Solving Online Events | Hacker News Reader

Solving Online Events

ben-evans.com

53 pointstosh22 comments

>In other words, some conferences are built around creating a network in the hallways. If you take them online, there are no hallways.

There are no hallways. Also, there are no side conversations, serendipitious encounters, forming and disbanding groups naturally, after-sessions social activities, or meaningful ways to gauge attention or intuitively navigate turn-taking. There's no forcing function of being in the same time and place among people of similar interests.

Online is fine for content delivery, so presentations and slides easily transition from in-person to remote. However, the medium doesn't conform to how people make actual human connections. Online events can be deeply frustrating because the social instincts we've honed since childhood are suddenly useless in that context.

Well said - and any attempts to "mimic the hallways" feels contrived in the context of the internet/online. It is difficult to translate the multitude of social cues/contexts/interactions that real life offers. Nevertheless I'm sure we will see more and more coherent attempts.

Call for startups: if you are innovating in that space, I want to hear from you. I'm passionate about that space.

I look at this as complementary rather than replacement. Online shopping didn't replace in-person but gave a better experience for some shopping use cases for some people. Quite a few of both, in fact.

Online shopping needed filters, context and reputation (ratings, reviews, algorithm-aided discovery, etc.). Notably most of that didn't exist for in-person shopping, so we should expect new structures for online events as well - likely ones we haven't anticipated.

May similar develop for humans at virtual events? Here are 40 people you are matched with for the next coffee break. Add a serendipitous element - here is the coffee bar area with 49 (e.g. add 9 'randoms') others - you can drop into the group of 50, and then peel off (or be peeled off) into x minute 2-4 person conversations. You tag the people you want follow-ups with (and the algorithms take note as well) before you are moved into a different subgroup. How would AR enhance all of that?

Quite busy with my startup but throwing thoughts out there for others - it is certainly a space for innovation.

I'm co-founder of Iterative.ai /DVC.org (open source tools for ML) and doing conferences/meetups is an essential part of the business for us (kinda marketing for dev tools). I would definitely recommend you to connect and talk to amazing folks from the https://tulu.la/ team. They are building (still in stealth) a product to run online events with experience as engaging as possible. I'm biased, since I know founders personally (and happy to be their friend!), but they started their company with this vision even before all this coronavirus stuff, they definitely have a big vision in mind for a long term and have been passionate about this space for years. An example would be this online conference they organized a while ago - https://divops.org/. I would happy to connect you (and I'll send a link to this conversation to them).

I'm co-founder of Tulu.la. We're building a community first solution. A mix of twitch and discord but for professional events. Would be happy to share more details.

I working on a tool for better online networking experience.

https://spatial.chat/

https://www.producthunt.com/posts/spatialchat

Though it wasn't designed initially for big online events, due to the outbreak we see the surge in that area. Already landed a couple of 5000-people conferences, and many people use products for meetups and drinking parties.

dm me in twitter https://twitter.com/kidrulit

We are trying to solve this with a twist on 3d spatial video chat. https://laptopsinspace.de

(No mobile support yet)

Edit: this is what it looks like https://twitter.com/neeshstudio/status/1255858585235488771?s...

We're working on helping sell tickets for and build community around Zoom events: https://zmurl.com

We started 2.5 months ago and have seen ~ 10k events of all kinds.

We're hiring engineers :) - victor@zmurl.com

I am in my last two weeks at my full time job. I'll be going full time into my project which gamifies the virtual office in order to create culture for remote teams. I'd love to chat with like minded people.

eric@tengable.com

or twitter

@ericwooley

Going to send you a Twitter DM! I'm really into this space as well and would love to connect with like-minded individuals

Online social events just don't do it for me. The time delay is a small factor, but reducing social interactions to what I can take in to only two senses while everyone sits in a chair is just not what social events are.

Real life interactions involve every possible kind of stimuli -- we're just usually only conscious of a few of them. I must need to receive subtle scent cues, micro-gestures, voice interactions with the room tone around us, whatever else we don't know yet that influences us in order to enjoy video chat bullshit that is more than transferring work details. Video chat works worse for me, socially, than talking on phones ever did, though I don't know if the extra video information is 'blocking' what my imagination filled in while having a phone chat.

