
What Comes After Zoom? - 1cvmask
https://www.ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2020/6/22/zoom-and-the-next-video
======
Joeri
I feel video conferencing is a sidetrack. It is an approximation of a physical
meeting that never captures the spirit of the real thing and prevents us from
moving on to something better.

The real power of digital communication is that it is searchable, remixable
and that you don’t need to be at a specific place at a specific time to take
part, and yet we now all have slots in our calendar requiring us to be in
something that has none of those benefits. This is an anti-pattern.

Group communication needs to be async, written and structured for easy access.
The linux kernel mailing list is a much closer approximation of how it should
be than any video conference, but it too is a high friction system. No tool so
far has cracked this, although some like discourse and basecamp are trying.
Google tried to once upon a time with wave, but they’ve given up and joined
the physical meeting proxy club.

~~~
zucker42
I fundamentally disagree. The reason synchronous video communication continues
to dominate is because it's more information dense than text in many
situations, and more interactive than asynchronous alternatives.

Asynchronous communication has its place, and it's amazing what has been
accomplished over the LKML and similar. Software projects tend to make this
sort of communication ideal, since they are amenable to individualized
contributions. But the prescription that efficient digital communication must
be asynchronous and textual is incorrect.

~~~
atoav
I work as IT-Support for a university and during the last months I mainly had
to do with video conferencing both on and off work (a person living in my
household still studies and they have been in conferences as well).

My feeling is: video conferencing took hold for two main reasons (in the
university context):

1\. It is the most straightforward continuation of whatever existed before
(those who talk, talk and those who listen, listen)

2\. People have desire for beeing close with others

However in terms of efficiency, I noticed that the raw educational value of
some (often 4h+ long) meetings could have been summarized by watching a well
produced 15min video and reading a 10 page PDF, if one were to skip all the
chitchat and pointless hollow remarks. In terms of information density the
seemingly unlimited nature of video conferencing doesn't work out well in
practise (especially if paired with people who like to hear themselves speak).

Most of our educators are certainly not happy with what it does to the way
they have to teach (less interactivity — anything other than a 3-way
conversation is nearly impossible, the rest has to be passive). They say it
leads to more frontal and less communicative education.

As musician, artist and programmer i know async collaborations and projects —
the best stuff was always a combination of sync and async. This is why I tend
to recommend to our educators to view video conferences not as _the_
replacement for their usual seminars, but as part of a strategic mix with
synchronous (video conferences) and asynchronous components (email,
collaborative text editing, etc).

~~~
draugadrotten
> well produced 15min video and reading a 10 page PDF,

It is surprisingly difficult to create a useful 15 minute video. Go ahead and
be rich if you find it easy. It takes me about 8 hours to produce 15 minutes
of truly information-packed video content. And it is not as re-usable as you
think.

> if one were to skip all the chitchat

Many people need the social chitchat to feel OK. It is not a negative side of
video conferencing, it is added value.

~~~
ckdarby
> It is surprisingly difficult to create a useful 15 minute video. Go ahead
> and be rich if you find it easy. It takes me about 8 hours to produce 15
> minutes of truly information-packed video content. And it is not as re-
> usable as you think.

This is the problem. Why does it matter if it takes 8 hours?

What this comment replies to talks about 4 hour meeting but just with 3 people
it nets 3 hours saved as a collective (assuming all 3 watch the 15 minute
video).

This past week there was an article on HN that talked about the benefits of
written communication. The argument of effort to produce such "memos" was
throughout the discussion but it is the very same as the conversation about
video here.

I've seen this at multiple places that contributors don't want to put the
upfront additional work for the collective benefit. Human nature at it's best,
selfishness.

~~~
neutronicus
> Why does it matter if it takes 8 hours?

It matters because letting impatient people get rid of social conventions
placing boundaries on their access to others' time is a dangerous thing to do,
doubly so when the pretext for doing so is dumping responsibility for creating
deliverables on small subsets of an org, which they will never be able to
escape once the expectation is established.

The thing about synchronous is that the important people who refuse to read
anything all have to sit in a chair and fidget at the same time to get the
answers they want. There is no fiction that I will produce an artifact
allowing me to disseminate information 1-to-M, and each important person
enforces with the others that they can't interrogate me out-of-band and skip
the meeting. There's only collective benefit if the document author can tell
people "fuck you, read the memo." Otherwise, you're just spending hours
putting up a sign-post for lazy people to bother you.

------
DebtDeflation
My company uses WebEx not Zoom, but I have found meetings far more tolerable
since I started disabling inbound video. I've always turned off my own video,
but turning off everyone else's has been a game changer. The important parts
of a remote meeting are the audio and screenshare; video is a net-negative. I
get no value from watching people type, fidget around with a phone, have
random family members and pets walk by, etc. and actually find it quite
distracting.

