Zoom corrects usage numbers: says it has 300M daily meeting participants | Hacker News Reader

Zoom corrects usage numbers: says it has 300M daily meeting participants

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78 pointsciccionamente114 comments

I don't want to imply too much here, but I'm surprised by all the people here saying Zoom "just works" whenever Zoom is mentioned. It's a recurring mantra.

I've had various really annoying issues (completely blank settings windows, sound devices not getting recognized or used properly, crashes). All of these I've experienced both historically and during the past month. Neither Ubuntu, Arch or NixOS, all on three different laptop models, have been free of show-stopping issues.

When a customer wants to use Zoom for a call, it's been about 50/50 that we can do the call without issues.

I just find it suspicious that all the top comments are "it just works" when my experience has been the complete opposite, in various environments.

So far Google Meet and Whereby (formerly Appear.in) have been the least hassle-free in my experience (probably due to being web-based). Looking forward to trying Jitsi when I have the time and inclination, it looks really promising.

What is the implication you are trying to cancel with "I don't want to imply too much here"?

I like linux myself a lot. But you can't build your opinion on the software based on their linux version.

Yes. Yes, you absolutely can.

Not if you're assessing comments like "it just works".

Zoom making their software badly on Linux is 100% in line with the company. They aren't aiming for good design, they are aiming for the nontechnical user using out of the box windows or MacOS.

If you're assessing comments like "it just works", then there are two possibilities. Either it works for you, at which point you have more anecdata, or it doesn't work for you, at which point you have a refutation. This is the same, regardless of whether you are using the Linux version or any other version.

FWIW, the Linux version works fine for me, with a couple of niggles. The most annoying of which is that the software turns the headphone volume up to maximum at the start of every call.

I think the part of the equation missing here is that you don't just have anecdata, you have data that more or less applies to most cases of your specific OS + Browser + other relevant customizations. If you have a highly customized system, you're simply more likely to experience issues from edge cases, yes. That data is also much less reflective of the average user.

No, it's not hard scientific data with a p-value. But IMO it's important to not simply write away all experience as anecdote not data without contextualizing the relevancy of the anecdata in question. I have seen way too many HN comments that look at usability and don't realize how specific their situation is that causes their issue. That and of course their complaints not being relevant/visible to the typical end user.

Was about to say this. I was with the OP through to ‘I tried it on three computers,’ and when they specified the OS on those computers were three variants of •nix, I laughed a little.

A much, much more fair/reasonable comparison would’ve been the three computers running three different Operating Systems, of course.

I don’t mean to sound harsh, but I’m sorry, if you’re on •nix, if commercial software exists for it, count your lucky stars a build even exists - and also remember you are exponentially insignificant compared to all other platforms. You will not get the same standard of support and they probably can’t justify dedicating too many more resources to it if you have issues. You represent a drop or two of water in the dozen gallons of daily users.

I’m shocked there’s even a •nix client. Good on them for making an effort, even. (Not that I’d be caught dead with Zoom on my computer, it seems scarier than Google from a privacy perspective!)

I'm going to build my opinion on the software on whatever version they claim is officially supported for my machine.

If they don't want to do a good job supporting the OS I run then don't support it, or call the support a beta version and have an easy user flow to get to the web client or something.

Otherwise yea, I'm going to call a spade a spade and say it's bad software when it doesn't work as intended as an official release on an officially supported target.

Out of curiosity, why did/do you not use the Zoom web version? I haven't tried their linux client but if it sucks there is an alternative. The "it just works" crowd probably uses mostly Windows/Mac OS, iOS/Android or the web version.

Getting the join by browser link apparently can be an issues but at least in the edu account I manage there is an admin setting to always provide the join with browser link.

How recent is that? Whenever I try any link it insists on triggering xdg-open to the doggarn qt client.

The site will always try to trigger the registered protocol handler but couldn't you just block the handler?

well, whatever the linux client does, the browser client sucks really hard...

I haven't found a better solution for large meetings (> 50 participants.) Jitsi killed my CPU when I got over 5. Is there something as good as zoom (performance, easy to invite/join) out there for large meetings?

Sure, just have every person stream the meeting on twitch and use a multi-stream client. All the privacy and security of Zoom.

We had a 50 person meeting yesterday on Google Meet and it seemed to work just fine. Most people had their video off, though.

I've used Webex with around 30 people, and it worked just fine (before COVID mostly with video, more recently with only a few using video).

