Hacker News Reader

Comment by camgunz | Hacker News Reader

What attracts you to Google Meet? I prefer Zoom personally (despite the privacy concerns), as I can have a meeting with someone without the fans on my 2017 MBP 13" going into liftoff, and the video feeds of the participants never freeze. Legitimately every Google Meet I've ever been a part of has either completely drained my battery, or frozen the video feeds of multiple participants, or both, even if there's just 1-2 other people.

Plus I kind of resent Google Calendar not having reasonable plugins for other video services (Jitsi, Zoom, etc.); feels anti-trusty to me.

View on HN

>What attracts you to Google Meet?

It just works. You get a link, you open the link, you're in.

Whenever I get a Zoom link, it first forces me to download the app. As in, you open the link and it instantly downloads an executable to my computer, which I need to then go delete. Then I need to fight the website by clicking a series of links to get to the browser version. Then I enter my name and join. Except oops, the meeting has not formally started, so it has now kicked me back to the previous page to re-enter my name. Try again, except later since if you go before it's officially started, you're doing this again.

And that's how bad Zoom is even before you start the call. The UI in Zoom calls is also worse than Google Meet. What the hell is "Join with Computer Audio"? What does that even mean?

This. Meet isn't perfect, but 'click link, meet' is so damn simple.

Yeah it seems like Zoom's falling prey to the "we're a 10,000 seat contract but we really need this feature" stuff. I think using Zoom was fine as long as you could effectively ignore the UI (yeah "Join with Computer Audio" is completely nonsensical, double especially at that phase like, oh yeah I would like to make that decision right now where people don't know I can't hear them and they can't hear me, cool cool cool), but if you're actually using Zoom features beyond like, everyone get on Zoom, it's not wonderful.

Exactly this. Running my own business and that's one thing I do to e-meet people: it's either Google Meet or nothing.

Not perfect, yes my fans go nuts, but it works, everybody can understand how to get in, and it's rather very intuitive. I LOVE GOOGLE MEET.

You should experience what it's like as parents and educators to use Google Meet for school. It's barely usable with massive performance and access issues.

Google Meet unfortunately doesn't just work as easily as it should.

Well, I’m not a parent or an educator, but we’ve had company-wide meetings on Google Meet with triple-digit attendance and I haven’t noticed performance issues.

Your company probably has a better budget per computer than the school for the teachers and students.

The issue I personally have with zoom (besides all the historic security concerns) is that it is typically incredibly complicated to use - too many bells and whistles to do even basic things. Meet generally ‘just works’, and has been better performance wise than Zoom on my hardware.

Zoom does seem to do better overly severely degraded connections (and surfaces that It is happening). The experience is still pretty bad though.

Oh yeah that's totally fair. I was hosting a meeting the other day and one of my participants wanted to share their screen, and I still haven't found where to do that. I just made them host. Their UI is hot garbage.

It's in your meeting settings (sadly on their website, not in the app) under "Who Can Share?".

Amazing, thank you! Who says the Internet is a cesspool haha

>Plus I kind of resent Google Calendar not having reasonable plugins for other video services (Jitsi, Zoom, etc.); feels anti-trusty to me.

It isn't native to gcal, but the zoom chrome extension works relatively well.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com