~~~
ben509
Yup. The worst on Zoom and Google Meet is:

a. the person with feedback or background noise causing the video to flip to
them

b. someone displaying their lunch for everyone to see

c. Zoom specialty: obnoxious video backgrounds

Zoom helps you block trolls, but does nothing for the pain of having to listen
to someone's feedback during an hour long meeting. And you often don't want to
interrupt the meeting to pester people about their microphone.

It's a similar problem to Slack. We have some people who overuse @here and
various similar sins, and Slack's answer is there's no reason to block, just
fix your company.[1]

What this misses is there's a broad range of behavior between pleasant and
malicious. There are also a broad range of social remedies we normally use to
deal with this behavior.

Most of those social remedies don't work well online. It's surprisingly hard
to craft a written correction that doesn't come across as an attack,
especially if you're senior and don't want to unintentionally throw that rank
around.

[1]:
[https://twitter.com/stewart/status/624239660529684481](https://twitter.com/stewart/status/624239660529684481)

~~~
soylentcola
We also use WebEx at work (university setting) and for smaller meetings, we
require everyone to use (at a minimum) a set of basic headphones to avoid
echo. If they don't use them, they need to keep their mic muted whenever they
aren't speaking.

For class-related stuff or larger meetings/seminars, we use the Events portion
of WebEx instead of Meetings. It's basically the same thing, but there are
more "roles" so there's a host who can mute/unmute participants or assign
privileges. Panelists are the speakers who can turn their audio and video off
by themselves but can only screen share if made a "presenter". Attendees are
just the people watching the thing, and they can chat with text but can't turn
their own mics on. They can raise their hand or the host can find them in the
attendee list if they need to unmute them.

Once people got used to how it works, it has been surprisingly effective. You
don't need to make sure every attendee in a 300-person seminar has headphones
on--just the people who are presenting. If one of the presenters is unwilling
or unable to use headphones, I can mute them if they have a live mic that's
just causing echo while they sit there and listen. Students and other
attendees can still speak with their mics, but only when called on.

Incidentally, this also does away with all of the issues of people disrupting
Zoom calls because you can only join as a panelist if you are on the list and
have the right link. You can still publish the attendee link publicly because
the worst thing an attendee can do is type in the chat (and even then, they
can only send to "all participants" if you enable it).

------
jojobas
Why do we have RFC standardized and decentralized email but never could make
standard chat/call protocol?

XMPP and now Matrix made good progress in that direction but are mostly
obscure to date.

~~~
bsder
1) Because email predated everybody trying to become a monopoly and extract
rents from the Internet.

2) NAT _really_ screwed us all by breaking the end-to-end nature of the
Internet.

~~~
zucker42
Could you explain how NAT is relevant to the growth of walled gardens to
someone was born after the development of the World Wide Web?

~~~
jodrellblank
If nothing else, NAT makes it harder to leave a walled garden for a small chat
program between you and your friends/family/interest group. Without it, you
could potentially all run the program and talk. With it, someone has to be
technical enough to do port forwarding, someone has to be on a connectin
without carrier-grade NAT so that port forwarding is an option, and/or someone
has to pay with money/time to setup and run a server on a dedicated IP or
upgrade their connection to a static IP.

The most easily accessible alternative is another company's closed system.

I suspect NAT wasn't involved in that developing as much as money was - IRC,
email, Newsgroups were hard to profit from. Having a distinctive service which
is different from your competitors so customers can be attracted, and which is
closed so customers want to bring their friends and family in to talk to them
and then can't leave without the whole group leaving, is bound to be more
profitable for the winners than taking part in a federated system where only
one user can join and talk to their contacts with relays to other servers.

------
pornel
I think Facebook is ultimately right, just too early, betting on VR being the
next thing.

Spatial presence is incredibly important: you can face towards the person
you're speaking to. You can whisper to the person next to you. Crowded rooms
naturally organize in cliques/groups. In a video chat all of this is broken or
awkward.

VR today is way too bulky and annoying. It's in the "luggable microcomputers"
stage before laptops and phones, but it shows a glimpse of the future.

