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Comment by davisr | Hacker News Reader

Don't use Zoom, and better-yet, ditch proprietary software altogether! Instead, use Signal (which has incredible voice/audio quality) or Jitsi (https://meet.jit.si/).

There are lots of other Jitsi servers, too. Pick your favorite: https://github.com/jitsi/jitsi-meet/wiki/Jitsi-Meet-Instance...

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Many solutions which position themselves as Zoom competitors lack any of the differentiating features. Just to pick a few:

- Force mic mute on all participants except the presenter, disallow enabling without presenter permission

- Webinars for thousands of people (handful of presenters with video, multiple non-video listen-only participants)

- 50+ people with video streams enabled in one meeting

- Smart background replace with optional green screen support

Then there are all the features for education, split rooms etc. But just those four - to my knowledge - exist only in Zoom. Some competitors might have 1-3 of those, none of them have all four.

We don't use Zoom because we especially love them, we use Zoom because it's the only one with the features we need.

I don't know about the greenscreen bit, but BigBlueButton is likely the closest that I know of. It may well have the feature; I've never checked it out myself. That can also be done by making a fake camera processing pipeline locally, but that's certainly not typical usage.

Overview: https://lwn.net/Articles/817146/ Notes from deployment for a virtual conference: https://lwn.net/Articles/830436/

You make a good point from a software point of view, but ‘features’ are not just things you code. You mention educational features: is the freedom to express ideas and to discuss important historical events not an important feature in education? It’s certainly more important than green screen cutouts but nobody ever puts it on the list explicitly

No. As far as a communication tool goes, if you underperform, but have a nice moral story to go with it, you'll get a nice little niche userbase that can sit there under the shadow of the bigger, better tool.

So true. The general experience is that consumer boycotts rarely work and most people will only react to total moral outrages, if at all.

The question was "is freedom of discussion important to education", not if Joe Random cares enough to deviate from the path of least resistance.

If I make my living from training and presenting webinars to people of varying technical skills, I'm picking the best tool for the job - not the one with the best backstory or license.

If this were a tool for a group of friends for casual chitchat or games, then I might pick on other merits.

> Smart background replace with optional green screen support

I find that one curious. Can you elaborate on it? I'm having trouble thinking of a situation that would make it a need. I don't particularly want people having a view into my home, but it's easy enough for me to sit in front of a wall/curtain, or just move personal objects out of view.

The others are more interesting; thanks for the list.

Allow me to add one relevant to certain communities: Audio suitable for musical collaboration. The music teachers, students, and performers I know prefer Zoom because it works better than the alternatives they have tried. I think it's a combination of tolerable latency and the ability to disable audio processing that's designed for speech but distorts live music.

I usually work in varied locations and rather not have the people I'm in call with see where I am. They don't need to know that I'm outside or in a cafe.

The green screen support is mostly for my home office, I can hang a generic green sheet behind me and get perfect background replacement.

Seeing that someone is trying to conceal their setting is 100x sketchier than being outside.

I'm not the person to whom you have replied but I'd say one could look at it from another perspective. I do not like the invasion of privacy from having others look into my home when I haven't invited them to do so. So, when I have a choice, I'll always remove or replace the background.

I'm on Zoom calls for work about 10 hours a week and custom backgrounds are very popular. Personally my office is a complete mess and putting a custom background on is much easier than cleaning.

For the same reason, I use a custom foreground where possible.

That's why the custom backgrounds is important. It normalises it. People can just think you're using one for fun.

I disagree with webinars being a necessary product for a Zoom competitor. It feels like a necessary feature for a different, only partially overlapping market. As I remember it, Zoom has Webinars as an optional paid extra on top of its professional accounts.

Forcing mute (and ideally video off) on participants is a pretty easy feature to code for someone like Google and their google meet does seem to support 50+ users. It doesn't have green screen, but it does have background blur, which I would expect to be the same.

