[hotnfresh]

We got accustomed to it, but it never stopped feeling super weird, I think, somewhere deep in our heads.

A wall of faces staring at your neck is not what any real in-person thing feels like. A wall of facings looking in your eyes isn’t, either, for that matter, but the constantly-averted-gazes do add even more to the weirdness. You don’t feel so constantly watched in person, unless you’re doing a presentation.

I did a little work with one of the Big 3 management consulting firms about… oh, four or five years back, well after everyone cool and most non-cool had adopted Zoom or some other video chat for work calls. They favored actual dial-in conference calls. At first I thought they were dinosaurs, but the more I considered it the more I thought they had the right idea. Nothing to download or permissions to allow. Doesn’t tie up your laptop. Don’t need a laptop out at all, in fact. Phone number and code digits are all you need, can record that on a napkin.

Mass video chat’s so weird that I’m not sure the video’s adding value anyway, if you’re not screen sharing.

[ajmurmann]

I always found the audio on phone calls awful. In addition, I cannot see who is on the call, there is no indicator who is speaking, no visual cues who is getting ready to step in. No ability to read the room because you cannot see anyone. It's just awful.

[OkayPhysicist]

Since one of my friend groups now resides primarily online due to general diaspora, I'd say there are adaptions that make VoIP a lot better. Right off the bat, good quality VoIP calls are vastly better than phone calls, because the compression on phones combined with typically rather shitty audio equipment creates an environment where subtle tonal queues are completely absent. Discord's audio is fantastic, but so is Mumble's, a FOSS VoIP solution, so I have no idea how big companies like Microsoft can't figure it out.

Secondly, there's some etiquette rules that people eventually pick up on: Leave pauses in your speech so that people can butt in, shut up if no one's responded verbally to you in while, and understand that there is an appropriate amount of talking over each other that is acceptable.

[voisin]

> Secondly, there's some etiquette rules that people eventually pick up on: Leave pauses in your speech so that people can butt in, shut up if no one's responded verbally to you in while, and understand that there is an appropriate amount of talking over each other that is acceptable.

Many, many people don’t figure these out in real life.

[Banditoz]

> Discord's audio is fantastic, but so is Mumble's, a FOSS VoIP solution, so I have no idea how big companies like Microsoft can't figure it out.

Oh Microsoft figured it out. They just made the quality subtly worse vs Zoom. Jumping from a Zoom meeting to a Teams one, especially with the same people, amplifies this a bit.

[esafak]

They can't even do audio feedback rejection. On Firefox I have to use a headphone.

[Obscurity4340]

I wish people liked me enough for this to be like a regular thing I could just, like, drop in on. I hate how regimented it has to be, gotta fucking book anybody like 5 days in advance. :(

[sellmesoap]

I enjoyed working at a place that used teamspeak as the tool for conference calls, it showed who's talking. Announced joiners etc. Kept me from needing a long distance plan, kept out of the way, was snappy. It reminded me of my early days playing video games with friends, maybe the nostalgia added to the charm, I'd recommend it!

[Obscurity4340]

It really is like missing half the inputs when mirror neurons are not engaged. I mean this in a pop-sci understanding, not sure if its relevant. I do like to watch people's body language, although its the waking equivalent of lucid dreaming in the sense I have to be very deliberate in taking noticeof it to the extent I rely on it more than to tonality and diction.

[jghn]

Yeah, while I don't love videoconferencing I love the shift to it from audio conference calls. I was never able to stay focused without the visual cues and would wind up drifting off pretty quick.

[Obscurity4340]

> A wall of faces staring at your neck is not what any real in-person thing feels like. A wall of facings looking in your eyes isn’t, either, for that matter, but the constantly-averted-gazes do add even more to the weirdness. You don’t feel so constantly watched in person, unless you’re doing a presentation.

Maybe I just watch wayyy too much CNN, but this has never been weird to me and its fatigues me vastly less than bullshit commuting/travel

Edit: I like how any time normies start having access to rich people shit like Zooming for work, the rich do AnimalPlanet type documentary-style media campaigns about how the lower among us simply can't handle it and it needs to be gently but forecefully brought to a smooth transition until closure or the point at which they can massage through enough pointed legislation/social pressure

[Gigachad]

I absolutely hate calls. WFH works well when you just need to grind out something solo, but it’s awful to communicate.

Personally I go in the office 1-2 days a week. If you want to talk to me, do it in person those days. If you add me to some 10 person video call. I’m just going to zone out.

[mrits]

I feel like you need to compare a 10 person video call with a 10 person in office meeting. And of course, a hallway chat vs a 1-1 zoom call or discord exchange.