For example, standalone Oculus is less of a hassle than thethered headsets.
Camera-based hand tracking demos show how people can freely gesticulate in the
VR space. Imagine that extended to full-body tracking and in-headset sensors
that capture facial expressions and "deepfake" you in VR.

~~~
codethief
I agree 100%.

Speaking of spatial presence, I recently came across tonari[0] through a
post[1] here on HN and thought it looked really cool. In case any of the
tonari developers happen to hang out around here: I would love to try this out
sometime! :)

(Side note: The blog post linked in the HN discussion below does a much better
job at explaining what it is that they're doing – at least to me as a techie.)

[0] [https://tonari.no](https://tonari.no)

[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23540586](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23540586)

------
skybrian
If you want to play in hard mode, figure out how to get video calls working
for someone calling their grandma in a nursing home, when she doesn't have a
laptop or smartphone.

It would have to be a device that's as simple to use as a phone. Not a cell
phone, a regular phone that sits on a desk, the old-fashioned kind.

I bet a whole lot of people wish that they had something like that working
during the pandemic.

~~~
rapnie
My 100yr old grandma is using KOMP right now, and that's going very well. She
can understand us better than on the phone. The device is on the expensive
side, though, with 600 £.

[https://www.noisolation.com/uk/komp/](https://www.noisolation.com/uk/komp/)

~~~
rhythmofrest
Thank you for sharing this, I've never seen KOMP before and it looks
wonderful.

------
axegon_
IMO, Zoom has the worst user experience of all video conferencing tools by a
long shot, at least on Linux, regardless of whether you are a paying user or
not. And while Skype was doing a terrible job for years, these days it's light
years ahead of Zoom. Google Meet is also doing an incredible job and lately
I've been using it a lot. I seriously don't understand how a horrible product
such as Zoom made it so big... So whatever comes after Zoom, I hope it will do
a better job.

~~~
dnautics
You haven't tried Cisco WebEx,have you? For a good chunk of time Skype was
dead while MS was busy figuring out how to assimilate it. Google was out
because companies didn't want google to spy on you, so your options were WebEx
or zoom (which we didn't know was a spying dumpster fire yet). We eventually
also had to give up on WebEx because it simply did not work consistently on
our Linux Dev's laptops. So our option was "or zoom"

~~~
axegon_
The spying argument is not exactly applicable for most scenarios. I mean you
know you are taking a risk when you're using proprietary software running on
servers that aren't yours, whether the privacy issues are intentional or
design flaws(both of which exist in every solution, whether that be zoom,
google, microsoft or any other competitor in that context). So with that I
personally pick reliability over anything else, hence my personal choice -
meet. And realistically speaking, very few people are of any interest to
Google or even state agencies. I most certainly am not: I've applied for
positions at Google in the past so they have my near - complete resume(now
lead developer as opposed to senior developer when I applied), I use some of
their paid services so they know my bank account, full names, address and
telephone number and I use a ton of their products in general. I'm way past
the "on the internet no one knows I'm a dog" state. I'm with Torvalds on this
one - I'll use proprietary solutions so long as they do the job and there are
no viable alternatives.

~~~
dnautics
Well in the case of Google I was working at a company that was interested in
partnering with google competitors, so it didn't matter whether we thought we
were targets or not.

------
rm445
What on earth happened to Skype? Over a decade of head start, why wasn't it
completely untouchable when COVID-19 came along?

Another thought. Last year at the peak of Fortnite hype, when top DJs were
hosting parties live in game etc, there was talk that the next big thing in
communications might be everyone hanging out in games, Fortnite or whatever
came next. I do think that lots of young people are meeting friends in games,
but it hasn't had the enormous breakthrough in culture that Zoom has. We can
probably retire our expectations of some kind of Metaverse for a few more
years.

~~~
stevewodil
>What on earth happened to Skype?

Microsoft happened

~~~
umeshunni
eBay happened, then Microsoft happened.

------
nharada
I feel part of Zoom's initial foothold in the market was that inside of a
conference room it "just worked". Or at least more so than other options I'd
tried, especially a couple of years ago. Even earlier this year I had issues
getting Google Meet to work in our office's conference rooms. Minimizing or
removing the "fiddling with the AV software" phase of meetings is huge.

------
Yhippa
Very interesting post. One thing I'm thinking of is if an enterprise uses
something like Slack then you could have persistent video rooms similar to the
audio rooms in Discord.

The last paragraph makes a good point though. As good as Slack is, there is
something that still feels inefficient to me. When I'm trying to communicate
with people it's almost like shouting out into the ether. Did they see my
message? Why haven't they responded yet? I need this question answered now.

