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Comment by swiftcoder | Hacker News Reader

> group discussions over zoom just don't work IMO. The sound only allows one person at a time to speak

I do wonder if there are any technical solutions to be found to this. Now that high-speed fibre is pretty widespread, what if we transmitted every participants audio feed to every other participant, and merged them on the client, instead of the server?

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Discord is designed like this, because there is no special "presenter" or "organizer" and all participants are equal. Everyone can present simultaneously and you can mute individual speakers for yourself and not everyone else.

The single speaker is a design decision, not a technical issue. Only one "presenter" is allowed is allowed in business, or in school.

There are a handful of Spatial Audio videoconferencing solutions that work pretty well to allow multiple simultaneous conversations.

Metaverse and VR Chat? They mix on the client because also you get to hear where each speaker is in the space next to you. Without it in zoom it's just one garble if more than one person talks

I feel like we could probably just distribute everyone in a virtual circle - as if they are sitting around a big conference table - and skip the VR headset part of this

(don't get me wrong, I like a VR headset, but it's not something I've managed to work into my coding and docs writing setup just yet).

sure... I'm just saying mixing on client already exists.

Felt like a few dozen toys and a handful of startups all came up with this same solution during 2020-21 as next-big-things and Zoom still came out on top for so many other reasons

EDIT: Even MS Teams implemented it!

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