[tomjakubowski]

Ten person meetings have felt better for me in person. I think it's because there's more room for impromptu overlapping discussions, which Zoom doesn't support well.

[OkayPhysicist]

This is the billion-dollar problem in VoIP. I call it the "cocktail party problem", because a cocktail party is the most extreme example. In meatspace, you're able to drift between conversations subtly queuing to the other participants in a breakout conversation that you're engaging with them, while still being able to pick up on nearby conversations which you can choose to swap to.

A multi-call system like a Discord server represents a small step, with the ability to see that conversations are happening in other calls, and maybe get a guess of what they're doing thanks to live presence, but it's far from a complete solution.

[neuronerdgirl]

Gather Town was tackling this issue surprisingly well during COVID, but anytime I tried to convince people to use it they defaulted back to Zoom because Gather was too confusing. I think it would take a real paradigm shift from the "call with video" model to get decent adoption of something like that, and now that it's so expensive to use Gather I don't see how they can get enough exposure to really convince the public at large.

[Terr_]

Perhaps another factor is that it doesn't seem like the nine other participants are always staring towards you, personally, specifically, persistently. There are breaks and ebbs and flows, as other people talk and you can take turns as an observer from the side.

[colechristensen]

I find meetings I shouldn’t have been invited to a great time to do the dishes. Likewise big status update meetings with low information content.

[selykg]

Wish that was easy for me. The people I work with seem to insist on having video on.

[Gigachad]

Because video off meetings are entirely pointless and just shouldn't be run. Not to say that turning video on magically makes the meetings have point, but if you are muted, video off, and doing the dishes, you just shouldn't be in that call.

Requiring video on probably makes people push back against being invited to useless meetings rather than seeing it as an hour to clean the house.

[BigJono]

People that schedule meetings like that don't want pushback. They're not trying to optimise the list of people in the meeting, they're trying to grow it at the expense of everything else.

They genuinely believe that whatever they're crapping on about to a brick wall for 2 hours straight is the most important thing in the universe and they want your undivided attention, productivity or profit be damned. That's why they force people to turn their cameras on.

[decafninja]

Because many meetings that involve many people are entirely pointless for the majority invited, period, regardless of format.

Many of the people for whom the meeting is pointless are usually in no position to push back on it.

[flappyeagle]

Just don’t go

[thunky]

> you just shouldn't be in that call

Exactly. But most of the time you don't have a choice.

So may as well do dishes.

[flappyeagle]

Just don’t go. You have a choice. You are a sentient human being.

[Gigachad]

As an individual you may as well do dishes, but as a company you should believe that your meetings are actually important, and if they are, everyone should be present and video on. At least that way there will be pushback against useless meetings.

[15457345234]

I absolutely love calls, you don't have to type and you have the other person's (relatively) undivided attention. Plus cajoling, browbeating and instigating techniques work better and if called out you can put things down to 'tonal misunderstanding.' Also a lot of people these days can't truly understand written content because they don't grasp nuance and only interpret things literally. When you actually talk to them they tend to be a little less robotic and start inferring more so you don't have to spell things out so elaborately.

[tomjakubowski]

> a lot of people these days can't truly understand written content

It's a two way street. A lot of people are terrible at writing to communicate, especially in a time-sensitive context like Slack, and we remote workers are having to do a lot more written communication than when we were in the office.

US national reading comprehension test scores have been flat, more or less, since 1992. https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/highlights/reading/2022/

[cassianoleal]

> a lot of people these days can't truly understand written content because they don't grasp nuance and only interpret things literally.

There seems to be a disconnect between parts of this sentence. "Can't understend written content" because they "interpret things literally."

Why wouldn't they? If you have something to say, say it - or, in this case, write it.

Why leave things open to interpretation?

Furthermore, why not just say things literally in a video call or in-person meeting as well? Surely the only possibility is for less confusion this way.

[15457345234]

Because unless you take half an hour to write 500 words you're always leaving things open to interpretation. A huge part of human communication is interpretation and inference.

When you have a verbal communication people bring up things they don't understand in realtime and you correct as you go so that, by the end of the conversation, a mutual understanding has been reached.

In writing - especially if you're sending emails - people are often reluctant to come back for more info as they think it'll make them look dumb, plus there's the 'inertia' factor plus the factor of not knowing whether you'll get a timely reply.

[kccqzy]

You know you can just have an in-person meeting. You also don't have to type and you also have the other person's undivided attention (perhaps even more so).

[15457345234]

I don't like to move, I like to sit at my desk and summon

[steveBK123]

My problem is that in-office I'm going to zone out in 99 out of 100 of the micro conversations I get interrupted into per day.

[agumonkey]

Strange how I felt zero difference. As long as sound is crisp clear it feels like we're in the same room.