Some things are just not fun online. Not everything is about efficiency, sometimes people just want to be around other people who are interested in similar things :)

For example, nobody says hm, I wonder how we solve night clubs, but online.

Although it could be that type of unusual thought that leads to something interesting :)

It's not safe right now to be inside, with a large crowd of people, doing strenuous physical activity. So; online, it goes. It's not a question of efficiency, but the entertainment industry serves a myriad of customer needs, and for those still stuck sheltering-in-place and meeting up with friends online, the question of how to have a better online night club experience comes up every weekend. Zoom's shortcomings become more and more glaring as time goes on. We all know it's not a substitute for in person interaction, but what can be done to make it suck less. Ideally, there's even a way to use the Internet to enhance the experience!

It might be possible to optimize latency for attendees to a digital event to those within, say, the same 10-mile radius than Zoom currently uses. That's not a use case that remote video conferencing is typically optimized for. Better speakers and video would also improve the experience compared to a laptop.

Then there's the music itself that gets played. The current challenge is that DJs moved to Twitch as the world moved online. It's pretty much the perfect platform except for one fatal flaw - Twitch isn't licensed for music online like a bar/club is. There's no online equivalent of the venue paying the yearly ASCAP license fee. So mixes come down as takedown notices are issued, since the music the DJs are playing are unlicensed. Many DJs are thus trying to find a new platform, possibly Mixcloud or Soundcloud. They have their own shortcomings, however.

> For example, nobody says hm, I wonder how we solve night clubs, but online.

Sure they do, that's a not-insignificant part of VRChat. :p

Nice piece. Not the main point, but I deeply resonate with the brief aside on in-person meeting: "I sometimes suggest it would be helpful if we all wore banners". There is still low-hanging fruit for software to improve in-person interactions. Much of the small-talk dance is an attempt to find common ground between two people in order to catapult into a deeper conversation or more meaningful relationship. Software could do this.

I actually think VR and events could be magic. You put it on and for 2 hours do a combination of keynotes and chose your own adventure experiences. If it incorporates interesting enough visuals with content I’d much prefer this to going somewhere in person for the week or sitting in front of a “online conference console” with streaming video and a chat window.

This was a great read. I think what's going to be interesting to observe after the dust settles is events are going to be online by-default.

Not necessarily as insurance against a global pandemic, but rather due to the expansive reach that many event organizers are realizing.

I don't think offline events are going away, but (as the author alludes to) the incentives to attend online vs offline events are different; therefore it won't be a 1:1 experience. I don't think anyone in the event/event technology space actually figured out the secret formula to provide a great online AND offline experience for both the event organizer & attendees/vendors, but once someone does I think there's great opportunity to capture.

> A long time ago Twitter took some of that role, and the explosion of online dating also shows how changing the way you think about pools and sample sets changes outcomes.

I like how his examples are the parts of the internet that the largest number of people hate with a comically fiery passion.

One of the most interesting and efficient “network” (not really networking) events I went to was a after-hours meetup at a LGBTQ+ leadership conference. After a brief presentation about sexual liberation, everyone wrote exactly what they were looking for on a name tag. People put everything from “someone to have lunch with tomorrow” to “voyeur seeking exhibitionists.”

Amazingly, everyone I talked to the next day to got more or less what they were looking for, whether that was something sexual or just a new friend.

I think your point is very pertinent: People literally advertising what it is they're looking for. I see only two problems with this:

1. It reduces serendipity. And that's the "hallways" thing missing in online interactions.

2. As soon as I put my wants/interests out on the internet it's almost certainly going to become chum for spammers, dodgy recruiters, the GRAFT and so on. i.e. Repurposed to ends antithetical to my original intent.

Still, there's something in the notion... if we can say something about ourselves (online) in a safe way, then there's at least a chance we can get some serendipity/discovery happening.

> As soon as I put my wants/interests out on the internet it's almost certainly going to become chum for spammers, dodgy recruiters, the GRAFT and so on. i.e. Repurposed to ends antithetical to my original intent.

This is likely true when the conference is open registration, but generally not true when it's a closed conference that just so happens to be on the internet - practically nobody who wishes to be part of the conference enough to invest time/money/energy into getting an invite are going to then sell your data on to spammers.

It's the same with random irc channels without public logging - while everyone could be logging everything you say to use against you later, in practice this just doesn't happen in channels of 100-200 people.

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