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Comment by dogma1138 | Hacker News Reader

TBH the thing I’ve noticed is just how fast people stopped turning cameras on during Webex.

Before the nearly everyone at my company what was WFH or was joining from their laptop rather than a video conferencing room had their camera on.

Within like a week of the lockdown people stopped and I can imagine why you stopped dressing, stopped shaving heck I can hear bedsheets on some of the calls I attend.

Pretty much now the cameras are useless.

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That's some pretty broad-strokes-painting. I'm still on a video call every week, and I'm not in as many meetings as most of my coworkers. I'm also in two separate weekly online roleplaying game groups and we use cameras for those because it's much less fun without the added expressiveness.

That's definitely a "YMMV" situation. There are a few people at my org who always have their cameras off, and occasionally I'll keep mine off as well, but in the meetings I'm in, 80% of people have their cameras on.

That might vary by team. My team/org still uses cameras a lot as it makes it easier to empathize and be empathized with. Especially if we're trying to be persuasive, a human face is easier to emotionally connect with than a voice.

We had specific guidance to not have cameras on because of the bandwidth load on the VPN. For cost reasons, they've also turned off access from the 800 number to dial in to meetings.

Something I noticed specifically with webex is that the latency isn't nearly as bad in audio-only mode. Not as good as Mumble or Discord, but you can actually have a decent phone call.

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