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Alternatives to Skype
Kris Asick
Member #1,424
July 2001

Exactly as the title suggests. My friends and I are getting fed up with the ads showing up in Skype, so I'm now asking all of you what you'd recommend as an alternative. Bonus points if it has both Windows and Linux builds and video support, though Windows builds, text chat and audio chat are the main features desired.

--- Kris Asick (Gemini)
--- http://www.pixelships.com

Elias
Member #358
May 2000

Google Hangouts

--
"Either help out or stop whining" - Evert

bamccaig
Member #7,536
July 2006
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Going from Skype to Google is just trading one evil for another one. Here is what I got Googling (shut up) for "open source text audio chat" (no quotes): https://jitsi.org/. Seems like an open source video chat solution. No telling how stable it is, but I'd look into that first. Google is no more trustworthy than Microsoft. They might do a slightly better job of hiding their evil, but it's there regardless and supporting them just makes them stronger.

blargmob
Member #8,356
February 2007
avatar

Google Hangouts is really really excellent. Skype is nice too, but I haven't used it in a while.

---
"No amount of prayer would have produced the computers you use to spread your nonsense." Arthur Kalliokoski

Kris Asick
Member #1,424
July 2001

Considering Google is continuing to break YouTube, I won't be supporting them by using their products. Forcing people to use Google+ in order to post comments on YouTube was bad enough. Now, they've completely removed YouTube's "Feed" system, meaning you can't post text updates on your channel anymore, meaning if you want to inform people of things you're doing on YouTube you need to use Google+, which means people who aren't subscribed to you can't read about your YouTube updates unless they go through the trouble of visiting your Google+ page... which is a nightmare to navigate since you can never tell what is the most update to date thing due to the layout unless you read the dates on everything, plus your text updates get meshed in with absolutely everything else you do on YouTube like marking favourites and commenting on other videos...

Brilliant, Google. Just... brilliant. :P

Also...

Skype is nice too, but I haven't used it in a while.

Microsoft has been rolling out a new advertising system to users at random whereby fairly large, graphical ads are shown on practically every window now, including text-chat windows. It squishes how much room you have on every window to see chat text to the point where it's almost impractical to have more than one chat window open at a time now. >:(

--- Kris Asick (Gemini)
--- http://www.pixelships.com

Derezo
Member #1,666
April 2001
avatar

I second Jitsi. It's still early in development, but it's great.

Google is continuing to break YouTube

Whaaaa?
Just to be clear, before I rip into the rest of your rant: YouTube is a subsidiary of Google.

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Forcing people to use Google+ in order to post comments on YouTube was bad enough.

Whaaa? I never visit the G+ site.

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you can't post text updates on your channel anymore

I never even knew I could do that! I usually think of channels for video, though.

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if you want to inform people of things you're doing on YouTube you need to use Google+

I don't use Google+ directly for anything. I still see friends updates on YouTube and I'm able to post my updates, follow subscriptions... what're you referring to specifically?

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people who aren't subscribed to you can't read about your YouTube updates unless they go through the trouble of visiting your Google+ page

What happens when you go to YouTube.com/Derezo? Do you not see me and my YouTube updates? Do you see something else?

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Brilliant, Google.

It is! I love the new updates rolled out this week. It's nice having only one account to access all of Google's services, and it makes it incredibly easy to add new ones.

I argue that YouTube is better today than it ever was at any point in history..

None of your quibbles have an objective basis or even have anything to do with videos (which is what YouTube is about -- videos).

"He who controls the stuffing controls the Universe"

blargmob
Member #8,356
February 2007
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Derezo said:

I argue that YouTube is better today than it ever was at any point in history

+1

People complain way too much just because a service changes.

Fact is, if the change was truly "negative", Google would be reverting the changes. You'd better believe any changes to such a high profile service will have undergone enormous amounts of testing to ensure its progress.

Of course I have some minor complaints here and there about some very small things, but in general, Google has done an excellent job with it. Evidence of this? You, I, and everyone else in the world is still using Youtube.

---
"No amount of prayer would have produced the computers you use to spread your nonsense." Arthur Kalliokoski

bamccaig
Member #7,536
July 2006
avatar

We're still using YouTube because it's virtually a monopoly. I do not know of any other service like it that allows you to freely upload gigabytes of video for public consumption. They can severely fuck up the service and people will still begrudgingly use it because the communication it offers is still revolutionary. Google didn't invent that. Google bought that. Now they are exploiting it, much like Facebook would. "Don't be evil" was last decade. "Fuck you, we're rich" is 2010s.

Derezo
Member #1,666
April 2001
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It is unlikely that Google shares your distaste for capitalism. Exploit it indeed!

"He who controls the stuffing controls the Universe"

blargmob
Member #8,356
February 2007
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Bambam, have you ever done any professional software work, particularly with Fortune 500 corporations? This tinfoil hat way of thinking usually comes from people who have no idea what they're talking about.

