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Comment by xenocratus | Hacker News Reader

> my ears will continue to bleed from the awful audio people broadcast into this world. I wonder, most people must notice how terrible everyone in e.g. video conferences sounds;

If it is physically hurting your ears or being difficult to follow then it's understandable, but otherwise (as you mention with the masks) this sounds very superficial. Do you also complain about people wearing the wrong kind of clothes (and I don't mean tailored confederate flags)?

I hope to one day see the day when most people realise it's none of their business how others present themselves.

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This isn’t an issue of fashion, it’s an issue of cognitive load. Bad audio is distracting, and requires more mental work to process. It’s fatiguing, and as someone who spends an absurd amount of time doing video conferencing, it makes a huge difference.

I’m also a teacher, so I bought a nice microphone and some acoustic panels to help my students focus on the material.

Acoustics & audio quality is important when trying to pay attention. Crappy acoustics can fatigue you and give you headache. Crappy audio can distract you, make you mishear things and overall is tiring to listen to. I've skipped online videos and lectures due to crap audio. I've gotten headaches and sore throat after sitting & talking in echo-y rooms for 30 mins.

Fair, though I meant complaining about understandable (but low-quality) audio or video.

Comprehensibility isn't yes/no. There are a lot of recordings that are possible to understand, but are a lot more work. I have this complaint about phone calls all the time. I feel like I'm taking crazy pills because people on a phone call are so hard to understand. Yet voice memos I record on my own phone are basically fine. I assume it's because phone audio goes through some tortured path with 12 layers of translation and compression or something, but it's irritating to me.

Maybe it's superficial but if you make yourself harder to understand and/or unpleasant to look at on video, I'm far more likely to tune you out, especially on a multi-party conference call that I'm probably only half paying attention to anyway.

So present yourself however you want. And I'll pay attention however much I want.

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