Have weekly Jitsi calls with ~15-20 people. 1-2 have occasional problems, otherwise it's been great

Zoom for Ubuntu client works perfectly fine. Been using for past 4 months on Ubuntu 18.04

Yesterday our team gave a shot to Google Meet but it does not allow screen sharing on Firefox (seems IE6 errr Chrome only feature)

I feel you, what I do is use chromium specifically for that and nothing else. Interesting that you didn't face the Zoom issues I did though. I wonder what gives.

I have consistent crashes in zoom if I try to manage a participant (put on hold, mute, etc) as they disconnect, but at least I can get back on fairly quickly.

The other one I have for enterprise reasons is Vibe, and starting that beast up is a "five minute notice" affair.

Huh, I'm able to screen share via Google Meet on Firefox! Running OS X 10.9.

I agree. Been using Zoom for Ubuntu and it "just works".

so seems, like I'm not the only one finding the Zoom experience lacking: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23012749

And yeah, it's quite funny, how noone proposting has a measured opinion, it's always: Zoom's by far the best... (and being in education, it seems like around 50% of my course participants are joining Zoom on mobile, because it won't work on their computer...)

As for alternatives: all are sh* in one way or another (try Jitsi with Chrome please, then it works great!, I know of a local LUG which outright bans non-Blink on their instance....). I use it now, because admininstration says it's fine (and discord is equally horrible from a privacy standpoint)

There are alternatives provided that you don't need video. Mumble and Teamspeak have a proven trackrecord on all platforms and work even with the shittiest of internet connections.

Have you tried the desktop app on a Windows or macOS machine?

I don't mean to imply that you shouldn't use Linux or that the Linux version shouldn't work—but if you're using an uncommon platform, that might be why you're having uncommon issues.

I've had similar issues trying to use the Windows app and Apple app.

Zoom has worked near flawlessly for me running Manjaro (i3wm) for 1.5 years now. What were the three laptop models you used? Were they all similar?

I've listened to multiple major podcasts lately that suspiciously mention Zoom during the show in obvious "organic" ads.

Most recently was Conan O'Brien's "Connan Makes a Friend" podcast where they have what are obvious potted mentions of Zoom on the show.

In one instance, Conan pretends that he accidentally minimized the video conference app they're using. And finally his co-host is like "just click the Zoom icon to bring it back!" Like, that would obviously be cut if it was real.

In another instance, Conan says he's really bad with tech but has been getting better now that he has to figure out his laptop without employees around to help him. And then he adds that once the quarantine is over, he'll probably forget everything... except how to use Zoom, of course.

Just thought it was somewhat relevant here since it seems Zoom is doing some massive marketing campaigns. Not to mention how it seems in ubiquitous use and everyone online is constantly mentioning it. Pretty damn impressive.

Aren't the FCC in the US pretty strict about requiring you to specifically tag paid material?

This could just as easily be paid advertising as a joke (zoom is getting most of the news cycle for 'meetings' atm, so it's the topical product to joke on). And in some countries I'd more easily believe it's paid but I see a lot of work even creators/youtubers have to go into to explicitly declare sponsorship's I'd just be surprised.

If that's not the case please let me know!

Exactly, I don't see why Zoom would open another front of negative press if they break the law on disguised advertising.

Unless there's a culture problem of "break things and move fast".

No, the FCC is not at all strict about having to tag paid material. You may mean the FTC, but as far as I know there is nothing that says that TV shows have to disclose any sponsored segments

Don't know about TV, but if this is a v/podcast, then you need to disclose

https://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/business-center/guidance/ftc...

FWIW, Conan has come under some heat in the past for his Clueless Gamer skits, which were often "sponsored" by videogame companies looking for coverage:

https://kotaku.com/conan-obrien-video-game-salesman-17420912...

I think you’re looking too hard. Conan will frequently call out his co-hosts for topping products that they’re not getting paid to support and joke about old show sponsors. To me, that interaction was just a genuine reflection of what they were using. The rest of the show hits you over the head with the sponsors, and I’m not sure why they would categorically treat others as stealthy when they joke about being shameless with their endorsements.

Agreed. For the non-technical world forced into video-conferencing due to the pandemic, Zoom _is_ video-conferencing. It's the most well-known product to the general public, and therefore the one you use to make relevant jokes right now.

Observed in some news articles too.

Honestly Zoom just works how you expect it to.

Other applications do exist and they're bad from a usability perspective.

Google hangouts maxes out my CPU. Teams is a horrible electron app which I'm loathe to use.

So the negatives are that it's unencrypted, traffic might be routed through China sometimes and unknown participants can join if they have the meeting link with password.

For the majority of people they're not too bothered.

I'd argue that security is about having an understanding of the risk and mitigating it accordingly. And for a lot of cases zoom is fine.

