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Comment by Leszek | Hacker News Reader

Anecdotal, and I don't want it to sound like my example is intended to disprove this research or anyone else's experience, but I personally find it extremely fatiguing if people _don't_ turn on their video.

More specifically, when I'm talking in a meeting or giving a presentation, I find it very helpful to see other people, see their reactions, see whether they laugh at jokes or look confused when I'm bad at explaining things. My nightmare during remote work is giving a presentation to a silent wall of "camera off" icons.

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I've worked from home for a decade now, and I've found the people who want cameras on in meetings are the folks who don't normally work remote. They're not used to not seeing reactions, so it throws them when nobody has a camera on. The people who have worked remote for a while - at least since before covid - don't ever use their camera.

Having worked remotely before and since Covid, I prefer to at least keep my camera on. I think it makes me more approachable... as approachable as can be expected anyway.

I've also been in large meetings where everyone has the camera off - it doesn't bother me, but given a choice between not seeing people and seeing people, I would choose seeing people.

I have worked remote as freelance many years, and I just use the camera as a reciprocity tool, if you have your camera on, then I'll turn mine on, if yours is off, then I won't bother with it and I have no issue/lots of experience working/talking without the camera

It's not even about home office work necessarily, it's about whether there's a long-term culture of having remote conversation. The company I work for is old by tech standards, and has always had fairly distributed offices. People there have been doing remote conferencing long before video conferences were a thing, and the culture is a bit mixed but leaning heavily towards not turning on video.

Excellent point

I've worked remote for over a decade and our company has never used video, only audio. This year we used it in lieu of our yearly in-person get-together, and outside of the first 5 minutes of "long time no see" at least for me it added nothing to the actual meeting. For instance, I like to pace around the room during meetings to help think and with video that's just awkward.

Same here. Video meetings used to be the exception but since last year it is rare that anyone uses sound only meetings. One thing that annoys me with video is that I try really hard to look directly into the camera but fail miserably and instead keep checking my image as if it was a mirror :)

I've been remote a long time -- see my other comment uptopic -- and part of my job involves long workshops for training or configuration. I absolutely agree some aspects of this would be easier in person, but I do NOT think they'd be easier with cameras on, because mostly when these workshops are happening the screen is dominated by either a presentation or someone's shared screen so we can work together. A column of postage-stamp sized faces isn't going to help with engagement-measurement.

I did a lot of in-person presentations before, and one thing I had to learn is that remote facilitation/presentation is a different skill. You figure out other ways to discern who's keeping up, e.g.

This is true and also something we eventually get used to I think.

I've seen the same flow happening IRL, where people new to the team expected a somewhat responsive crowd when they present, just to be met with a wall of laptop screens and inscrutable faces when the time comes.

To be clear the people in the room were paying attention, and effectively cross checking info and exploring the points they wanted to focus on. They just didn't give any feedback to the presenter until the end of the presentation, when it's time to discuss the details.

It can be seen as socially rude, but to us it was really efficient: instead of telling the presenter we'll give feedback another time, at the end of the presentation we already had a rough opinion with a modicum of confidence in the numbers or facts to discuss. Doing all of that checking before the meeting is another way to do it, but honestly I'm not sure it's much better.

I can echo OP - have given a lot of presentations over the past year to blank screens. I used to enjoy presenting and thought it was one of my strengths, now I end every presentation with that sinking feeling like I bombed. Maybe I just need the feedback, but I also feel like I can tailor the presentation to the audience better if I pick up on body language in person. For example I may quickly gloss over a slide or spend ten minutes explaining the background depending on how the audience is keeping up.

I feel for you. I don't know if there is a good equivalent nowadays to the feedback you got.

When it comes to low stakes, wide range presentations, an approximation I've seen was a side "reaction" channel on Slack or Discord to share random thoughts during the presentation. It gets very memey and you need an audience that is used to random chats, but there is an actual feeling of back and forth between the presenter and the audience. You'll see emojis and reaction gifs flying around when people get engaged, questions that you can scoop along the way or keep for the Q&A section afterward, etc.

> Anecdotal, and I don't want it to sound like my example is intended to disprove this research or anyone else's experience, but I personally find it extremely fatiguing if people _don't_ turn on their video.

Both can be true right? This study just studied the effect of persons own camera while participating. However, it doesn't really say much about how turning off camera affects other participants that are now left without the visual feedback.

Fair point - I was being careful with phrasing because I have a pet peeve about people trying to disprove research with anecdotes, but you're right that this is a somewhat different scenario.

Indeed, supposing that both this research and my anecdote are valid, it'd be a rather unfortunate asymmetry in remote work, a fatigue issue that has no good solution which doesn't require one of the participants to compromise.

We've had a couple people prove at work that you can prerecord your presentation, force-mute everyone using the mod tools, and then play it back and they'll never realize it was a recording unless you're showing your background on it.

(I'm not very dependent on human social anything, so I don't really know how to speak to the rest of it, sorry.)

You don't know if the look at something else and listen to you at all. If there are boring meetings it's quite common for people to use split screen or a second computer and browse something or read and vaguely paying attention. For this reason we decided to not bother with cameras.

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