It's strange. Email for the most part you were reasonably assured when you hit
the send button that it was off into their inbox. It would be kind of cool to
see what the Snap of business comms could look like.

~~~
kwindla
Tandem has done a really nice job with persistent video/audio rooms for
distributed teams: [https://tandem.chat/](https://tandem.chat/)

------
ipiz0618
With my experience Microsoft Teams is actually a better choice than Zoom. You
don't even need to install the program and it works on the web, unlike the
fake "web interface" of Zoom that just loads infinitely and forces you to
install their suspicious client.

------
war1025
I haven't used Zoom, but I have attempted to use Google Meet for video chat
and it was an abysmal tire fire.

My mom wanted to do a family video chat over Easter and I thought, "Hey, we
use Google Meet at work. I bet it will be great for this." It was a completely
unusable experience of frozen videos and dropped audio. I was ready to just
completely throw in the towel on the entire idea.

My mom said, "Well, me and my sisters have been using Skype for years and it
works just fine." So I begrudgingly downloaded Skype and created an account.
It just works. It's amazing.

We've been doing video chats every Sunday evening with my mom and my brother's
family for a couple months now. I thought I hated video chat. It turned out I
just hated Google's idea of video chat.

My wife uses Facebook video chat with her mom and it works pretty acceptably
too. I think Skype is still better, but Google Meet is absolute bottom of the
barrel in video chat technology. Which is a shame because Google Meet works
great for audio with screen sharing.

Maybe Zoom works comparably well to Skype. I hope so.

~~~
eitally
Duo is a much better choice for family video chat than Meet/Hangouts

~~~
war1025
I've never heard of it before you mentioning it. That does look to be more in
line with what I'd want. A bit confused why they wouldn't leverage the same
technology in Meet since that seems to be the product that gets more press.

------
bullen
The action MMO is the final medium, in VR or not, I suspect in 3rd person!

Positional 3D audio is the last frontier. But I'm not sure you will want it
for public gatherings,

it should be a friends only thing in a sea of chat bubbles above the
characters heads.

The chat feed is not interesting because the context is lost and trolling is
too easy.

~~~
foxbarrington
2d positional audio works really well too. Check out
[https://rambly.app](https://rambly.app) for a 16-bit rpg feel. Works great
for virtual happy hours / groups of 5+.

------
zitterbewegung
The thing that comes after Zoom is another app that makes the experience of
teleconferencing easier.

If I were to guess maybe some kind of Mixed Reality system. Having Audio,
Video with Video sharing is good. For some niche industries like CAD / CAM and
also VR /AR / Video game design if you had some kind of Mixed reality system
that could allow people to collaborate with 3D data you could actually have an
interesting product.

------
neltnerb
Certainly I can see Microsoft simply integrating video chat into the Office
suite. I'm kind of shocked they haven't yet really solved real-time
collaboration given that they own Skype and Office.

~~~
wenc
It's called Microsoft Teams, and in its current iteration, it's surprisingly
good. I actually prefer it to Slack. It is highly integrated with Office 365
(supports live collaboration etc.).

The HD video quality is surprisingly solid -- comparable to Zoom, far
surpasses Webex and Google Hangouts -- and uses a different protocol, codec(s)
and network than Skype for Business, which I have always found spotty. MS
Teams is the slated successor to Skype for Business (good riddance).

[https://www.djeek.com/2018/01/microsoft-teams-and-the-
protoc...](https://www.djeek.com/2018/01/microsoft-teams-and-the-protocols-it-
uses-opus-and-mnp24/)

It can handle up to 250 participants for group video chat (similar to Zoom),
and there's an MS Teams Live Events edition that can handle 10k participants.
(20k during COVID)

[https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/teams-
live-e...](https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/teams-live-
events/plan-for-teams-live-events)

It actually does a few things better than Zoom -- its virtual background
feature is able to better detect and eliminate complex backgrounds. It
recently introduced on-the-fly automatic closed captioning (through speech
recognition). Later this year, it will have a larger video grid (currently the
limit is 3x3) and AI-based noise cancellation on mic input -- previously the
domain of offerings like krisp.ai.

On iOS devices, it even lets you do live screen-sharing on mobile (using
Apple's Screen Recorder mechanism), which makes it easy to demo mobile apps on
a video call.

EDIT: --I don't think Zoom let you do this (yet?)-- not a true statement, but
leaving this here with strikethrough.