> Google hangouts maxes out my CPU. Teams is a horrible electron app which I'm loathe to use.

A good example that there are some benefits to using Qt (like Zoom) to make correctly performing apps

I don't think it's Qt. It's another thin window layer, duilib I think?

Their Windows SDK demo pages certainly use it anyway. duilib is here: https://github.com/duilib/duilib

Using the Zoom SDK with its many spelling mistakes and broken English comments, I am sure that a Chinese UI toolkit would be preferable to Zoom, since their development team really does seem to be Chinese.

It's definitely Qt with QtQuick.

    nm -D -C zoom  | grep Q

https://paste.ofcode.org/vZWguEXM6f7ib6nuCJcMEX

Ah you are on Linux! I am using Windows. That'll explain it!

you're obviously not worried about traffic routed through China might cause IP theft? And you also say Zoom for a lot of cases is fine. Would you say if my company does work for clients in critical technologies (energy plants, telecoms) where research is an expensive upfront investment that it's OK to use Zoom? Or is it more for companies who are only running a web-dev SaaS product where nobody cares about stealing it?

I'm asking as somebody who has found his code stolen by a Chinese colleague working from our Hangzhou office and then published on github after he switched to Huawei (under his real name because that's the amount of f*s they give).

Seriously please don't assume your threat models are portable.

If you are worried about traffic routed through China might cause IP theft, are you also worried about traffic routed through Five Eyes countries (US, UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand)?

After all, they have been caught red handed using their communications interception intelligence gathering for economic favoring of their own companies.

> If you are worried about traffic routed through China might cause IP theft, are you also worried about traffic routed through Five Eyes countries (US, UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand)?

very much so. if you work on projects that take a 2-3 years forward investment on research and based in central Europe (automotive, telecoms, energy) the idea of hosting your source code on github or using google cloud for critical core services is totally out of the question. Some of my clients even booted Atlassin out of their portfolio because Jira was considered a security risk after Australia changed it's laws last year. If you're building web-tech maybe this is fine but that doesn't mean your threat-models are portable to other domains.

> you're obviously not worried about traffic routed through China might cause IP theft?

Newer versions of Zoom allow you to specify which countries’ data centres are allowed to host your meeting, and also shows which data centres are in use. They’ve also cleaned up their act on encryption.

But yes, a lot of Zoom development occurs in China (700+ employees). But it is US owned. Many other corporations also develop software in China, so I have to ask — where’s the evidence that using Zoom makes you especially vulnerable to being ripped off? Because otherwise it seems a bit FUD-ish.

trust only works in retrospect. Zoom has done nothing in its past to deserve that trust.

If one can live with a software that behaves like malware (disabling of a hosts security controls and fake claims about e2ee) than nothing can convince them. Chances are they've committed to Zoom long before and it's now impossible to walk them back to a different reasoning. It's like arguing with a QAnon supporter about reality (Impossible).

Also it's much easier to convince somebody to use product than it's to get them to stop using it. The latter has a cost (pride) but the former is free.

> trust only works in retrospect.

Seems somewhat odd to abide by this kind of principle instead of considering the real changes which we believe have been made, as Zoom seems to have cleaned up their act to some degree in response to the backlash, though you might think not enough.

In any case, if you're being watched, you're not likely to cut corners, and Zoom is being watched. I'm not surprised if the 'suspicious public' effect averages out over all cases to account for the chance that a company is still keeping some unsavory practices under the covers.

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/01/23/webex_hid_url_for_r...

Cisco WebEx, secret backdoor that allows websites to run arbitrary code on your machine back in 2017.

Are you going to use it again?

again? who said I ever used it? webex was already rubbish in 2012. the only reason webex is still being cited in 2020 in a whataboutist manner is that there are at least 75K internal CISCO employees forced to continue useing it on a daily basis.

Is it really that much better than it's open source alternative jitsi-meet?

No it's not, I'd say Zoom is demonstrably worse; at least in the experiences of people I've worked with.

Zoom performance is crap for me. Routinely poor quality.

Jitsi just works. Seems heavy on resources, but for one-on-one or small groups, way better experience than Zoom.

Is that not the same thing?

We evaluated Jitsi after discovering it during Zoom's security and privacy issues and have been incredibly surprised.

The best part was that none of our more technically challenged members got stuck with joining a meeting (unlike Zoom). I'd say in terms of usability, it's better.

Jitsi has come a long way in the last six to nine months, though. People who tried it even relatively recently would likely be surprised today (I was). It'll take some time for people to find out how good it has become (assuming it stays that good -- I never take that for granted with things I use for free anymore).

