# 2020-05-13 11:54:28.943148 UTC (+0000)
Video Conferences Suck, Audio Conferences Rule
Our dear connection spy to the social slavery web has written a nice
insight on his life as a video conference victim:
https://natalian.org/2020/05/12/Video_conferences_suck/
(You can access https:// using for example hurl and htmlfmt. Do not
use a web browser, this is always a security risk.)
All bitreichcon visitors liked the conference, because we kept to
certain rules:
There is only one audio stream, which is the current main content to
discus, talk and reason about. There are never multiple people talking.
People easily see the slides using ssh.
The IRC room forces people to convert their fast thoughts into text. The
questions were collected and added to the main audio stream context
according to the current moderator.
We had a schedule for everyone. It was changed, but this was decided in
a democratic way.
We had no bandwidth issues, because all information was scaled down to
the minimal needs. Text is text, the audio is for only using one sensory
input. You could have done something else while following. For following
the whole conference you need less than 200 kbit/s download speed.
After the conference it is easily possible to recreate the slides, to
grep them, to convert them, because a simple format is used. This simple
format allows to convert thoughts into text easily too. No ugly clicking
and moving around the mouse is needed, like in PPT.
Conclusion: Video is mostly a waste of time. Use it for porn or other
beautiful things. Showing faces which pretend to smile is not what the
Internet was made for.
Sincerely yours,
20h
Senior Information Officer (SIO)