> I disagree with webinars being a necessary product for a Zoom competitor

Sorry for the bluntness, but this is like saying "pivot tables are not a necessary product for an Excel competitor". If you don't provide webinars features (panelists, Q&A, viewers on mute by default...) then you are not really a Zoom competitor, just the n+1th video chat service. I know these may look like trivial features, but having them out-of-the-box is what made Zoom a game changer.

And I say that as someone that utterly despises Zoom, as recently most of my friends ended up being inexplicably locked out of the webinar where I was defending my PhD.

If the C-team need to give a virtual presentation for 1000+ employees, people forgetting to unmute their mics or allowing them to unmute without permission is a complete and total dealbreaker for a product.

I know that these aren't complex features code-wise, other solutions just have decided not to implement them.

No kidding - blocking participant screen sharing, there is always someone who can't figure out how to un screen share.

Space to speak works great as well

Ease of use - how is that not on the list. Zoom persists / pops up / works for everyone.

Signal? Are folks serious here? This is ease of use to onboard a 50 person call with a click? When I last checked they didn't even have group video calling AT ALL.

You realize why zoom is crushing it - people care a lot more about convenience then anything, and signal didn't even have group video calling.

Not everyone. I can’t use it. Jit.si, Google meetings, and others work OK on my machine, but not Zoom.

worked in video conference industry for a few years, those are not hard to implement at all.

what Zoom gets is what its CEO once described: they always think from the perspective of users, instead of listening form the marketing dept. That is, Zoom put customer and usability first, the rest(including security...) second.

you need green screen support? always felt like a cosmetic thing to me

And Zoom is also absolutely corrupt malware. Obviously, you can be the judge for yourself, but I personally don't care if my malware has chromakey--it ain't ever getting close to my PC.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/apr/02/zoom-tech...

The OS vendor needs to push fixes to uncorrupt people's PCs because Zoom installs a backdoor to spy on webcams? That's worse than terrible--that's criminal.

https://techcrunch.com/2019/07/10/apple-silent-update-zoom-a...

It could be either done intentionally with evil thoughts, or it's just a growth pain and areas/issues need to be fixed/improved whenever they occur. Note Zoom basically got a "lucky" home run by the COVID-19 scenario, that Zoom itself never expected to be used by so many so soon. I hope, Zoom will be improve in those weak areas quickly to erase concerns.

But I hate the censorship part in the OP, there is no reason for them to do that ever.

There's a logistical problem with it. Most home Internet connections have asymmetric bandwidth. I.e. your download speed is much faster than your upload speed, which works great for browsing and watching videos.

However, if you want to have a meeting with N participants, the presenter's connection needs fit N independent outgoing video streams. Cloud-based services work around it by sending 1 outgoing stream to the server with a much better connection, that then forwards it to every other attendee.

The trouble is, someone needs to pay for that server. And since most people want videoconferencing to be free, that server would be either run by an enthusiast that will bail out once the traffic becomes noticeable, or by someone with a political agenda.

I lost every time people compare apples and oranges. Do you realize that in case of Zoom and Webex their traffic goes via their global backbones with strict SLAs and in case of the other software it takes the Internet path (unless your company/you have their own backbone network)? The thing about Internet is that no one can guarantee you anything - bandwidth, loss, jitter and most importantly - latency. Today the quality is okayish and tomorrow it is crap - but you can’t do anything with that. That’s the thing you should keep in mind when you’re advising alternatives. Of course if you are using video conferencing to chat with your relatives from the same city (or country if your country is small enough) it will most likely be fine. Things change when you need to have multiple countries in a call.

I think most people would use alternatives to Zoom if they weren't obliged to use it because their university or their workplace have some kind of partnership with them.

This is definitely not true for me or most anyone I talk to. In fact, I was incredibly glad when my university created an agreement with Zoom, and am now often the one asked to create the meeting when communicating with friends and family (including on FB Messenger which has video calling built-in) to use Zoom and avoid the Free plan limitations.

My point is: if you are against Zoom's policy, you can't really afford not to use it if your workplace is using it.

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