What is the point of an online conference? | Hacker News Reader

What is the point of an online conference?

scattered-thoughts.net

140 pointsjamii106 comments

I have been speaking at about 50 conferences over the years and I refuse to do online ones. Why?

- Conferences are usually not paid, except expenses. In fact the "compensation" for a speaker is to be able to travel and attend in person. Maybe for some this is a drawback, for me it's not.

- In person conferences allow you to meet and network with other speakers. Online conferences do not (unless you count "come to our discord" as networking, I don't)

- The value I get from conferences is also interacting with the public and listening to them, outside of the talks.

- I also don't really get any of the promotion value for my company, which obviously I represent.

In short, I understand they are cheaper to organize but the value is simply not there at all, so I will not speak at them, attend them, or sponsor them.

For me giving a talk to a quite camera is also a lot more exhausting. Got to make sure I remain in focus of the cam, hope the audio works and get no feedback (did the joke work? Am I too fast or too slow?)

And not being there also has the consequence that I do other things on the day and it's a lot more "in between" than focus.

All that, I assume, also reflects to the experience for the audience.

I’ve only stood in front of more than a dozen people twice outside of college, and it’s definitely a vibe. At a conference or even just a presentation you get up that morning and you focus differently. You travel to the event and you psych yourself up for it. You mull over your talking points and lock them down more. Less extemporaneous speaking. I have never put that sort of energy and focus into a video call.

> did the joke work? Am I too fast or too slow?

I gave a remote talk a bit earlier this year, and that was the hardest part for me. I didn't quite realize how much I adjusted my speaking based on how the room is reacting. Sometimes my sarcastic humor doesn't land, or it would have landed but I talk way too fast, or people just can't understand what I'm saying and I can see that by looking at peoples' facial expressions.

Probably won't do it again unless there's some kind of emergency. I would have done it in person even this last time, but there was some scheduling conflicts on my end. It's just a lot more fun to do this stuff in person.

One of the bigger meetups I used to go to would pull in speakers who used us as practice for a conference talk. We were dress rehearsal for standing in front of a crowd three to thirty times the size.

I not sure how live rehearsal, virtual conference would work. Great for some presenters, not so great for others.

Guys do you all realize this is why our modern work from home zoom era of meetings all day is silly and why nothing is getting done anymore? We get all these same benefits from working in an office together. This thread is a Gell-Mann Amnesia generator. Everyone says online conferences are stupid and then doesn’t see how absurd it is to say working the other 51 weeks of the year that way makes sense.

I didn't say they were "stupid", I said I had trouble presenting at one.

That said, it's not apples to apples. I spend like 60% of my day coding, which of course I can do from pretty much anywhere, and it doesn't really matter if my jokes land. When I do video calls, it's generally in relatively small meetings, and it actually is relatively easy to gauge reactions that way.

It feels like you're extrapolating a bit much here.

For me that is very different. Regarding conferences I wrote above, while at the same time I am working remotely for 15 years.

In remote work with zoom meetings for me (may be different in other jobs)

* Most meetings are in small groups/teams and more discussion, where the feedback problem works better than a conference talk for 100 people * I know most of the audience, thus know what this expected to present, where the audience got experience and which humor does (not) work * In many meetings I can keep it running on the side while doing some other work and only give attention to the parts relevant for me * and am not involved in all that office noise and all the related distractions, but focus on my actual work

My boss of course has to trust me I do my stuff instead of standing behind me.

For larger milestones etc and socializing having in person meetings once in a while is important. But day to day remote massively reduces distractions and removes a lot of irrelevant stuff.

For some, a lot of their work is not doing "conference-style" activities (networking, meeting people, giving presentations, promoting to the public).

For others, perhaps it is, and your point would hold more water for them.

But surely you can see that yours is not a one-size-fits-all answer.

Man i wish work was just a big hang-out-and-chill conference! Talking and eating all day and watching endless presentations. But unfortunately some of us need to get actual work done.

If your job is to present on stage to a crowd 5 days a week, 9-5, sure. If not, don’t draw bad comparisons.

Conferences are fundamentally different from work though?

Even watching recordings of online-only conferences isn't interesting. You would think for a remote viewer it's the same, but it's not.

They're mostly not comparable. High-quality streaming keynotes (especially for conferences I couldn't otherwise justify attending) not-withstanding.

Two very different experiences, and the fact that a lot of conference presentations would probably be better at half the length also not withstanding, a bunch of YouTube videos may be fine for some but, as someone who has probably attended hundreds of conferences, they're really not the same.

During COVID, I resigned myself to attending and presenting at online conferences, but it was mostly a waste of time.

