RFC 7282 – On Consensus and Humming in the IETF (2014)

Humming has all but mostly died within the IETF, and COVID played a notable part in killing it.

During the pandemic with all of the meetings being placed online, the video conferencing tooling messed around with different ways to recreate the hum and what is left today is something more akin to regular voting which sometimes can be janky and confusing with working group chairs having to iterate which option is an endorsement or rejection.

I don't think humming as a mechanism will be anything like it was five years ago, although physical attendance levels are (mostly) back and an on-going effort for remote participation to be more accessible - besides, the room humming isn't usually picked up well by the microphones. Unless it's fixed the working groups are going to be a little bit more awkward in getting consensus.

Nowadays it tends more to rough consensus by exhaustion. I've got drafts in late stage which have five years or more of arguing behind them.