I bet you also think that all corporate executives are evil, evil people ::)

---
"No amount of prayer would have produced the computers you use to spread your nonsense." Arthur Kalliokoski

Thomas Fjellstrom
Member #476
June 2000
avatar

Fact is, if the change was truly "negative", Google would be reverting the changes. You'd better believe any changes to such a high profile service will have undergone enormous amounts of testing to ensure its progress.

Hahaha. Testing and Google used in the same paragraph. Ahahahaha.

Every other youtube change has lead to major breakage of features. They don't actually seem to test the changes they push out.

That said, the latest layout change doesn't seem to be broken. In fact they fixed one major thing they broke a while back, and thats that "automatically switch to HD in fullscreen" option that you can find in your youtube settings. It hasn't worked for many MONTHS, until today that is. And it seems most videos are HTML5 in chrome now. All of today I haven't seen a single video that used the flash player.

It may be related to Youtube getting a new manager.

Also, a second point... It could actually have been quite negative for them (tons of large profile content providers disabled commenting entirely), but it's likely they don't care, and are prioritizing G+'s long term growth over any short term losses in other services.

--
Thomas Fjellstrom - [website] - [email] - [Allegro Wiki] - [Allegro TODO]
"If you can't think of a better solution, don't try to make a better solution." -- weapon_S
"The less evidence we have for what we believe is certain, the more violently we defend beliefs against those who don't agree" -- https://twitter.com/neiltyson/status/592870205409353730

bamccaig
Member #7,536
July 2006
avatar

I've been doing professional software work for 7 years. Never for a "fortune 500". That is an American phenomenon. That said, of the larger companies that I have dealt with, I am always faced with a moral dilemma knowing full well that the company is absolutely willing to hurt people to make a buck. It's sickening.

blargmob
Member #8,356
February 2007
avatar

They don't actually seem to test the changes they push out.

They do.

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and are prioritizing G+'s long term growth over any short term losses in other services.

That is the mechanism that quantifies their decision as good.

---
"No amount of prayer would have produced the computers you use to spread your nonsense." Arthur Kalliokoski

Thomas Fjellstrom
Member #476
June 2000
avatar

Quote:

They do.

Please explain why every single change to youtube in the past couple years (at the very least) has come with a ton of bugs and missing features that people depend on?

That is the mechanism that quantifies their decision as good.

Time will tell. So far G+ isn't working out all that well.

--
Thomas Fjellstrom - [website] - [email] - [Allegro Wiki] - [Allegro TODO]
"If you can't think of a better solution, don't try to make a better solution." -- weapon_S
"The less evidence we have for what we believe is certain, the more violently we defend beliefs against those who don't agree" -- https://twitter.com/neiltyson/status/592870205409353730

blargmob
Member #8,356
February 2007
avatar

Please explain why every single change to youtube in the past couple years (at the very least) has come with a ton of bugs and missing features that people depend on?

I've always had a pleasant experience, luckily. What's something that's gone awry for you?

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So far G+ isn't working out all that well.

{"name":"Microsoft-Excel-600x412.jpg","src":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/3\/e\/3e8dc174aa9b88575240598b1628bad0.jpg","w":600,"h":412,"tn":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/3\/e\/3e8dc174aa9b88575240598b1628bad0"}Microsoft-Excel-600x412.jpg
http://marketingland.com/google-hits-135-million-users-27904

---
"No amount of prayer would have produced the computers you use to spread your nonsense." Arthur Kalliokoski

Derezo
Member #1,666
April 2001
avatar

Please explain why every single change to youtube in the past couple years (at the very least) has come with a ton of bugs and missing features that people depend on?

That is incredibly hyperbolic and plainly untrue. I have yet to lose access to a single feature I depend on, even for a moment, and if such an event did occur it has not persisted through time.

"He who controls the stuffing controls the Universe"

bamccaig
Member #7,536
July 2006
avatar

Derezo
Member #1,666
April 2001
avatar

I am a highly objective person. The fact is that Google is a corporate capitalist entity inside the capitalist system. It holds capitalist goals and objectives, and it operates under the principles that govern the system.

There has been no support provided that the service offered by them is not the best there is, or that it is unusable, or even unpleasant to use.

Oh, but don't get me wrong. I certainly haven't changed my belief that capitalism on the whole is entirely unsustainable and a detriment to humanity... but we're not talking about that.

"He who controls the stuffing controls the Universe"

Thomas Fjellstrom
Member #476
June 2000
avatar

Derezo said:

That is incredibly hyperbolic and plainly untrue. I have yet to lose access to a single feature I depend on, even for a moment, and if such an event did occur it has not persisted through time.

Thats because people got seriously upset and youtube reversed the changes, eventually. Usually it takes months for them to even fix a bug, soooo...

I've always had a pleasant experience, luckily. What's something that's gone awry for you?

