I've been currently using Zoom during the pandemic because as a product it's still the best (and I signed up for a discounted year of pro), but I won't give them any money again.
Tesla canceled Zoom due to these privacy concerns expressed in this article. We use Microsoft Teams now and it's much better. Everyone already used it as an instant messenger before this and since it's part of the Outlook ecosystem i've found that it's much better. It's also saved a ton of useless meetings that run really long because i can just call someone straight through Teams instead of setting a meeting.
As much as I don't like consolidation of tech, I've had really good experiences with Google Meet. No scummy practices like forcing users to pretend that the app installer doesn't download just to connect from the browser either. What are Zoom's advantages?
I haven't personally used Google Meet, but part of what drew me to Zoom:
- General preference for non-ad supported business model.
- Google Meet wasn't an option until very recently.
- I really dislike hangouts and how it leaks chat all over Gmail (among other things), and this has biased me against their other products.
- Similarly, I was a huge fan of Google Voice which was way ahead of its time and which they abandoned for years until many other multi-billion dollar companies rose up and took the space.
- I've anecdotally heard Meet had worse video/audio quality from friends.
- I tend to try and avoid Google chat products since they're usually a mess and often killed.
Of all of these, the first and last are really the only valid reasons.
Google Meet does have its own scummy practices though (adding itself to meetings without asking which confuses participants and is extremely annoying, Benedict Evans tweeted/wrote about this).
Maybe Jitsi works well enough to actually use? I already have a Matrix server, I could try getting friends to use that instead (realistically probably will be difficult).
> I've anecdotally heard Meet had worse video/audio quality from friends.
The best part of Zoom taking off is suddenly Meet appears to be getting new features almost daily. It's like a product Google suddenly cares about again. Audio and video quality have also greatly improved. It's really like a completely different product from 6 months ago.
I think the pandemic has brought into harsh relief how critical some of those quality of life features were, and advanced their urgency within Google. They're adding so many millions of users per day, and already had a strong initial base product, that building these additional zoom-competitive features is a no-brainer.
And Google Meet is able to bring to bear some of their absolutely amazing advances with ML for things like predictive sound for dropped packets and the new denoiser function they've launched, along with live captioning and some other just incredible features.
There are a few little things that bug me with Google Meet: their newly introduced grid view doesn't display yourself as one of the tiles, for some reason. I don't want to pay $25/mo/user for an enterprise account _just_ for the video recording feature, which I will have to do come September, if they don't extend the current offer to make that available to all GSuite tiers. And I wish it recorded the transcription. But overall, it's a pretty great product, and its tight integration with Google Calendar and Slack, along with its frankly fantastic meeting room hardware has made it our software of choice for some time now for conferencing.
Plus, it's a sunk cost for GSuite users. Aside from a licensing fee for the meeting rooms, I'm not paying an _additional_ per-user monthly fee, which for a small consultancy like mine, matters.
The main reason I liked Zoom was because it was so easy to install. I've had zooms with non-technical people over 70, and not one of them needed help installing it.
The same cannot be said of Google. Heck, as a technical person I have trouble getting Google Meet to work consistently. That was Zoom's main advantage -- their ease of setup and use, and "it just works". We now know that part of the reason that is the case is because they do some very unorthodox things that are security nightmares.
Security and ease of use are always a tradeoff. Zoom has always been on the very far end towards ease of use and away from security.
Am I the only one who finds Zoom more difficult to use than Google Meet? I am not a regular user of Zoom, and do not want to install the app on my computer, but Zoom apparently requires the meeting organizer to go into their settings and enable a "Join from your browser" link for participants [0]. This is quite user unfriendly, and if I have to watch some seminar on Zoom I can't be asking the organizer to enable this option.
Note this is coming from someone who uses Firefox and Duck Duck Go to resist Google's monopoly (i.e., I'm not a Google fanboy.)
I think you are right that Google Meet in general is easier to use. However, I think that's at least in part because Zoom is so full of options. I mostly realize this when playing games via Zoom with friends. "your laptop that has no video on is making it so that we cannot see you iPad's video!" - "just turn on 'hide non-video participants'". "you need to get closer together or move the iPad further away because the edges of your video get cut off" - "Just double click the video and it will stop cropping". "Can you stop sharing your screen? I'd much rather see participants" - "Just click the icon in the top right to swap video and shared screen. You could also turn on dual monitor support".