~~~
meritt
My company tried MS Teams for about two days before canning it and switching
back to Slack + Zoom. I've never encountered such a poorly designed product
[1] other than the one it was supposed to replace, Skype for Business.

Why the does chat need to take up so much space on the screen and why is
everything presented in basically an old school SMS layout (I'm looking at you
too, Signal). I tried a handful of their integrations nothing worked
correctly. Trying to simply enable github commits/PRs/etc was a confusing
nightmare of authenticating multiple parties and ultimately all it did was
have a chatbot privately spam me, but couldn't have it reside in a channel.

Screen sharing is a disaster for everything business oriented too (ms teams,
zoom, slack, whatever google's thing is called this week). They're slow,
laggy, frequently crash, and resolution is unreadable most of the time. If you
need to have screen sharing where your voice chat happens at the same time as
your video actions, Discord is the only thing that works flawlessly. It's
superior on simple voice chat too, persistent voice chat rooms, etc. It's
lovely software.

[1] [https://images.techhive.com/images/article/2017/02/teams-
bet...](https://images.techhive.com/images/article/2017/02/teams-beta-
windows-100708530-large.jpg)

~~~
wenc
Screen-sharing on Teams has been pretty solid -- after all, screen sharing is
an enterprise's bread and butter. As someone who averages 10-15 meetings a
week, most of them with screen shares, I think I have a pretty good sample
size to come to that conclusion.

I can't comment on aesthetics since that's fairly subjective. I can't comment
on integrations either since I've only tried a few, but I find it integrates
fairly effortlessly with Azure Devops (ie Microsoft's attempt at replicating
Github in what was previously Team Foundation Server) [1].

Here's the thing about Microsoft stuff -- generally things work well if you
remain in the Microsoft ecosystem. Otherwise, you'll likely have to do extra
work.

That said, Teams has improved drastically since 2017. Microsoft's philosophy
these days seems to be move fast, ship crap and get better quickly. Not in
every product line, but I've definitely seen this happen with Teams
development and I've actually come to like what the Teams product has become
today. I have to confess, Microsoft under Satya Nadella is a very different
company from what it once was.

[1] We're not allowed to use Github in my organization (bigcorp, IP etc.) but
I've found Azure Devops to be quite a decent substitute. It plays well with a
git pull-request workflow, has almost full feature parity with Github as far
as I can tell, plus has a built-in kanban board.

I like Github -- it's more tightly focused and simpler -- but I've been able
to carve out a part of Azure Devops that is similar to Github and maintain my
previous git workflow without much trouble. Azure Devops is not the dumpster
fire I'd expected it to be -- it's actually fairly good in parts.

(the only pain-in-the-neck with Azure Devops is licensing cost -- it's not
free. In the enterprise, it has named-user licensing which can get costly. I
wouldn't have used it if we didn't already have it and couldn't use private
Github.)

~~~
meritt
> We're not allowed to use Github in my organization (bigcorp, IP etc.)

Is your organization aware that Microsoft owns Github and your Azure stuff is
most likely hosted inside Microsoft data centers exactly like Github? Seems
like a weird line in the sand to draw.

> Microsoft under Satya Nadella is a very different company from what it once
> was.

Yeah, Microsoft is doing great things in other areas. VS Code, Windows 10,
WSL, DirectX on WSL, the massive focus on open source and giving back to the
community. I just found MS Teams in particular is unusable garbage, but I'm
very happy with Microsoft otherwise.

I don't know if you're old enough but MS Comic Chat was significantly superior
to Microsoft Teams.

~~~
wenc
Our source control has to be on-prem (our Azure Devops is on-prem).

I've never used it but I'm old enough to remember Comic Chat. Fair enough, we
have different positions and that's ok.

------
ponker
What I think is interesting is how much worse the conversation experience is
today vs. during the days of circuit-switched landline phones. There was no
perceptible difference between a live conversation and one by phone between
New York and Washington DC.

Today the conversations seem so stilted because there's 50+ milliseconds of
latency at a MINIMUM that makes interrupting and a back-and-forth
conversational flow absolutely impossible. Also lost completely are the little
"ahs" and "ums" that add color to a conversation.

------
Blackstone4
Virtual reality meetings? Ideally to truly replicate the in-person experience
since I feel like the body language/phyiscal presense ocmponent is important.

~~~
aurbano
This could be it, but current headsets are not that comfy after too much use,
and if you don't have AC at home (tons of EU homes won't have them) they can
be a nightmare in the summer...

