Why so many negative news about Zoom on HN recently?

Probably because of the fact that everyone and their mother are now using Zoom. The options are pretty bleak if you need 5+ user video conferencing and a tool that's usable cross platform with minimal fuss and either free or very minimal pricing plans... I think you have maybe Google Hangouts/Meet/whatever it's called now, BlueJeans, and maybe a few other more proprietary options. Don't know if people are using Skype much these days.

Anyways, since it's become wildly more popular, I think more people are digging into what it's actually doing (probably similar to what most other not-self-hosted video conferencing tools are doing) and finding that there's a lot of privacy-violating actions.

Some of these issues bubble up from time to time, but now that Zoom is one of the few companies in the limelight as everyone goes WFH and school from home...

There are organic incentives for these stories to appear and to get a lot of attention on HN right now.

Please see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22751116.

Zoom has a metric ton of security and privacy problems, but not many people have looked that deeply into them.

Now that they’re getting a lot more press, more and more people are looking into the problems — and not liking what they see.

competition

jealousy