What do you talk about at conferences?

Mainly software architecture, inspirational developer stuff like cool personal projects, software team building and practices.

> What is the point of an online conference?

The article seems to be written from the standpoint of a conference organiser. Which is quite different than the perspective of a learner.

As someone who hasn't attended a single tech conference in my life, yet watched hundreds of recorded talks, I think the point of an online conference is to create an occasion for people to produce high-quality content in their field that others will enjoy watching. I would, of course, prefer that these people created such content regularly, without needing to be prompted by the occasion of a conference, but very few do.

> I would, of course, prefer that these people created such content regularly, without needing to be prompted by the occasion of a conference, but very few do.

That's more or less the first two points I mentioned - coordination and distillation. Getting a big group of interested attendees together is an effective way to get busy experts to distill some of their knowledge.

Perhaps there are some good conferences. I have yet to attend one. By good I mean value gained vs. cost and time spent.

A typical conference will for me cost transportation, lodging, and meals for several days, in exchange for sitting through a lot of sessions that are poorly presented by poor or inexperienced public speakers, and one or two good ones where I do pick up a nugget or two of useful information.

Generally the talks that are polished and well presented are by speakers who are somewhat well known and are really there to promote their latest book.

As an introverted person, the social aspect of conferences is not an appeal.

The last conference I attended, I bailed after the opening session on the last day and went to a local gym for a couple of hours, then headed to the airport. That was the best part of the whole experience.

A former colleague used to say "if we come home with one or two new ideas, it will have been worthwhile" but I always end up thinking "there's got to be a better way."

I've had similar thoughts a few times over the years. "Let me lock myself in an office for a week with a pile of books and YouTube and I'll learn more than any conference" - and I say that as someone who kept a full day at conferences and took notes.

What I realized is that the learning was supposed to come from talking to other people working on similar problems, as opposed to an earth shattering realization from the presentation itself. I remember one year when I compared notes with a few people on authorization approaches because we were getting ready to overhaul our authorization systems, and I found the random discussions very helpful.

That said, I still dream about getting to do a stay-conference, analogous to a stay-cation, but for learning.

Wise words from my PhD supervisor (paraphrased):

"The presentation is supposed to get them to want to read the paper and talk to you about it" - or basically, it's not a lecture.

If you're only going to a conference to attend breakout sessions as if they were lectures, you probably should just stay home. It's one reason I think sessions should generally be shorter; they're to pique your interest in a topic, not be a comprehensive tutorial (unless they're actually structured that way).

I totally get that some people don't like the other aspects of conference-going and that's fine. They probably really are better off taking some days at home to read and watch videos.

I've always seen conferences (and other business travel events like trade shows) as 90% social events, 10% learning/business events. They've always struck me as a way for extroverted employees to travel somewhere and goof around / party in a way that was justifiable as a "business expense." If they could go on a golf trip instead and be able to get it through the corporate expense report system, they'd do that instead.

Depending on where you live/work, there may be conferences you can attend that are local to you. Then you won't need lodging, and transportation is less, and maybe meals, depending on how far away.

But, if you're not getting anything from the social aspect, and interactions before and after the talks or in the hallways; then conferences aren't a good use of your time. Mostly the talks get recorded and uploaded and are freely available. Sounds like, for you, spending a day reviewing those later is probably better than spending two or three days attending.

But I think you get different presenters for an in-person conference vs a virtual conference vs a periodic video creator. So there's a point to these things even if they don't work for everyone.

Can you please share your favorite high quality content creators? This is something I am chasing and I’m curious what you consider good content.

For front-end web development:

- Many Google dev rels, former or present, are great. For example, Jake Archibald, Paul Lewis, Una Kravets, Adam Argyle, Rachel Andrew, Bramus Van Damme, Surma, Jhey Tompkins

- Web performance community is pretty rad. Harry Roberts is good. Tim Kadlec. Philip Walton's talk on service workers at a Smashing Conf was fantastic. Alex Russell is always good for a sobering perspective on how bad things are with the web. Barry Pollard is good

- Example conferences with great content: CSS Day (2024 was a good one; I remember the talks of Tab Atkins, Sara Soueidan, and Rachel Andrew as being very good), performance.now

- Among speakers on React topics, Ryan Florence is usually great; Mark Erikson too; sometimes Kent C. Dodds...

- Love Ben Lesh (observables and async programming); and Alex Rickabaugh's (Angular team) explanations of Angular signals

https://m.youtube.com/@CMUDatabaseGroup

https://youtube.com/watch?v=g8pjrVbdafY

(My favorite part is somewhere in the middle of the video when he realizes sat solvers are magic)

Wow, this was phenomenal.

