But the bigger issue is that conferences are (for me, and I gather for a lot of people) mostly about the "hallway track," not the official talks. I get a lot more value for talking to people at lunch and after talks than I do from the presentations themselves. That's currently totally missing from the online conference platforms I've used, rendering the whole thing kind of pointless. I might as well just record my talk and put it on youtube; the conference itself it adding little value aside from curation.

I don't think there will be any onsite conferences for the next year, which is a shame. Hopefully they will return at some point.

This isn’t to diminish efforts to put on these events. However, it’s important to look at the motives behind conferences:

1.) boost your status as speaker - speaking at conferences can land you a new job, get you investment, etc.

2.) gaining insight that you otherwise couldn’t gain online as an attendee - hallway gatherings, random discussions, etc is why a lot of people go to conferences. The chance that you might catch that one expert in your field and pick their brain is high.

3.) acquire leads as an attending company - for conferences like re:Invent or Ignite you’re year is made by acquiring thousands of leads over the course of 4 days. I’ve seen companies spend $250k on a booth and close over $5m in sales just from one conference.

4.) build good will with the community as a sponsor - when people see you throwing money around sponsoring social events and after parties they tend to give you more attention. Companies do this ultimately to close more business.

Given those 4 motives, I don’t see how online conferences are a thing. Perhaps my definition of conference is too enterprise-y and narrow though.

That said, most conferences had this option before it became a necessity. So having the conference in real life while making it available for everyone remotely is obviously the best of both worlds, but declaring the latter remote-only conference worthless seems like an exaggeration to me and certainly doesn't refelct my point of view.

On a sidenote: You might enjoy Confreaks, which covers a whole range of those conferences: https://confreaks.tv/

I guess that for speakers an online conference is as good as posting to the personal blog or uploading a new video. Furthermore it keeps the link with the conference community alive. So it's OK. For the public, no difference than going through the links in any weekly or monthly digest about that technology. For sponsors, which are an important part of the revenues of the conference organizers, I don't know.

Although the quality for this remote conference seems to be better than average.