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Comment by tetrisgm | Hacker News Reader

I've seen about 10 different articles against Zoom during the past 3 days. I really don't enjoy using Zoom, but the volume and frequency of criticism is odd. Has anyone figured out where it's coming from?

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It's easy enough to explain as a spinoff topic of the covid crisis.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22751116

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22754135

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22754818

Zoom has gone from being a boring piece of enterprise software to being central in lots of engineers lives and unfortunately they were in the "grow quickly and apologise later" section of their development cycle when they suddenly were big and were apologizing.

They prioritzed ease of use on the engineering side, and corporate sales on the business side. They never planned ot be mission critical, but don't think for a second that ever stopped any of their sales team.

The backlash is well deserved, entirely inevitable, and incredibly unlikely to make any difference.

> They never planned ot be mission critical

How do you figure? Wouldn't any enterprise-focused video conferencing software be considered mission critical?

Before COVID most non-remote companies could still function if their VC was broken; now it's impossible without VC.

Is video really that important? Sure it has benefit of being a bit more cozy, but in reality phone is sufficient to discuss work. Screenshare is much more important, especially for knowledge workers.

Absolutely. A lot of real work involves face to face talking, not looking at a shared screen or document.

With the exception of the involvement of a webcam, you can't do screenshare without being able to do video. Even if we assume video is irrelevant and screenshare is everything, you wind up in the same technological position.

Videoconferencing is used for a lot of things that don't involve reviewing a document or pair-programming. Many people find video quite helpful for such situations.

The problem with phone calls isn't the lack of video, but the lack of a "click here to join the meeting" interface.

Group meetings are much less hassle through Skype, or Teams, or Zoom, or whatever computer-based option you choose, than waiting for everyone to drag out their phones, dial the right number, type in the right meeting code.

> The problem with phone calls isn't the lack of video, but the lack of a "click here to join the meeting" interface.

If "dial this number to join the conference call" is too hard for modern professionals, what the hell is happening to our society? (I do not believe it's actually too hard for them. I think it's incredibly patronizing to suppose that dialing a phone number might be too hard for otherwise capable members of the general public.)

I didn't say it was too hard, but frictionless wins out more often than not.

Why wouldn't frictionless + more features win over tedious and incapable of screen sharing?

Friction isn't a binary, and nothing is truly frictionless. Zoom requires you to install an application, while conference calls only require you to have a phone. I would say the former is more friction, particularly since this particular application is one I'd not like to install on any of my personal devices.

Plain phone tends to have worse audio quality

My experience with conference calls overwhelming confirms that dialing in and entering a code will waste ~10 mins of any meeting.

With more widespread use, it is becoming obvious to more people that they are shady liars.

https://daringfireball.net/linked/2020/03/31/zoom-e2e

Zoom usage has skyrocketed in the past few weeks among quarantined users. Plenty of them are sick of hearing about the virus itself. Covering Zoom is a way for news outlets to reach that audience.

As it happens, there are plenty of bad things to say about Zoom, which has hit headlines multiple times in the past year for security problems and various other dick moves.

The macOS version of Zoom installs or installed an unannounced web server on macOS that runs even when Zoom isn't running, and could perform remotely controlled actions on the macOS host.

This, in a nutshell.

I'm a simple man. When my OS vendor has to push an update to remove a misbehaving program from my computer, I consider it malware, and will never install it again.

Not to mention it wasn't uninstalled when you removed Zoom, so that they could sneakily re-install it if you ever clicked on a Zoom invite link.

Fortunately OS X released an update to make this impossible for Zoom and anyone else.

The societal importance of zoom has massively increased as it has suddenly become a fundamental part of the modern economy over the past month or so. This means it undergoes more scrutiny.

Well, for one datapoint, I had never heard about Zoom before, but had to use it for the first time a week ago. I was appalled of the macOS installer, that behaved like a malware. (No user consent taken before installing, plus why even have an installer where an .app would suffice)

This experience was negative enough, that I have been retweeting some articles about Zoom. It seems that the installer isn't the only problem.

A lot of people have being told by their employer to use zoom recently. Stands to reason some of them wont like it.

Your other comment describing this as a hit piece is dead. So this is second attempt to discredit those making a solid argument with evidence. Again you take zero issue with all the points raised and just try to add noise and muddy things.

So, why? Anything you'd like to disclose? dang ?

Nondisclosure of interests is a persistent problem here. We can bury our heads or ask.

I'm a different person, no sure why you're attacking me here.

Questioning. And apparently incorrectly. My apologies.

short sellers, stock is overvalued at the moment.

The press always goes after the top dog. The articles about factory worker conditions are always about Apple, not Acer, even though Acer's are almost surely worse (due to no press scrutiny).

Zoom is the top dog in videoconferencing right now, and videoconferencing has grown by a factor of ~1 million in importance over the last three weeks.

Zoom has also pulled a lot of shady crap under the hood, so regardless of their 'top dog' status, they are getting called to the carpet to explain and remedy their bs.

Articles about factory worker conditions these days are about Amazon...

Why should the press waste their time kicking underdogs when the top dog deserves to get kicked?

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