Good Bye Skype | Hacker News Reader

Good Bye Skype

11 pointsrupiox13 comments

I have been using Skype for many years. It was once a good piece of software before you-know-who obtained it.

They made a new UI, linked together accounts from different projects.

Things started to fell apart very fast.

You can find tons of complains from users having problems. - The new UI is widely recognized as a huge failure https://www.quora.com/Why-is-the-current-Skype-UI-so-badly-designed

- Options to revert to the older versions are obfuscated and not supported

- Problem with skype auto-updating on start https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/skype/forum/all/how-to-stop-skype-from-updating/d2c7edcb-bbc8-4155-9f35-89a180825c0c https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/skype/forum/all/this-version-of-skype-is-no-longer-supported-get/c6ea5228-995c-4bad-8357-cef4c921f5dd

- Problem with account linkage https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/skype/forum/all/skype-account-and-microsoft-account-madness/50696c26-5e10-4131-b6a3-17e4fc083d79

Today a friend of mine accidentally logged into another person's account. We were looking at another persons contacts, profile details, we were able to send messages out. We have repeated this process on PC and Android devices.

I don't want to share the technical details here because it may damage a lot of people in so many ways. Unfortunately the problem is so easy to reproduce that I wonder how many users have already experienced this breach.

Good bye Skype, forever now.

A nice alternative (without text chat, for now) is vs5x. You can get it at http://blog.x-row.net/download/?file=vs5x&ver=015. The only issue is that it connects by using IP addresses. You and the person you're wanting to chat with can install ZeroTier (https://www.zerotier.com/) configure it to make a network and join it and then authorize the person's IP address.

I'm not giving up on Skype. Skype gave up on me.

(1) There used to be a Linux app that wasn't a web app in disguise ... not anymore. Skype can't be bother to really support the platform or the UI HIG of at least one toolkit on Linux.

(2) My smart TV has a webcam just so I can take Skype calls, no other reason. Really cool feature for me. Serendipitously my parents love Skype and it made it easy to talk to them from the sofa. Felt very home-y. Two years ago, Skype said, "Umm, I know you paid for this camera so you could be part of our ecosystem... but nah... we don't care about that tech anymore."

Thanks Skype. So long and I hope all the fish start rotting soon.

I recently had to set up a microsoft <whatever-theplatform-is-called> account for teams. I got there in the end but i'm fairly sure I now have 3 different microsoft logins. The whole thing was smooth as sandpaper and as logical as an M. C. Escher painting.

At least they provide a linux native client for it I suppose.

Yes, but logging into a stranger account with your own password is a new word in modern security.

I'm giving up on Skype because it can't even correctly display online status. If I look at my contact list all of the statuses are wrong or outdated, and I need to click each person's name for it to refresh their individual statuses.

But what is the alternative ? is there a fuckup-less communication tool ? if anything there is a good chance MS will fix this faster than others.

I thought the same a few years ago. They are fixing something and breaking another thing at the same time. Moving to Google hangouts now.

I can't quit it because I haven't found an alternative for Skype numbers, and calls to landlines.

lol, google voice is basically that, it's free, and lets you bring a number from another company for dirt cheap and after that, no more fees. or so i was told.

When they bought Skype, my first thought was: oh, they want to kill it to replace it with something else (Teams?)

I'm worried that the latest versions for Linux began to significantly load the processor during a video call.

All of the good stuff from Skype was integrated into Microsoft Teams.

use discord, so much nicer design wise, and the company actually gives a shit about their users, unlike micro$oft

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