I still don't know how professionals keep making this mistake. Having used Discord for so many years, this has never been a problem aside from a select few people who had very clear reason to mute themselves. Meanwhile in professional settings, people seem to be falling for this over and over while lacking the common curtesy of not letting random environmental noise bleed through (read: their mics are barely ever turned off).
Not to mention push-to-talk has solved this issue for almost a few decades now.
>I still don't know how professionals keep making this mistake.
Because
1) most group calls that need people to be on mute most of the time are useless, boring, snooze fests, most attendees don't care about, so those 'professionals', who are caffeinated zombies half asleep, will space out and forget the status of their mic within 10 seconds of toggling it
and
2) most chat apps suck at drawing attention to the status of the mic and, if you have multiple monitors, you can be staring at one monitor (Jira, reddit, Redmine, HN, VS Code, etc.) while the chat app and the status of the mic is being displayed on another monitor where you're not looking
It's a mistake super easy to make. Still, better be safe and make the mistake of being muted all the time, than forgetting to mute yourself and have participants hear something you didn't want them to hear.
Ideally I'd want a feature that gives the image on all my monitors a nuclear red vignette, or something like that, whenever my mic is hot, so I don't have to keep paranoidly glancing at the mute toggle every couple of minutes, to make sure my mic is still muted, so they can't hear me mumbling on how incompetent management is and on how useless this meeting is.
It takes a long time for the masses to adopt software in the way you mention. I’d bet that discord users are not representative of the masses. The main reason I notice people talking while muted is 1) forgot they were muted 2) multitasking / distracted 3) unfamiliar with the software / how to unmute. #3 was probably #1 in summer of 2020 when everyone was just starting. The #1 and #2 I listed just happen. It’s common to never speak in a meeting. It’s common to never speak in a meeting and then randomly get called on leading to forgetting to unmute. It’s also common that your mic isn’t working and you don’t realize it until you do try to speak and everyone is say “you’re on mute”. This happens all the time with some Bluetooth Bose headphones and my work PC, some configuration has this device matchup to be a constant problem and my IT couldn’t care less about a permanent solution since they found a temporary one (reverts on reboot).
I know people that literally retired early when they were forced to use PCs in the office. Over 30 years later, many people can barely use the most basic features of their computer. All to say, I’m not surprised this is an issue and I don’t see people as a whole digging their way out any time soon.
Some people don’t intuitively track the state of the video conferencing microphone, especially if they have cognitively involved jobs or lots of distractions. Mine are 1) the inability to resist that little self esteem boost from disdainfully highlighting inanity of other people’s shortcomings, and 2) making snide comments.
They’re both super obnoxious but I’m working on them.
People are not communication professionals. They are not ATC nor even pilots.
Still, PTT is the solution, preferrably in hardware. Not supported in sw anyway by e.g. Teams. In hw it keeps the mike-on symbol lit, and the device powered. Always having to push prevents ever forgetting to do so.
Discord's input handler sucks, uses semantic keys, not keycodes. Can't be mapped to an otherwise disabled capslock. TS and mumble can do that. Compared with those Teams audio looks like a toy.
Because in Discord you hop into an audio call and you're there for however long you want to hang out in the room. People can come and go from this room, but the room is persistent. In a job, you're going from meeting to meeting each with different attendees and stakeholders. You might have been on top of it in the morning for standup then 3 hours and a head full of code/spreadsheets/whatever later when you're discussing tech debt with other people you forget to unmute until your portion of the meeting comes 5 minutes into the start. Push-to-talk certainly helps, but if you're frequently talking in small meetings (say 3-5 people) then PTT becomes more of a hindrance than a help.
Personally I just have a headset with hardware mute functionality and a big red circle showing me it's muted. It remembers its muted status, so I just mute it by default and default my OS to use the headset's mic. That way I know quickly and easily when I'm muted and when I'm not, though even then I have small mistakes in the mornings when I'm tired. Over time I've optimized my meeting workflow because my company has gone all remote and I'm in a lot of meetings.
Main reason why I invested in a mic that has its own mute button with a very obvious red light when it's muted.
It also can keep the Teams mute status in sync as long as I don't touch it in the app myself (I believe through Teams detecting whether the mic interface is marked as muted or not, so it isn't exclusive to my mic).
I am muting because I don't want the sound in my room broadcasted... if it was silent, I wouldn't have to mute!