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Comment by scotth | Hacker News Reader

I looked into adding Zoom to our Slack workspace this morning, and was beside myself with the set of permissions they requested — reading the contents of every channel and private chat they're included in? For a slash command?

That's a hard no. Turned me off the service entirely.

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> reading the contents of every channel and private chat they're included in? For a slash command?

This may improve soon. Slack is starting to force apps to request granular permissions (vs a big-tent "bot" scope like before) and when you submit to their store, they vet each permission and verify what you're using it for. They don't let you request permissions "just because" in my experience.

It's only available in the paid version, but slack's video conferencing works pretty well.

Yeah, I saw that. Got pretty close to pushing the button on it after this episode, and probably will soon.

For me Slack's video conferencing never really worked that well. Even Google Meet worked better.

It works, but it burns through so much CPU your computer will be a gibbering mess. There's some pretty silly inefficiencies going on, for example; if you switch away to another window, they display a small video player while keeping the big one running the background. Each time you switch into screen sharing mode, they drag you back to the app again. If you draw on the screen, someone has screwed up their linear algebra so you end up seeing double with an extra copy of what you're drawing, in totally the wrong place.

Annoyingly it's a bit too convenient, so going out of band is a pain.

I regularly have complaints that people can't hear me over my laptop's fan when using slack video conferencing, or jokes about hair driers. Computer is a MBP16.

Seems like they need to get their CPU use under control.

You could also get a headset instead of yelling at your built-in mic. As a 100% remote employee, even before Covid, the coworkers with headsets are much easier to understand, and have less background/foreground noise.

As a headset user myself, no one ever asks me to repeat myself, notices when I type, or hears anything not within an inch of my mouth. Plus, I've got a physical mute switch for instant, unambiguous mute, as-needed.

It works great for 1:1 and small group conversations, but its max meeting size (15 people I think) is an immediate disqualifier. We regularly have hundreds of people on Zoom calls with no issues.

YMMV, but for me ut turns my computer into a simulation of a space heater even when I'm not sharing my screen, and those gigantic unhidable toolbars makes me feel like I'm playing whack a mole more than working a times.

Oh, and yes,I "almost forgot" ! How to they even physically manage to get multiple seconds latency at times, when everyone in the call is in the same city, and where the worst connection on the call is at about 20Mbit? Are they just buffering for the heck of it, why not simply drop some frames if you get behind?

There's no video in the Android client, though (not sure about iOS). Zoom and Meet can both do that.

We have Zoom on our Slack workspace and we'd remove it immediately if this were the case, but it appears to be false. The full list of permissions required by the official Zoom Slack integration is at www.slack.com/apps/A5GE9BMQC-zoom, and doesn't have read access to any channels, private or public, except for "some URLs in messages".

Following your link brings me to the same list of permissions that I was talking about. Here are (some) of them:

* View some URLs in messages

* View messages and other content in public channels, private channels, direct messages, and group direct messages that Zoom has been added to

* View basic information about direct and group direct messages that Zoom has been added to

* View basic information about public channels in your workspace

* View basic information about private channels that Zoom has been added to

* View files shared in channels and conversations that Zoom has been added to

* View pinned content in channels and conversations that Zoom has been added to

* View messages and files that Zoom has starred

* View emoji reactions and their associated content in channels and conversations that Zoom has been added to

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