multi-platform, including my fave, linux, in all sorts of conditions.

i wish this wasn’t so, and that we had good cross-platform solutions. :(

My anecdotal experience: Zoom's audio and video has consistently worked much better than any of the in-browser tools my team has tried.

I'm sure part of this is due to it being a native app.

Once a user is over the hiccup of "download and install this," being able to hop into a call immediately without much mucking about with audio and video settings seems consistently better with Zoom.

Most of them require you to create an account, often confirming an email in the process, which is a big barrier to setting it up. Accountless video conferencing is valuable if you don't have everyone at your company setup with Google or 365 accounts.

You have not set up video conferencing in academia then. Or have the WebEx or high-five meeting falter when a hundred people join. Zoom is definitely the most seamless video conferencing system out there, and there's a reason more and more corporations are switching over to them. It sucks that they're skeezy as well, but perhaps it's because they know they have the technical advantage

Not true in my experience. I have a remote cofounder and we do always-on video for hours a day so we systematically evaluated each option. The absolute best (resolution/framerate/latency) is FaceTime and the best cross-platform is Zoom.

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