------
mrkramer
The biggest opportunity in video was YouTube hence Google acquired it. Zoom is
only for business users: institutions, companies etc. Personal users use
WhatsApp, Skype, Viber or whatever they prefer.

"we are waiting for the Snap, Clubhouse and Yo." If products like this emerge
they will be niche like Twitch is for gaming video live streaming.

~~~
diegoperini
Wow, does Yo still exist? What have they been doing lately?

------
jpalomaki
I believe integrated groupware is the future. No separate tools for chat,
discussions, calls, screensharing, collaborative editing, email and
filesharing.

For example somebody pulls up document in a call. For team work it would make
sense if it was editable by everyone right there in the conference tool.

~~~
zhte415
This was Google Wave. A bit ahead of it's time.

~~~
auiya
Wave was an awesome product too. It's really a shame it succumbed to the
fickle and careless whims of Google's upper management. They've had so many
solid products that didn't get a properly good push, and instead pushed
products which were destined for failure, all to the same result.

------
fortran77
Why don't you ask Bernadette?
[https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0946288/](https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0946288/)

------
bsder
Everything has voice ... that nobody wants.

Customer service is now so terrible that I don't want to talk to you and I
_damn_ sure don't want you to talk to me. At this point, I've kinda bought
into the whole Millennial "If I can't do it online without interacting with a
human, go die in a fire cause you aren't making a sale."

Quit hiding the price--you simply lost the sale. Don't ask for a quote-you
simply lost the sale. Don't make me sign up before paying--you simply lost the
sale. If I can't do a return solely through online interaction--you simply
lost any further sales.

I see Zoom and its ilk the same way. Ubiquitous video chat--that nobody really
wants.

~~~
usui
I don't understand. Can you explain the connection between desire of online
convenience (this part is understandable) and Zoom?

~~~
bsder
The fundamental question is: "Do people actually _want_ video?"

Audio and, especially, video are very synchronous. Normally, the _last_ thing
I want in my schedule is another synchronous event.

Do I need _some_ video? Maybe. Perhaps my one-on-one with my manager.

Do we need video for a weekly group meeting? Do we even _need_ that weekly
group meeting? Sure, it was convenient when everybody was in the office. How
convenient is it now that everybody is at home?

------
shmerl
I don't get why Zoom got such attention. I've never even heard about it before
the pandemic. But I've heard of other video conferencing tools.

~~~
buboard
even before the pandemic, it was known as the most reliable chat for largish
meetings. Nothing else worked so well, and it still doesn.t

------
peq
An underappreciatd feature of Zoom is the 40 minute restriction in the free
version. Meetings are more productive with an enforced time limit.

------
dancemethis
We have Jitsi, which is Free Software. Zoom shouldn't even be considered for
anything in the first place.

------
aurbano
Is there a way to have good async group video chat?

I haven't given this much thought but maybe this is an interesting direction
to explore?

~~~
drewp
Check out [https://www.marcopolo.me/](https://www.marcopolo.me/)

It will even stream an in-progress video message to you as it's being recorded
if you happen to be looking at the app then.

------
SubiculumCode
Well after I just got to experience the Oculus Quest, I'm going to say, after
a few more VR generations, Zoom with VR avatars

------
MichaelAO
As an educator, Zoom is clunky and not designed for the use case. We built an
interactive live streaming platform during COVID-19 that we've found powerful.
A few keys features have been moderated chat, the ability to invite students
to join via video, embedded quizzes, and various screen sharing layouts.

Check out a stream today to see it in action:
[https://dexter.live/](https://dexter.live/)

------
buboard
Has someone repackaged the decades-old phone hotlines as an app and named it
Clubhouse?

------
kyberias
Why do they write about Zoom as if it invented video conferencing? Who is
blind here?

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tompagenet2
I think the author is noting that, as with Dropbox, video conferencing isn't
new (Skype has it), it's just then when the chips were down and millions of
people needed it Zoom seems to have worked better for more people than more
established entries, and part of this is probably that some fiddly things are
done well in Zoom. I'm making no comment personally about Zoom or its ethics,
just trying to clarify how I see the post.

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ISL
At its end, the article suggests a wonderful question.

What is Zoom's Yo?

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nexuist
Video voice mail? TikTok for enterprise?

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ISL
I feel like those might convey too much content?

Perhaps a link to a three-second "Never gonna give you up..." Rick-roll video?

Yo was one-bit Twitter. I don't know what one-bit video looks like?

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nexuist
Instagram with a 1kb upload limit

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monkin
Zoom out?

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BiteCode_dev
Crop.

