Crucifying Zoom over this while letting virtually every other company in the space (inc. Hangout/Meet and MS Teams/Skype) go free seems quite hypocritical from an HN community that's comprised of many startupers and startup wannabees who spend their professional lives working for entities with similar practices.
How is saying "yes we can scale" when you're not sure if you can, aren't you essentially implying that you have the infrastructure to deliver on that promise? And if you don't actually have that infrastructure yet/built/proven, then you're essentially selling a feature that doesn't exist.
It's shades of grey from lying about E2EE, but seems pretty similar imo
That's very different than making a specific claim that you already have a feature right now, that you in fact don't. That claim cannot possibly be made in good faith, as it's currently outright false, and you can never retroactively apply end to end encryption on conversations that have already happened.
Really? Do you think they would/could lie on the features of a product that they deliver to a client. If they did, do you think they should get away with that?
'We have that capability' claim is totally not the same.
(I think I'm preaching to the choir here; just clarifying for anyone else reading your comment)
The only alternative I ever looked into was Jitsi (because it was the first alternative I started doing research on, and by the time I'd finished researching it there was no doubt that it was more than good enough -- and super easy to build our own cloud instance so that, even though it wasn't E2E, we had total control of the server that managed the encryption), but I don't recall hearing arguments that any of the other major competitors were actually E2E encrypted.