[closeparen]

No matter how clear it is, the audio is half-duplex, meaning the small overlaps that are part of normal conversation control-flow instead make it crash and burn. Calls work fine for one way presentation or very structured Q&A, not so much for interactive discussion.

[agumonkey]

I .. really don't experience that, we're regularly 3 on zoom and we chat as if we were in our company offices. There are some audio issues if we really overlap too wildly but really it got to the point that seeing zoom webpage makes me smile.

[closeparen]

Are you all using headsets? I always do, but many of my colleagues just use their laptop speakers, so echo cancellation is in play.

[agumonkey]

Some times one guy will have headset, but everybody use various setups quite randomly.

[lotsoweiners]

At my job we use Teams and very few people ever have their camera on. This situation is perfect for me since a lot of my meetings are relatively irrelevant to what I do. My wife’s work uses the Google video chat equivalent and the majority of her meetings have most people on camera. It just looks so strange to have a wall of people nodding in agreement at whatever the speaker is saying.

[notesinthefield]

Two companies Ive worked for since the pandemic have never had video meetings, voice is all you get. One was entirely remote, so id never actually see my coworker’s faces and my current one is still pretty distributed but we meetup occasionally. I like it very much, I feel like one has to be more at-attention on a video call than actual in person meetings.

[wkat4242]

This is why I love meetings in VR so much. Even though the avatars don't look realistic, the feeling of being together is so much stronger.

It's just so hard to convince others before them having tried it. You can't tell someone what the matrix is, you have to see it for yourself.

[Philpax]

+1. I’m looking forward to it becoming more commonplace as Apple get Vision into more hands - communicating in XR is way less fatiguing for me as there’s more spatial cues and body language. You can look at the speaker, it’s easier to tell when you can butt in, you can split off easily, etc. It’s much closer to the feeling in chatting in person.

I just hope Zuck doesn’t continue to make it look unpalatable - that’s why I’m hoping Apple will build a consumer-acceptable solution that will force Meta to get their act together.

[wkat4242]

It's not just Zuck who makes it unpalatable. It's also the users who have tried a 30 second rollercoaster video on a google cardboard years ago and go like "I tried that virtual reality thing and it was useless". As someone who deploys this in enterprise environments I get this far too much.

I've done some pilots with serious VR meeting software like Arthur and Spatial (before they reinvented themselves as a "generic" metaverse tool). It's not for every call, no. But for the more proactive brainstorming / whiteboard session it's great. Especially as devices start having more sensor for body, face, eye tracking. You really feel like you're with the others. Really great option to replace a long flight you were going to make for a half-day workshop. So much more better than a zoom call. The detractors often point at the poor legless avatars but in my opinion that's something that gets forgotten quickly as you actually start communicating.

It's really hard to actually make people start using it though. And yes Zuck is burning way too much money on the wrong things. After all those billions Horizons still looks worse than VRChat, I mean really, how much did they spend? Can't be more than a few million.

[thunky]

> the feeling of being together is so much stronger

I hope there will be a way to convert voice into a realistic behaving VR avatar, no equipment needed other than a mic.

For example if I say "ok John, I like that idea", my avatar automatically faces John and locks eyes.

For most of the meeting I'm not speaking anyway so my avatar could just look at whoever is speaking and look interested.

[wkat4242]

Well if you are in VR you already will lock eyes with whomever you're looking at. Especially if your headset has eye tracking. You will not talk to someone behind you ("Soap opera talking") as it feels just as weird as in real life. Also your hands are mirrored in the virtual world and you can easily flip the bird, clap your hands and more friendly gestures too :)

Or perhaps you mean the boring MS Teams avatars you can use to replace video, they are indeed pretty bored looking all the time and not responding to your voice activity at all but I heard at Ignite that they are getting some upgrades.

[thunky]

> Especially if your headset

What I'm suggesting is that I wouldn't be wearing a headset at all, but everyone else in the meeting wouldn't realize this. My VR self (I'm calling that my avatar) would be on auto-pilot, driven only by my voice and reacting to others voices and virtual positions.

Most of the time it would just need to face whoever is speaking and appear to be engaged, and throw in some random movements, so I don't have to physically do that myself.

I could continue to play guitar or take my dog outside while those with VR headsets on are stuck going through the expected motions.

[wkat4242]

Hmyeah but if you do that you might as well just join by call of course.

And they will notice anyway. A real avatar with full body tracking is quite emotive.

[saila]

I'm typically looking at the top half of one person's head, the side of a few other people's, and probably up someone's nose. Any time there's eye contact, it's extremely bizarre/unsettling.

The idea that having cameras on will convey body language like in person conversations seems patently false, partly because of the above and partly because most people moderate their expressions to an extreme while on camera.