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Comment by lovecg | Hacker News Reader

Might be latency. Landline travels at the speed of light, while some video calls I’ve been in had latency measured in _seconds_. It turns meetings into carefully orchestrated back and forth and makes any kind of spontaneous communication impossible.

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> It turns meetings into carefully orchestrated back and forth and makes any kind of spontaneous communication impossible.

This is my (and my team's) main problem right now. We like working from home but it broke down any kind of interactive process/exercise, every meeting for a workshop becomes this choreography of: how to ask for a spot to speak, how to leave space for others to take that spot, who will facilitate that. It kills any spontaneous take or realisation that you could bring up in a meeting room. It feels like everyone has to stay in a queue to have time to speak. A lot of times it's happened that people forgot what they wanted to say or the conversation went way past that point and people don't feel like backtracking the discussion.

I can say that people feel like they should only speak up and state *really important things™" but often the small unsaid things are really valuable.

It really sucks, I thrive in environments where I can pick up bits and pieces of information and glue them together into something meaningful to my team, I can't really do that remotely (not without pestering people or trying to have scheduled coffee breaks to just chat).

I've been taking notes during meetings just for my own benefit, and often refer to them later in that same meeting to bring a topic up that I missed. Also helpful to review at the end to see if there are unclear action items, etc.

for some of the spontaneity, and interactive process, I feel like using a group chat (we use our own IRC server) for the bulk of technical talk works, and keeps everyone up to date, even if they aren't paying attention at any given time. Its like a big long meeting that never ends. But you can leave for 2 hrs, and come back and get all caught up in no time. Granted, my team is <10 people, so the room never gets overwhelming, and it's easy to break out sub rooms or direct chats for whatever else, or join rooms from another team for whatever reason. All that being said, in the past few months I've tried to also keep some light hearted banter going in the room too, I like to think it helps some co-workers to participate more than they otherwise would.

Or maybe I'm just a luddite that likes landlines and IRC....

When hanging out with friends online (and when doing something else such that we don't need video) I've been using Mumble for voice chat. Not sure about the other "gaming" voice chat software as I haven't really used it, but I've found Mumble's latency at least to be miles ahead of the videoconferencing software I've had to use for work.

Makes me wish I could have work meetings there, honestly.

An old POTS landline would be nice too, but my understanding is a lot of landlines now are basically VoIP anyway.

>> but my understanding is a lot of landlines now are basically VoIP anyway.

Yeah I think you're right. VOIP and landline and probably one and the same these days, and as long as whatever voice application you use doesn't use excessive compression or any added complexity, or route you halfway around the world, you've prob got landline quality.

It's kinda funny, but I sort of wish I had a landline again because of Covid. Spending much more time in phone calls (mainly using WiFi calling due to reception issues, which may be part of the problem) and spending so much time accidentally talking over people and awkward silences. It's been quite a while since I used POTS, but I remember it being so fluid and natural.

It is the latency, yeah. And it doesn't have to be seconds, even 200ms is enough to turn a fluid call into a very awkward "wait now talk". "wait, now talk" dance. Similar energy as driving and going from stop light, to stop light. Phone calls are way better at this.

It is the silence detection as well. Nobody can hear you taking a deep breath before speaking up, or giving assent by a slight "hmhm". Human audio communication is more than just words, but software forces it to be just words.

Ye. I can't stress enough how bad these anti-noise filters are. Just make people mute them self and use push-to-talk if the meeting is too big. Any natural "eehhumhum" before saying stuff goes dead. Surely it adds latency to, since the stream need to process some time before it can decide to start transmitting to everyone.

When I was using self-hosted Ventrilo playing with friends we didn't have this problem. It was like being in the same room. The ping was like 5ms and sound latency not noticeable.

Seems like some form of "Roberts Rules of Order" might need to be developed and become required reading for business/office culture.

I hate the video call latency. I feel like the major apps are overoptimizing on video smoothness. I wish they would have the guts to deliver choppy artifact-laden video but with < 100ms latency.

Haven't noticed that audio issue on Webex Teams but some of my coworkers with poor internet connection use PSTN callbacks so while their audio sounds a bit more "tin can", at least it's a predictable quality. And that still works along with video sharing.

Disclaimer: we dogfood our own product.

Honestly I don't really care about video at ALL. I almost wish they'd replace videos with Animoji or a kind of animated avatar like some Twitch streamers are using.

I care a lot about video when doing calls to keep in touch with family and friends, but I find it's really not pertinent or useful at work.

Tuple is great at this. It's for pair programming (which requires low latency desktop streaming) but turns out it's just a good experience for video calls too.

My favorite part is how low-effort the video calls themselves are. It makes me far more likely to end the conversation instead of waffling around looking for other things to shove into a meeting

Makes me wish we could increase the lag further. Flip the "I'm on the Moon" switch, which adds a 1.3 second delay in both directions.

One day in the far future, we'll have to learn to deal with the light lag. Why not start now?

You should be able to pihole yourself for that if that's what you really want.

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