Fair point. The ever-present tradeoff between features and simplicity... I guess for my fairly vanilla use case of talking to my friends or colleagues at work, there are just a lot of easier options.
I’m glad Zoom is forcing Google Meet to innovate, though.
Security and ease of use are not by default mutually exclusive. Depending on circumstances satisfying both may be a challenge, but it’s not a blanket impossibility and we could probably hold certain companies up to a standard that corresponds to their multi-billion valuations.
A virtual “slider” on which you can only dial up security by hurting usability is only a useful map, not the territory.
> It’s worth keeping in mind that even though security and ease of use tend to inversely correlate with each other, they are not by default mutually exclusive.
I actually disagree with you. I think security and ease of use are mutually exclusive.
I can't think of a single counterexample where security did not have an effect on usability.
Now to be clear, I absolutely believe we should have a lot more security than we do, and we should be giving up usability to do it. But I think that it is necessary to give up usability.
> 1. HTTPS everywhere has zero impact on the usability of a website, but makes visiting those sites much more secure.
You have to install a plugin on every browser and device. That's not user friendly. Also some sites break and you have to understand why.
> 2. Apple's App Store model for installing applications improves security and is also easier to use for the average user.
You have to have an account on the app store. You can't log into the same account on more than five machines. You have to put your password in every time you install an app.
That's all a lot harder than clicking on a link in an email.
> 3. 1Password with Touch/Face ID can actually be easier these days than entering emails and passwords manually.
You have to install 1password on all your devices. You have to mange your passwords with 1password. I'm an expert and even I have a hard time getting it to catch every update and every password field. 1password is a usability nightmare. Having the same password everywhere is a lot easier (and obviously less secure).
You're looking at one aspect after the initial setup and ignoring maintenance.
You're assuming that an extra step always implies a usability penalty, but that's not true.
"Usability can be described as the capacity of a system to provide a condition for its users to perform the tasks safely, effectively, and efficiently while enjoying the experience." (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usability)
Notice the presence of "safely" there. You should be penalizing the alternative in each of these examples for the non-zero risk of data breaches and getting pwned. Then we can have a more productive debate about which cost is greater.
It's not really much of a comparison if you pick things like 'the security mechanism breaks in some way' and no similar failure modes of the 'no security' variant. It's a serious usability problem if an insecure interaction gives you bogus information or if all your accounts are compromised because you use the same password everywhere.
If that's the point it seems like a particularly inaccurate and cherry-picky one. Security is not what's introducing the failure modes, the adversarial universe is. The no-security solutions have catastrophically worse usability in that reality. You're comparing the usability of things with security features with the usability of things without security in a hypothetical non-adversarial environment. I can posit a world in which security features never fail or introduce usability friction, that wouldn't be a useful starting point for a comparison either.
Generalizing your point, introducing or expanding on any feature or functionality always implies proportional degradation of some other feature via new failure modes. (“Security feature” being a special case.)
First, does that always hold true?
Second—if we pretend it’s an axiom—careful and competent approach may allow to shift such degradation to aspects orthogonal to usability (instead of being perceivable by end user, failure modes could cause overhead, say, to maintenance or engineering teams).
Https is worse from a usability standpoint because of the need for trust stores and keeping them up to date. While it's mostly taken care of by the browser, it can still cause problems when you don't have anything in your truststore that can verify the other certificate.
Ssh vs rsh suffers a similar problem. If the certificate on the other side changes, you have to update your local config to allow the new certificate and will either be blocked or have warnings until you do so.
Pretty much with anything that requires certificates, usability is worse because you have to maintain the trust store in some way.
In both cases you mentioned the effects are very negligible and certainly worth the tradeoff, but strictly speaking, the usability is worse.
I think security and usability are tradeoffs ... past a certain point. I have a hard time believing most products couldn't improve both substantially before needing to start considering the trade-offs.
I believe that the degree to which security negatively affects usability is variable, and in some cases could be negligible, depending on engineering and product teams’ competence.
Please don't make your arguments this way on HN. It poisons the community and evokes worse from others. Worst of all, if you're right, i.e. if you're in possession of some truth that others don't know, you end up discrediting the truth by mixing it in with personal attacks, calling names, or other aggressiveness.