The main feature of the site that I use the most (other than the video player itself) is the Subscriptions feed. They have messed with that several times the past year or so, hiding it, hiding it even deeper, then bringing it back to the menu in two places (after a lot of complaining). They have also completely broken the subscription feeds themselves, so you miss a significant amount of producer's content.

Then the content producers keep losing monetization on a fairly regular basis with no acknowledgement from youtube at all. Sometimes for a week or more at a time. Other times it takes hours to upload a video that would normally take maybe 30 minutes. And yet other times even if the upload was fast, it would sit in the processing state for upwards of 24 hours.

Then there was that really crazy issue recently where they re-did the logic on their content-id bot. And boy did they botch it up royally. It sent hundreds to thousands of content-id matches to people for videos that had already been up and not flagged by the content-id system for months or years. It takes months to actually resolve a content-id claim, and you can only have 3 open disputes at once. Imagine what happens if a person gets hundreds or thousands of them? They can also permanently lose their channel after 3 claims. So yeah, pretty serious issues.

There are more I'm not remembering.

--
Thomas Fjellstrom - [website] - [email] - [Allegro Wiki] - [Allegro TODO]
"If you can't think of a better solution, don't try to make a better solution." -- weapon_S
"The less evidence we have for what we believe is certain, the more violently we defend beliefs against those who don't agree" -- https://twitter.com/neiltyson/status/592870205409353730

blargmob
Member #8,356
February 2007
avatar

The main feature of the site that I use the most (other than the video player itself) is the Subscriptions feed. They have messed with that several times the past year or so, hiding it, hiding it even deeper, then bringing it back to the menu in two places (after a lot of complaining).

That's not "broken". That was testing a change.

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They have also completely broken the subscription feeds themselves, so you miss a significant amount of producer's content.

That's not "broken". That's just a change.

Quote:

Then the content producers keep losing monetization on a fairly regular basis with no acknowledgement from youtube at all. Sometimes for a week or more at a time. Other times it takes hours to upload a video that would normally take maybe 30 minutes. And yet other times even if the upload was fast, it would sit in the processing state for upwards of 24 hours.

That's not "broken", and things of this sort are covered in their ToS. These people have agreed to the ToS.

These are just things that you don't like.

---
"No amount of prayer would have produced the computers you use to spread your nonsense." Arthur Kalliokoski

Derezo
Member #1,666
April 2001
avatar

There are more I'm not remembering.

Are there any bugs that can be reproduced, or did they fix them all?

"He who controls the stuffing controls the Universe"

Kris Asick
Member #1,424
July 2001

We've already done the whole argument about YouTube thing on here lately and it's actually really important that I find a suitable alternative to Skype, so I would appreciate if we could get back on topic. :P

--- Kris Asick (Gemini)
--- http://www.pixelships.com

SiegeLord
Member #7,827
October 2006
avatar

You could try installing an old version of skype... as long as you manage to keep it from upgrading it should work (it did a few months ago).

I've tried Jitsi before and while I think it is very promising last I tried it it just didn't work as well with my webcam.

"For in much wisdom is much grief: and he that increases knowledge increases sorrow."-Ecclesiastes 1:18
[SiegeLord's Abode][Codes]:[DAllegro5]:[RustAllegro]

Kris Asick
Member #1,424
July 2001

SiegeLord said:

You could try installing an old version of skype... as long as you manage to keep it from upgrading it should work (it did a few months ago).

While this worked for me it's not working for everyone I know. I don't see any ads in the version I'm using now, yet one of my friends running the EXACT same older version does. :-/

--- Kris Asick (Gemini)
--- http://www.pixelships.com

Thomas Fjellstrom
Member #476
June 2000
avatar

Have you thought about Teamspeak or Mumble?

That's not "broken". That was testing a change.

You don't test a major new feature on the entire userbase ::) That's not how "it" is done.

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That's not "broken". That's just a change.

I completely disagree. I highly doubt they meant to not show you all of your subscribed videos. It actually harms the ratings of the channels you subscribe to, and likely both youtube and the channels get less money in ad revenue due to it. I certainly less watch youtube when my favorite channels have nothing new.

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That's not "broken", and things of this sort are covered in their ToS. These people have agreed to the ToS.

How is that covered in their tos? This part isn't about the content-id stuff, its just randomly not monetizing videos that would normally be monetized with no rhyme or reason.

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These are just things that you don't like.

I wouldn't say just.

They regularly break things, then fix them eventually, but it often takes months. They seem to do their testing by rolling out to production. That's what I call incompetent.

--
Thomas Fjellstrom - [website] - [email] - [Allegro Wiki] - [Allegro TODO]
"If you can't think of a better solution, don't try to make a better solution." -- weapon_S
"The less evidence we have for what we believe is certain, the more violently we defend beliefs against those who don't agree" -- https://twitter.com/neiltyson/status/592870205409353730

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