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Comment by aantix | Hacker News Reader

Hopefully this will push the internal influencers to actually care about remote tools.

The latency on videoconferencing still needs to be reduced. A ping between SF and NYC is around 62ms?

But with all of the half-interruptions, the interjections of "you go" - "oops, no wait, you go ahead", it feels like a good 300ms of latency.

The conversations do not feel natural at all.

John Carmack was speaking about this the other day in his Oculus talk.

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I don't know. This sort of thing happens during in-person meetings too, to an extant. Then again, all of my calls are in the same geographic area.

I think there's some subtleties that are taken for granted with a face-to-face conversation that simply become awkward when engaging in a remote conversion with latency.

With face-to-face I can avoid a majority of the interruptions because I can notice a slight change of a facial expression, e.g. a mouth slightly opening, eyes lighting up, that alludes to them beginning to speak.

But with a remote conversation, that noticing of expression suffers from the same latency issues as audio, so I'm reading the emotional cue way too late.

It gets easier. I’ve been working remotely for a decade, and eventual you learn to communicate differently to mostly avoid these issues.

Agree. I’ve been working remotely for the past five years. It can definitely be done.

But I’d prefer an in person conversation any day vs the CB Radio-like feel of today’s conferencing.

I don’t want to throttle my thoughts. I want quick successions of comments going back and forth.

Simply not the experience right now with videoconferencing.

I usually don’t have to throttle my thoughts with video conferencing unless there are more than 1 or 2 other people on the conference. But when there are more than 3 people in a conference room, I have to throttle my thoughts there as well.

I'm still amazed that current video conference doesn't have a "wait to signal" on the UI.

Video conf people, if you're reading this:

  Study what's the regular "wait to talk time" for a face to face conversation - let's assume 250 ms. 
  Measure audio/video latency (from remote capture, encoding, transmission, display) - let's assume 100ms. 
  Add a listening progress bar to video that's filled when someone else speaks un-fills when 250 + 100 ms has passed.
  Add a speaking progress bar that fills when when the person speaks and un-fills when 250 ms has passed.

It's not great or polished idea but I have no idea why this doesn't exist yet. We need a visual indicator when to talk on video conference because our human metrics are not calibrated for it.

Shouldn't it be 250 - 100 ms (rather than plus)? The person who was talking is silent for that extra 100ms while they wait for their words to reach their peer.

Maybe, I'm not completely clear on this could work.

What I imagine is that when I'm listening I need to wait the regular wait time plus network lag because the speaker may have resume speaking. The speaker needs to resume speaking before 250 + 100 has passed so that others don't start talking before the speaker resumes.

I wish people would just use text more instead. I agree that video conferencing calls are hard and people overlap a lot - but the bigger issue is that most of what people say in meetings is pointless! Maybe it’s just me, but I find it impossible to think in conversation, and most of what I end up saying is “um - what about - oh, never mind, won’t work.” Especially with tech problems, I need time and silence to figure it out. I wish people would propose the thing to be solved on a chat thread, tag the people involved, and trust them to engage without being forced to do it real-time.

I think this will be the unpopular opinion, but writing, text, is actually the problem.

Most emails/tweets/texts read like statements of proclamation.

The cues of a "hmmmm" or the rise in pitch in voice, can indicate someone isn't sure of the position. Or that they're pitching it as a possibility, not the actual solution.

All of those cues are lost. Twitter is the worst offender - I've seen many of people that I follow present in person at conferences and they come off as humble and approachable.

But their tweets are written as a bold, definitive statements, and read as a proclamation to be argued and challenged.

I see your point, but I personally hate the time wasted on phatic meandering like “... unless anyone disagrees”, “hmm, what if...” etc. I’d much rather people concisely said things they were quite sure of. Plus, it’s hard to disagree with people in person. I don’t have all the facts to hand, and I can’t double-check my phrasing. Text solves all of that for me.

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