That phenomenon gets stronger the less-known the truth is, because people will more readily look for reasons to reject a contrarian/minority view than a familiar one. It's important not to supply spurious such reasons, and that means articulating the truth (or what you believe is true) in a way that avoids gratuitous admixtures.
Your policy isn't working. It's letting open-and-shut misinformation like this, the outright denial of the existence of a well-known field of research going back decades, go unchallenged. That's Creationism-level intellectual malpractice. You may succeed in making HN more polite — or, more likely, rude in a more subtle way, like Winston Churchill — but if you do it by reducing it to an echo chamber of vulgar misconceptions like this, is that really a win? How can you improve the epistemic functioning of the community?
I'm going to take a break for 81 days now, unless I need to respond to something specifically about something I've written. We'll see what this place looks like then. I'll probably follow it with a longer break.
You're a great contributor and I appreciate your passion. In fact, any internet forum with HN's mandate which is kragenless has got to be fucking up somehow. I particularly appreciate that your passion is completely unpredictable. That's extremely unusual, (and believe me, after doing this for 8 years, I know). So please come back sooner than 81 days, or at least make future breaks shorter rather than longer.
You've been at this longer than I have, so I don't feel like I have much to offer by way of insight, but let me try one thing. Any large, open internet forum has a serious upper bound, a cap on how good it can ever get. Misinformation and ignorance float in like open sewage. There's nothing we can do about that. It's frustrating. Actually it's crazy-making, because the more we all do to improve the community and make it better, the more it invites an influx of sewage, because sewage-spewers always want to spew in the highest-quality environment they can find, and there are zero barriers to entry here. (Lest I hurt anyone else's feelings, I should add that I'm not calling the other commenter a sewage-spewer, even if he may be wrong about the tradeoff between security and usability. Rather, this phenomenon is best described in the general case.)
Given that there's zero we can do to prevent this, the only agency we have is around how to react to it. There, I think we've learned something. Misinformation is not best combated by attacking the misinformed. One of my teachers once told me: "I did a Ph.D. in psychology, and here is what I learned from my Ph.D.: that punishment is not good for learning." Rather, misinformation is best combated by relating with the misinformed person while correcting the misinformation. How do you relate with a misinformed person? That's up for grabs. I don't think we've learned any formulas for that; the only thing I feel pretty sure of is that it can't be faked. Clearly, though, "you're full of shit" is not the way to get there.
Attacking the misinformed person puts their nervous system into flight-or-fight mode, which on the internet reduces to fight-mode. Worse, it fires a polarizing laser into the community, because while some readers will agree, others will be on the opposite side of the question, and still others will be neutral on the question itself but will freak out in response to the attack. Attack invites counterattack, and what gets lost in this process is the open state in which people are available for new information. Fight mode is like a muscle spasm, while receptivity requires relaxation.
The model underlying how we moderate HN doesn't have to do with politeness. I agree that enforcing politeness does not improve epistemic functioning; it just creates a fear of breaking the rules, and fear is a shut-down state. Meanwhile in other people it provokes a 'wtf? fuck politeness' reaction—and quite rightly.
The policy here isn't about politeness—nor 'civility', which is a word we stopped using a year or two ago for similar reasons. If I had to pick a word as of right now, I might pick 'openness'. We're interested in what practices of behavior are the ones that can encourage each other to stay in an open state—that is, a state in which we're able to hear each other and exchange interesting information.
The bottom line is that any large internet forum is going to be an 'echo chamber of vulgar misconceptions'—any attempt to prevent that is doomed—but we have the opportunity to be a somewhat interesting echo chamber of vulgar misconceptions, that is, a community which is able to respond interestingly, and the way to have that is to practice openness and the things which encourage openness in others.
I went around the office helping colleagues setup Zoom around mid-March before the UK went into "lockdown" and told people to work from home if at all possible, because it was obviously going to happen soon and the company wanted at least a stop-gap solution in place while everyone was still in the building with easy access to our IT team.
In my experience setting up accounts and installing the Windows software for 15+ people in one afternoon, I cannot believe what you're saying. Unless Zoom has gotten way easier to setup and use since March, it is a nightmare.