Andrej Karpathy https://www.youtube.com/@AndrejKarpathy/videos

Sasha Rush (an underrated creator who deserves more eyeballs) https://www.youtube.com/@srush_nlp/videos

> They typically borrow the form and structure of an in-person conference without considering whether those still make sense online, and whether the goals of an online conference should even be the same as an in-person conference.

Been having a similar debate with a client about their (remote) company all hands. If it’s just going to be a few execs talking at the camera, it shouldn’t be a live group video call.

A remote all hands should have the form of a twitch live streamer. The ceo in his pyamas on a desk with old coffee mugs reacting to content from their own intranet, chat flying by, tts. I'd watch that.

That's the proven format for a one-to-many conversation on this medium.

His underlings prepared some slides, he reacts to them blindly, live fact checking of chat questions.

The CEO must regularly yell at chat to keep with the traditional divorced dad/estranged kid dynamic at play on Twitch, though.

This is brilliant.

All hands should be followed by Q&A, rare opportunity to have execs together so the right one can answer. And it makes sense to listen live to know what (not) to ask.

What you are describing could be just an email.

Ultimately the Q&A will become a reading of pre-approved questions though, in which case you could also have just recorded it.

Really depends on the company I’d say.

That's why they said "will become". It just takes longer for some than others, but at some size / leadership personalities it'll the company flip the approach. For some it may start already like this, for some takes thousands of employees to change the vibe, and most will just go bankrupt as usual.

And, until that happens, there's value in doing it live.

This right here is why executive leadership is complete bullshit.

Can’t even handle unfiltered questions they become so fragile

Have you ever attended an all hands that couldn’t have been an email?

Yes, definitely. I’m not a text processing machine, I’m a human in a human organization and I want to see and feel the leaders I work for and with.

The email can have a video link.

Unless there's a need to interact (and there rarely is at an all-hands), it would save everyone time to just prerecord it. Any followup questions can be sent via email with reply-to-all (or an internal mailing list).

I couldn't care less about seeing and feeling my ceo, I just want to do my work and get paid with as little pointless interruptions as possible. Though this could be different if I worked for something I really cared about.

How large is the company you work for? In mine, I can't imagine wanting to "feel the leaders I work for and with" - the very idea of working with them feels like jumping 5 steps up and 2 steps sideways in the corporate org chart.

It was different before acquisition, back when the 90% of the company fit on one floor of an office building, and the CEO was someone you passed by regularly, and who contributed actual engineering. But company this kind and size, they don't do "all-hands" and "town squares" videocalls...

When I joined my current company, I was the first remote employee, there were less than 200 people total. It's over 4000 now, all over the place.

I have no idea what would I want to ask from leadership. They are so far removed from me.

It’s a small company, yes. But I guess you still get a better sense of leadership even in a big company with a live video compared to a an email.

Yes, a lot gets lost in an email vs. video. I'm not saying it has to be a live meeting, but videos of execs talking about strategy often make their ideas much clearer than a written text.

And live has the big advantage that it cannot be re-recorded, so it's more natural and not as rehearsed as a recorded video.

If a strategy is clearer orally than on paper, something is very wrong. Either you're getting bamboozled by charisma and a bad plan is getting a fake dress up OR they don't know how to write.

It's not about the abstract strategy. It is also about trust. Are they presenting it in a way I trust they believe it? Is it just show?

…or some people just prefer visual interactions to text only formats.

This is very true in my case because I’m dyslexic so I ingest context more easily when heard vs when read.

For other people, it might just be a personal preference. Just like you have the personal preference to read rather than watch.

Arguing that the GP has some major character flaw because of their own personal preference really says more about your own character than it does theirs.

I said zero things about the GP.

Also it's not personal preference. If you're an executive you need to know how to write properly. Execs rely on oral communication to use their charisma points on you, when you read the plans many times they have nothing to do with what was said or it's much simpler. Same with politicians.

A good all hands meeting is about much more than just outlining company strategy.

It’s about uniting everyone emotionally as well as academically.

The emotional component is an absolutely a critical part.

And this is one of the tells for a company that cares about staff moral verses those that don’t. One that care make their all hands about the employees too.

It's not about interactions. Sure, some people prefer or respond better to talk than to reading, or video, etc. But if the execs can't articulate their plan in writing, and can only explain it over words, it's a good indication they don't understand it themselves and it's probably nonsense - for the same reason your exciting, beautiful solution to a programming problem falls apart when you're three lines into writing it down.

