Are 500-person conference calls actually productive? Surely the number of speakers in any such meeting will be a small percentage of listeners?

It's useful.

It's more of a large-scale broadcast situation. Think of large corporate town halls, town council meetings, etc.

You can just have a conference call with the 5-10 speakers and use broadcasting software to stream it to the audience, why do they need to be in the conference?

Why setup a separate broadcast when listeners can just join the meeting room?

Yes, I know it's more comfortable that way, but if you have to decide between giving all your data from all your meetings to a random US company and a slight annoyance whenever you do conferences with more than 500(!) participants, the choice is pretty simple to me.

Giving all the data to zoom probably means also giving it to most US law enforcement agencies (should they request it), that would be a big no no for me.

Not to mention that until very recently even MS Teams sent you to a different product when you wanted to stream to 500 people. Even if it's now integrated, it's still a different product inside (and e.g. you could for example open a new window when you were in a 500 people "meeting" at the time when you still could not do so for a regular meeting).

For the corporate or training use case, this is not a problem. If you are worried about US law agencies, you shouldn't be using any system that isn't rooted in face to face communication for anything sensitive. (And even that is suspect with as small as bugged devices are today.)

There is a huge difference between requesting data that has already been collected and requesting Zoom/Microsoft/Google to record future data. The latter probably requires some serious intent. And of course, if I would want to be entirely safe from US law enforcement espionage then I would need to not use computers but whose use case is that?

You say "just more comfortable" but if you have two streams and one of them is on a channel you know to be unreliable (Jitsi) it's pretty guaranteed the unreliable stream is going to be down a significant percentage of the time. If you're a company with 500 people this isn't a comfort question, you're wasting probably hundreds of hours of your employees' time.

I think we're not on the same page about Jitsi being unreliable. In fact, it has been more reliable for me than Zoom in the past. Maybe due to the fact that I'm running Linux, I don't know, I haven't tried either on Windows.

Because then you have the option to use less specialized software (not Zoom).

Live Q&A is a nice feature.

Conference for the speakers + unlisted livestream on YouTube could handle that, using chat for Q&A.

Chat lags for 5-120 seconds depending on livestream settings, writing is much slower than speaking, does not always convey the question as well as sound, and is close to impossible to do on the go.

They allow substantially less than 5. Tho trying is indeed slower for most people.

So, then... you're bound by youtube's TOS, you can't prevent people from getting in (usually via login), and Zoom makes it a nice experience instead of a hack.

Oh, and you can also do sub-rooms with Zoom, which has some applications in these types of meetings.

They don't actually suggest using YouTube. The point is just to illustrate that this is a very common and relatively simple concept. There are tons of tools able to accomplish this.

In my experience there will be always some guy ranting for minutes so I learned to really appreciate town halls with a few speakers and taking questions written in the chat.

For the Q&A section that comes at the end, usually.

You don’t need to be in the videocall to ask a question; you can do it via chat.

Zoom has a mode that basically does this for you, which I assume is how they support >500 users.

At some point though why not just collect questions beforehand, record the whole thing and let people watch it on their own time. At that scale there'll be no integrity during the meeting anyway.

You'd be surprised how much chat happens as a side channel. Further, collecting questions means that the presentation material would have to be out there first, and that misses the point of the town halls, where financials and other initiatives are often first presented to the larger organization.

Out town halls usually ask for questions beforehand and that works quite well.

Because that's how you end up with projects that take 3 years to plan instead of 3 months. A live Q&A where all of the experts who can answer questions and everyone interested in the subject who may have questions are in the same room (live or virtual) is a lot more productive compared to what you are suggesting.

If something they said in the main presentation was missing important details that you need to do you work, why do you need to wait days/weeks for them to gather all the questions, find all the answers, and publish a video, when they could just answer it live in a few seconds?!

Having 500+ people on a project is how something takes 3 years to plan.

"At that scale there'll be no interactivity during the meeting anyway."

There is interactivity. Each company has their own way of doing this, but it's typical that they have someone reading the chat to gather questions and that higher ranked employee can directly speak to ask questions.

Very... Particularly when the CEO announces half of those present are sacked...

So it only needs to support 250 participants, really.

For real, theres no 500 person conference calls, just mostly a one way broadcast with a stream of questions.

City wide Town halls where every one can listen in but pre-registered people can ask questions are a productive usecase for public information. Those buildings can't accommodate 500 people.

It may be that only a small subset of people will talk, but it's not necessarily the case that you know which subset beforehand. When the software can handle it, it's much easier to have everyone join a single call than it is to make sure that the right three people and two meeting rooms have access to talk, and guess which one other person out of about 250 might be called on to provide more context on an answer.

And I suspect that for most people -- including me -- Zoom accounts are "effectively unlimited". I wouldn't expect that many people to attend one of my meetings. The Internal Events team have licenses that allow for more attendees; I have a 500 attendee limit and I doubt I've ever gone above 50.

Specifically because of the discussed TOS.

> 500-person+

that is called broadcast media -- it was actually better thirty years ago than it is now. If you want conversation then you make a panel, and have a single microphone for the rest.

Come on, 500+ calls are a very niche use case. With plenty of alternatives at that