It's been a while, but I'm fairly sure was basically like this:
1) Enter email into website
2) Click link in email
3) Enter name and password
4) Invite others or skip
5) Click to start a meeting, which actually starts a download
6) Install software, meeting starts automatically
7) End meeting
8) Manually log in to Windows client despite it starting a meeting on your account immediately after installation
That is not easy or accessible to non-technical people at all, especially with how they hid certain buttons as really pale grey during the signup process. It was also a nightmare trying to oversee this process, and repeating it on each machine for those who got lost trying to do it themselves took ages due to waiting for emails, people deleting the email thinking it was spam, downloads not starting due to requests timing out, etc.
Then, a few weeks after we all started working from home, Zoom removed the automatic Company Contacts list and suddenly we could only contact colleagues through existing group chats. No warning, no explanation, not even a reference in the changelog or help pages on their website - rather, the help guides still said the feature was available and explained how to toggle it on or off. Everyone spent that morning adding all their colleagues as personal contacts by manually entering emails one-by-one and then accepting all the invites they received in return.
Zoom is useful once you get it working, but it is definitely not easy to get it working for non-technical people.
My company tried to use Google Meet. With a group of around 16 people, Google Meet had all sorts of connection quality issues—people's voices cut out while talking, sounded garbled, etc.
A week later, we tried Zoom instead. We could hear everyone clearly. We've used Zoom ever since.
I had some say in the decision to continue with Zoom, and I feel kind of bad about choosing it, but it's hard to argue with the results. We had similar issues with Slack video calls (although we still use those for small groups—not my decision!), Microsoft Teams, and a product from LogMeIn called Join.Me. Unlike Zoom but like Google Meet, these products are all based on WebRTC, and I'm starting to conclude that WebRTC is just a crappy technology for large-group video calls.
We admittedly haven't tried Jitsi. Perhaps I'm part of the problem, but I don't want to be the one to suggest a random product no one has heard of. Especially when that product is also based on WebRTC.
A little bit more than a few weeks ago when lock down was in full effect when everyone realized that products like Skype, line video, and Google meet etc had all had these massive head starts but were left to languish and were all actually awful when it actually matters.
The more I learn about zoom as a company the more I can't wait to delete it but all the comparable products have all been terrible in comparison.
The reason I'm not using Google Meet is because there's no guarantee about the continuity of the service a few years down the road. I think it's a reasonable fear about every Google product (except for search, gmail, and YT). I don't wanna rely on a service that gets discontinued by Google just like their other popular products e.g. Reader, Plus, Glass, etc.
Strongly agree. It seems every few months or years the tide shifts and we all move to something else. And one may use different choices for different groups or larger or smaller audiences.
If it works well enough, it would be a fine choice to connect with your friends/colleagues while you are stuck at home due to the corona virus. A few years down the road there will be new products!
Zoom is SO much more seamless than Meet. Its desktop clients exist, are usable, and don't force you to keep trying Chrome whenever something breaks. (I swear Google never tests their prodcuts on FF/Safari...)
Meet also has a very fixed layout. Its mic control bar on the bottom cuts off the names on the bottom row of participants. The UI on "waiting to connect" page is hilarious; it has a line of vertical dots for changing settings, and a line of horizontal dots for monitoring audio. There's a small concept in design called discoverability -- doesn't exist for Google, lol.
No idea. We're on Meet at my company, and I'm very happy with it. Works well in the browser, connects to Google calendar without any fuss, and I haven't had any issues with dropped calls or low quality.
Not being bound to the browser can be a huge advantage. I usually use at least two Zoom windows. One with a panel view of all meeting participants and a second with either a shared screen or the speaker view. In some cases I split the chat out as well. I find it super important to not only see what's being shared, but also be able to watch people's reactions.
Zoom makes it also easy to see who has noise coming from their microphone, what audio and video up and down bandwidth is looking like. Lots of little things like this that matter if you spend most of your day in remote meetings.
Wow, looks like I have been living under the rock for a little bit. The monetization strategy was not clear to me, but I though that eventually having premium accounts would make sense. The launch of Stellar was a little confusing.
You should be able to reset your account to negate all your keys and set things back up if you lost access to all previous devices.
I ended up doing this anyway in the end, after deleting everything I could before I stopped using it.
They do make you wait seven days before you can do it after you make the request.
I still have the account because I don't want to lose access to my username (didn't delete it), but it's otherwise empty and unused with fresh keys that have no history with anything.
I've been currently using Zoom during the pandemic because as a product it's still the best (and I signed up for a discounted year of pro), but I won't give them any money again.