Does not match my experience at all. Jitsi has an awful UI and performance. Noise cancelling seems completely missing, people can’t figure out when they are muted or not (because of the UI) and if you have 20 people on the CPU goes berserk.

In my experience at least and from people I share the calls with, Jitsi is the worst of the bunch but people use it because of privacy reasons.

would you mind explaining what kind of screen you are using/meeting you are in, where 20 people need to/can see and speak to each other within a split-second?

If a product can't do something, whilst it's competition can without issue.

Then it's not really a case of going "but do you really need it?"

Not sure about noise cancellation as we never had an issue, but what you describe about ~20 participants and muting intuitiveness doesn't match our experiences with a wildly tech-illiterate audience.

Zoom traffic is encrypted, just not end-to-end. So your ISP and flatmates can't sniff it but people with access to Zoom servers could

Where are those servers?

The 5.0 client includes an icon that has this information; after starting a meeting, this currently says "You are connected to the Zoom global network via a datacenter in the United States."

Make what you will of that.

I see you have not used Jitsi. It's not bad.

Still they are winning with their branding and their free 45 min tier ... people don't talk about telecon anymore but rather they are having a Zoom meeting.

But their UI really could use some rework ... it is really crappy.

My SO has to use a multitude of tools, because all her university teachers use different tools, because there was no standard up front.

She (and I have to agree sitting next to her) states that Zoom by far has the best usability and user experience. It is easy to use, features are quite detectable and stuff like virtual raised hands are great for teaching bigger groups.

So I would say it is the best tool out there currently.

Personally I prefer Google Meet - but that is because I use it daily for work and it became free only days ago.

I am suffering through Zoom at university and I had no idea about virtual raised hands existed, the UI could be improved.

*Small correction: free 40 minutes

All conferencing platforms have had issues. Zoom does seem to be fairly responsive when it comes to vulnerabilities and security patching.

As for 'state actor' interference, that is generally called 'lawful interception' when you drop the hype and FUD. I'm sure Zoom does/will comply with those regulations just like all the others.

I like how they say that they're sorry they referred to them as people.

I have had very few problems with zoom over the last 2 years. My company has always used it, with people connecting from various linux, windows, and apple machines. We are all remote, and have pair-programmed via screensharing for hours with zero issues.

As government contractors we'll most likely have to switch due it to being banned by the pentagon [0] (bad optics), so I guess we'll use jitsi, but it's quite unfortunate.

All of the DnD people I know are switching to it because it... just works. We haven't had any issues there either, but I can't speak about calls with ~15+ people.

I don't really like any of the alternatives: gotomeeting, chime, bluejeans, webex, discord, or god forbid, skype.

[0]: https://www.stripes.com/news/us/zoom-for-official-use-is-no-...

Whenever I'm using Zoom I'm astounded by how it works. Seriously. What black magic are they performing? It works remarkably well. Just like magic.

I've used Skype, Google hangout and others. They are like 1-2 years behind Zoom.

Poor encryption? China? Security issues? Whatever. It just works unlike others.

>What black magic are they performing?

They run all the traffic through their servers to avoid the inevitable NAT issues. So the magic is probably having a while lot of money to buy enough server capacity and bandwidth so that they never run short.

PRC funded... Yeah, let's support a communist, authoritarian regime known for committing massive human rights abuses. No thanks, It's a hard pass on Zoom for this American.

and then they combine that with an insistence on using their un-sandboxed app. Well, seems like the same magic, the yahoo-toolbar used back in the day...

Regular folks don't care. Zoom is currently, waaay better than anything else, although may be not for long. But venture capitalists and investors have their egos. It's funny to have the same fight (DAU and how engaged users really are) between Slack and MS Teams.

Personally, I find Zoom's breakout rooms a complete game-changer when it comes to hosting online events. If you use them properly they can reduce or eliminate a lot of the energy-sapping effects of online meetings.

discord has them too and does them even better. + it runs in a browser...

I agree and don't understand the downvotes.

I have in the last weeks probably seen most of the tools out there and used a lot. As said in another comment my SO has to use multiple tools. So Zoom won from a usability and feature perspective for non technical users.

I’ve written video software.

Zoom’s client blows away anything that I’ve seen from anyone else -by a significant margin.

When you can have 30 active video thumbnails on a single screen, with very little latency, on a humbly-specced machine, and the fan doesn’t even kick in, you have some impressive work.

I have wondered if they're combining them on the server-side and just pushing a single stream to the client. Would that be detectable?

That's exactly what they're doing. They are using an MCU architecture where as most others use an SFU architecture. I believe some solutions use a hybrid of both.

