A better microphone would fix that, and has the added advantage that when you Do P to T your audio quality isn't crap for the duration you're saying stuff. I use a Blue Snowball, it's great, there may be better alternatives.
PTT (in my experience) has some significant disadvantages in terms of interactivity. You can't have a real spontaneous conversation, and you can't hear people laugh.
The problem with not having PTT is that in large calls, a small noise from potentially tens of individual people becomes a larger overall interruption in the call.
Its a blunt stick when you cannot trust people to keep quiet or appropriately position their mic when they aren't talking.
Atleast you only need to deal with their mic quality when they're talking, which at that point you can directly ask the person to fix it if need be.
I think you can allow people to choose to use PTT or not. However if someone doesn't use PTT the user needs to be aware of their mic sensitivity to ensure that background noises are not impacting the call. Examples of this are dogs barking or power tools being used nearby and even breathing into the mic.
I dont think you can choose to do this actually, otherwise you get the tragedy of the commons - those who dont care make loud mouth noises, chewing, and constantly talking to people in the background.
Those who are polite with their communication are drowned out by those who are not.
It really doesnt suffer interactivity problems, mouse 4 exists on most non-shitty mice.
I run a couple of programming groups currently over zoom. Usually between 5 and 15 people. I will tell people to get headphones or fix their audio issues (breathing/mouth noises) and I will mute them if they don't make progress on these issues. Perhaps it helps that most of these people I consider to be friends, but earlier today I did switch the CTO of a company from Slack to Zoom citing the quality of his audio.
I've found that most people seem to fix things themselves after being told a relatively small number of times.
yeah, Zoom has PTT of a sort, you can mute and unmute yourself as you wish (and I will mute myself when I know I'm not going to be taking part in a call for a long period).
That said, you still need a decent mic if you're using PTT, dealing with someone's crap audio when they do P to T is still a bad experience.
Because it's weird. I've done it, pressing a button to laugh feels really strange and fake. You can solve the issue with a decent quality mic (which you should have when you're using PTT anyway) and by using headphones, so there doesn't seem to be much of an advantage to having PTT on permanently.
Most of the time people just don't know their audio is a problem, and all of the times I've pointed it out it's got fixed.
PTT isn't 0 cost if you take into account the reduction in fluidity of a conversation. If I didn't have my mic already I would consider it a reasonable price to pay to get good audio quality, especially since you still need good audio quality when you're actually talking.
PTT (in my experience) has some significant disadvantages in terms of interactivity. You can't have a real spontaneous conversation, and you can't hear people laugh.