It's good to remind people, but Zoom does everything it can from my perspective to ensure no one is aware of this.
By default if you click a Zoom meeting link to join, it takes you to the Zoom page and starts a download of the installer (.pkg for Mac). The "Join from Browser" option is hidden and if I remember right, you have to click "Join" again, and then it will show a small HTML link about Join from Browser.
The Browser experience is subpar and buggy. A lot of features lag in the UI, it's very slow to connect to audio, and there are a few options I recall that reload the entire page without warning, meaning you leave the meeting and have to reconnect, often to find a double of yourself.
I also noticed issues with USB Audio devices where after awhile, a static-ey robot noise would appear from you. No other voice apps I used experienced this, only Zoom and only with USB devices and from the browser version. Maybe it's something with Firefox + USB audio, but never was interested to investigate more.
Zoom is really not good software and it's an exercise in frustration when we have to use it at work, and the pricing model seems a bit ridiculous, even for basic users.
There are loads of dark patterns, agreed. This drove me to go hunting in Firefox for a “don’t automatically download shit” option, but to no avail. I guess they hijack your click from the previous page. Just all round awful.
On the other hand, I’ve not had any audio or video problems once in the call, so ymmv.
You could change the option of where to save downloads. Instead of automatically putting them in the downloads folder, if you change it to ask every time, then you will get the file browser prompt before the download starts.
> Zoom is really not good software and it's an exercise in frustration when we have to use it at work
Having used pretty much all video conferencing software, it's by far the best in terms of features, UX, call quality, feature distribution across platforms (do you know that some like BlueJeans don't allow you to have a separate audio input/output device if the device chosen for one supports both? (I have headphones and a separate mic, i can't have the headphones for output only). With Zoom as long as everyone is on the app and not the browser version, all features work. Teams on Linux or mac is always lagging months behind.
Zoom got lucky that they managed to build a brand name just around the time Covid hit and everybody discovered that they needed to do video calls suddenly. I don't think it's particularly well designed or has any particularly novel features. I've been doing online meetings for a very long time and Zoom is just yet another thing here. Very middle of the road in terms of design, UX, or what it does.
In any case, I seem to need to talk to various companies using a disturbingly wide range of applications on a regular basis. Google Meets, Zoom, MS Teams, Cisco WebEx, Skype are all things I've used professionally in the recently. I've also used Slack, Discord, as well as Whatsapp, Facebook Messenger.
The thing is, they all kind of work and roughly with similar audio/video quality and all with the same kind of performance, usability, and other issues. Some of these are more suitable for 1 on 1 meetings and some of these things seem to be geared towards corporate setups.
I have a slight preference for using Google Meets; mainly because I can just launch that straight into the browser (Firefox) without any fuss and it just seems to work and is actually designed to work that way. There is no app even. You just click the thing in the calendar and it opens. Best of all, it plays nice with Firefox containers. So I can join corporate meetings with one account and private meetings with another. The most annoying thing is when you have 1 minute to join a meeting and you discover you need to first install some enterprise crap ware to join and then deal with permissions for it needing access to the screen, audio, etc. I just got a new laptop so, I got to do this a few times already in the last week.
Zoom was eating the lunch of other online meeting software even before COVID. It was the only meeting software where you had a chance of getting started without spending the first part of the meeting doing impromptu tech support for people who could not see, hear, having to download some kind of browser plugin, or dealing with echos, etc.
When the pandemic hit and everyone started working remotely, Zoom was already primed to be the winner.
Not my experience. As I said, I've been doing this for well over 15 years with various tools. Zoom has a level of friction that matches other tools. You need to run an installer,fiddle with headsets, make sure your network doesn't suck, etc.
Zoom hit enormous growth in 2020. Before that, they were just yet another obscure video call tool thingy. I've used several of the long forgotten ones that existed before covid. Investors seemed to like investing in me-too applications. Zoom was one of them and was able to spend enough on marketing right when it was optimal to do so. They hit a perfect bubble of investment cash and a sudden, unexpected need for video call tools.
People imagine all sorts of technical advantages that it simply never had. It's just a web app around some generic off the shelf video communication technology that they definitely did not invent. That's why there were so many of these tools already long before Zoom existed. I know of several such companies that came and went in the Berlin area and talked to their teams. All you needed was some generic full stack coding skills and a couple of weeks to prototype together the off the shelf stuff. Some of the UIs I saw were actually pretty cool. Unlike Zoom, which I always thought was pretty generic and bland as a UX.
Even today, Webex, the closest thing to a standard that existed before Zoom became mainstream, sucks. The UX is shit, it's slow, has bugs like forgetting to turn off audio input after the call is over or having to turn on the camera to unmute, etc. It was a Java based app before, and it only worked on Windows (and at some later point in a limited capacity for mac).
Zoom has less friction, the installer just works on all platforms, and there are less noticeable bugs.
This is what I did but it doesn't work all the way, break rooms don't work, broadcasts (Zoom theater) doesn't work, it's shitty. Like even in a VM it's shitty. Zoom no like VMs, Zoom yes like you installing it as root.
No it can't tell--I'm sure they'd like to, the attitude is omniscience, infinite data for infinite perving looking for patterns. Like most patterns just aren't virtuous, like oh I can fuck them out of a few extra bucks if I bug them at 5 in the morning after a bad experience at small claims court. That's business intelligence. That's a pattern. Or another pattern, we get more signups after sending users "informative" messages terms of service have changed--it's actually a form of marketing, anything to nag and bug people with some minuscule link to the business and money that it craves for its tumescent growth aspirations. Otherwise it would be technological, like come up with actual useful knowledge that would actually be useful. Economists say in the long run all wealth and all progress comes down to technology. Technology is the only thing that matters.
But yeah it can tell it's in a VM because that's when it decides to crap its pants. By this point it's impossible to tell if bugs are intentional when they benefit the startup, there's a whole game in bugs, like no don't fix it it causes the user to lose his shit and give up and pay for this upgrade in the hopes that it all gets better.
There was one bug, yeah a bank bug I saw in Chile. So what this bug did is it fucked up printing the receipts after the user had paid and the bank machine said the transaction was approved. Employees would then insist the user hadn't paid because a receipt hadn't gone through. So the customer had to pay again--and the second time it always worked--double billing. Fucking stealing. Theft. MacDonald's at the SCL airport brazenly stole from me in exactly that way. And did that bug get fixed promptly? Ha...na let it be a little longer, it's not a high priority. It's...not urgent. Fix it next quarter, it's too difficult.
You can't assume good faith in software as it's delivered.