I use BlueJeans at work is this is what they do. I'm not so sure that Zoom is doing this. The side effects are that it heavily restricts what kinds of layouts you can use, and you will frequently see everyone's face go pixelated in a way thats super clear it's a single stream. Stuff like BlueJeans will only show you at most 9 users in a grid, even if more than 9 have video on. They will never have rows of 3 and then a row of two users. I don't see this behavior with Zoom but I only use it about once a month for random meetings.

I agree with robszumski. I don't think that it's a single stream being configured server-side.

They may have some good video-compression stuff going on. I haven't bothered to set up a network sniffer to see what is going on, but I suspect that it's a PtP vid connection.

This is because I will occasionally see only one thumbnail bork, and also the thumbnails are constantly switching places to match my screen (which I find maddening).

I think that it was Skype that had the "lowest common denominator" problem, where just one bad connection would bork the whole session. It seems that in Zoom, a single (or multiple) bad connection won't mess up the whole call.

Also, the quality doesn't seem to degrade as more people are added.

I guess it's the client who's sending the video that's adapting.

That's what I am saying too. Zoom is ahead of everyone. Better yet, people actually SEE why and how it's better than Skype, for instance. That's why I am saying that actual Zoom users don't care if it's being used by 30 million users or 300 million users. It's a great service. BUT the story is different for investors and VC. They don't care about if Zoom is good or bad, they care if Zoom is taking market share or losing market share.

regular folks don't care because those who are supposed to be experts and the only ones who are skilled to peel back the layers of BS instead make hand-wavy assessments like this.

This was expected already, anyway it's better to use jitsi, better security and privacy

I prefer Teams or Skype for Business, they works best.

I don’t like the zoom UI or setup

Funny how they admit that AFTER their IPO.

Lawyers: get your securities class action lawsuit in!

They made the statement they corrected less than two weeks ago. How is their IPO last year relevant?

Article sponsored by Microsoft, Google.

There does seem to be quite the media campaign against zoom. Interestingly its highlighting that strange divide between those of us that follow 'tech news' and those that don't. I've seen a few of the tech types try and get people to switch away from zoom with very little success over the last few weeks, no-one outside of this sphere seems to give even the slightest damn about what's being briefed to the tech media.

They apparently have 300M daily meeting participants which is actually more impressive than this headline.

Its 3x what Google Meet reported in their recent blog post, just for context.

I am a fairly young consultant and have initially advocated against Zoom due to the glaring privacy issues.

Obviously to no avail. Nobody cares. People just want to open a service and have it work and Zoom excels at that. As Teams was already there for my large enterprise client, we tried that at first but nope. Has issues with screen sharing and makes problems even with less than a dozen users.

I never had any Zoom connection issues and among my consultant company and my client I have participated in Zoom meetings with 200-300 people (we did some events digitally) with absolutely zero issues. Grid view is amazing as well.

Jitsi exists but I couldn't even convince a single person to switch for more than one session. Zoom works and nothing else counts. In Europe I don't know any company that would get Google licenses for Meet due to ... Google being Google.

It's all Zoom (professional & private) and Houseparty (private).

> Obviously to no avail. Nobody cares. People just want to open a service and have it work and Zoom excels at that.

Not true in my experience. Some people definitely care: the CIO at the mid sized company I work at has restricted Zoom usage; and my wife's company also cares (they started with Zoom and have moved to Teams partly because of Zoom issues).

Keep trying, not everyone cares indeed but plenty do, especially when it impacts data regulations/security.

I have had plenty of issue with Zoom. Quality being bad, people not understanding the interface and my university had people zoom-bombing or whatever it is called. I recently accidently logged into a session with the wrong credentials (whatever Zoom defaulted to, not my official uni login) and everyone thought I was zoom-bombing them. I couldn't understand why I was being cross-questioned by people in the session.

Unfortunately the media have pushed zoom so hard that everyone assumes it is the best option and don't want to hear of anything else.

> Quality being bad, people not understanding the interface

Honestly hearing this complain about zoom for the first time. I have never seen anyone complain about quality of meet or the interface (more than a 100 people from different teams).

I am in New Zealand so distance may have been a factor. I haven't had problems in a couple of weeks.

Jitsi is easier and better in many ways, in my subjective opinion. Barrier to getting a meeting going or joining a meeting is even lower than Zoom.

I have used it privately in small groups and it had a few issues. People dropping out, constant sound issues and duplicate people entering. I have no experience with 80-300 people (interactive events mostly, sometimes division-wide meetings/webinars...).

I would definitely put it right behind Zoom though and really love what they are doing.

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