[jasode]

>The solution to Zoom fatigue is to eliminate meetings where the purpose is to share basic facts & information. Save meetings for collaboration, relationship-building, and working on thorny problems.

Just an fyi to avoid derailing the topic...

The "fatigue" the author is talking about is not about frequency of useless and redundant meetings.

Her usage of "fatigue" is specifically talking about bad sound quality and some ideas on how to change the acoustic environment to improve it.

Whether everybody in the press uses "zoom fatigue" the same way I can't say. In any case, it's the fatigue from suboptimal sound environments is how the author of this thread's article is using it.

[throwaway1239Mx]

Thank you! Props for polite correction on someone straw-manning the OP. Otherwise I likely wouldn't have looked into this one.

I've definitely noticed mental fatigue from the changed aural environment in my house. I normally work from home, but now that my wife is also WFH, I've realized that hearing her on zoom at the same time as I'm in a meeting (or trying to concentrate) just melts my brain. Can't actually comment on zoom sound quality as have a pair of headphones that doesn't drive me completely nuts, and didn't notice anything about it in the previous few years of WFH...

[Ididntdothis]

Same here. Having my girlfriend in the house and talking the whole day is starting to really bother me. Thank god i have an office door I can close.

[Ididntdothis]

“bad sound quality and some ideas on how to change the acoustic environment to improve it.“

I hope that if video conferencing stays more popular we will see a lot of progress there. Cell phone cameras have shown what can be achieved with enough computation so I hope the same can be done for video conferencing. The current solutions are still very primitive as far as sound and image quality goes.

[pradn]

I wonder if premium virtual conferencing solutions will pop up. People might pay more to be guaranteed calls would go over dedicated networks and high performance servers; the service provider can send the participants custom hardware (perhaps even appliances) to improve quality at the ends. I'm unsure how much of the quality degradation is at the last mile, which this sort of service won't be able to help much.