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Comment by theelous3 | Hacker News Reader

> Turning the camera off is just a socially acceptable way of not showing up.

Why do you think that someone with a camera off is not present? How can you honestly equate camera-off with absence?

> There are exceptions of course

imo it's the opposite. Rarely to never does it matter if you see my face in a meeting. It's an exceedingly rare exception that you should need to as a business requirement.

Have you considered that... _you_ just like having your camera on, and like seeing other people? And other people just don't care?

Furthermore - even if you were right, I would say it's a good thing that busy people have a socially graceful way to opt out of the organisational mistakes of others.

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> Have you considered that... _you_ just like having your camera on, and like seeing other people?

Yes, I think this is the whole point here. This is a bidirectional relationship.

We all have biases, and for a lot of people wanting some physical concept of the person they are working with is one of them, so yeah, they might just like seeing your face.

It's your prerogative to turn it off, but there is a very real chance this will impact your relationship with other people.

The biggest change for me is that I now hide my self video 100% of the time. I can't see myself in an irl meeting, so I don't need to see myself online either.

Don't this kind of makes the whole problem go away.

Meetings take place across big tables, not with your faces taped to a cardboard box a foot away from each other to inspect your zits and boogers.

These are just digital calls that someone put poor representations of facial expressions alongside.

> Why do you think that someone with a camera off is not present?

I never said this.

> Furthermore - even if you were right, I would say it's a good thing that busy people have a socially graceful way to opt out of the organisational mistakes of others.

Maybe, if you have a company culture where such mistakes cannot be addressed frankly, then perhaps. The lack of facial expressions and other non-verbal cues will take away much of the signals that are available to the organizer however. Which in turn can make regular nonsense meetings last longer than they should.

In my experience quite a lot of these regular meetings are scheduled as a knee-jerk reaction of management to solve problems they don't actually understand. This is great source of unproductive meetings, bowing out 'gracefully' by turning off your camera and attention will not make things better. I'm used to being able to express my concerns openly though, without holding back, so maybe I'm biased.

There's a one-way implication here, not two way, i.e.:

I_want_socially_acceptable_absence => I_join_with_camera_off

but there's no 100% certainty the other way round.

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