Turns out, people have only so much working memory, but are good at covering for it with emotions.

Sure. But when all hands meetings are done well then they aren’t just about communicating company strategy. They’re about the employees too.

You’ll see demos from colleagues in different departments who you might not normally work with. And individuals praised for specific wins.

A good all hands should be for the staff, not for the execs. And that’s the harder skill execs need to learn: when to stfu and let their staff have screen time.

If all hands is done well, it brings the business closer and motivates employees in ways that an email couldn’t. However this is lost on most execs and so all hands often ends up being an ego trip for themselves, and when that happens the thats when things need to be communicated via email.

I'm not opposed to video, but if stuff gets lost in the written version that's more a statement on poor exec written communication skills than video being better than text.

People ingest info differently, and being able to communicate the same info in multiple ways should be table stakes at that level.

The video just gives execs more leverage to use the skills they use every day (people skills) to overwhelm the skills you use every day (charitably either the same skills or some sort of knowledge or physical skill). The more they're comfortable, the worse off you are. Their entire position within the company hinges on being able to exploit you for as much as you're willing to let them get away with, which hinges upon how well they're able to convince you you're worth less than they are (after all, you earn less).

Giving them anything is the wrong move. If you think you are getting as much out of the video as they are getting out of you watching them speak, you are wrong. The degree of wrong depends on your affinity with their chosen craft (which is, to be clear, grifting you).

To be fair, no one would read that mail.

To be fair, no one listened to the all hands either

When it’s all hands, it’s workout time, so I do listen to things in the background.

>Have you ever attended an all hands that couldn’t have been an email?

Yes, they are the ones that happen once or twice a year, not the ones that happen weekly or monthly though, and they covered topics that have a broader scope than what I'm personally working on at any given time.

Tell me you don't manage a lot of people without telling me you don't manage a lot of people.

In some roles you have to over-communicate. All people -- me included-- over estimate how carefully they pay attention to communication. So people will say you could have just sent me an email in good faith and sincerity and the reality is that would not have gotten the point across, the discussion started, or coordination happening.

The entire satellite office couldn't gather for microwave popcorn in the conference room if the layoff damage control all-hands meeting was an email.

My company does those periodically, but they always ignore the interesting questions or claim to need to 'take it offline' for further research.

I had the same thought. Ours usually end in a Q&A and I wouldn't want to miss that.

On the bright side, at least you can turn off your canera and do something else if its on zoom. Hard to do that without getting fired in person.

The essence of virtual gatherings should prioritize interaction and engagement, which can get lost in a traditional lecture-style setup.

I think this post turned out to be a pretty good sell on hytraboi. Last time the conference was held, appears to also be the first time it was held, in 2022:

https://www.hytradboi.com/2022

I'm giving the talk list a try now that I hve read the organizers thought on it.

The "Hallway Track" is my favourite thing about conferences. By far the best one of those I've had, so far, is at Functional Conf 2022 online edition (because of you know what), where I ended up hanging out for almost six hours with a bunch of APL nerds discussing APL, Life, The Universe and Everything in one of the "breakout rooms" of their conference software.

Everybody had their favourite beverages coming to them and were in their favourite jammies at their favourite spot in their home city/country talking about their favourite things and demo-ing their favourite stuff.

I do love in-person gatherings and online ones, when done right, both cases.

Online can be serendipitous in ways that in person can't (and vice-versa).

Next time I get a chance to organise an online conference, I'll steal from Jamie's playbook and invert the model. Viz. ask for pre-recorded talks, distributed to attendees just prior to the conference, with curated live chat + demo sessions with the speaker(s) about the talk. Make the Hallway Track as big and boisterous and charming as possible.

Also it's be nice to see a feature where you can 'queue up' to speak 1:1 with the speaker after the general discussion. This could be like a lottery where whoever gets in line gets paired with the speaker for 60 seconds of chat and then it goes to the next person.

> Next time I get a chance to organise an online conference, I'll steal from Jamie's playbook and invert the model. Viz. ask for pre-recorded talks, distributed to attendees just prior to the conference, with curated live chat + demo sessions with the speaker(s) about the talk. Make the Hallway Track as big and boisterous and charming as possible.

Agreed. This is so much better than having to watch live talks of people stumbling with their camera setup causing the Q&A to be canceled because of that.

when i spoke at an online conference in india i insisted that my talk be prerecorded to make sure there were no interruptions since i was worried that from china the quality might suffer some times. i sent the talk to the organizers to stream and after the talk we did a live q&a. i don't know if the participants felt a difference, but i thought it was the prudent thing to do.

That's very smart. You could even be in the q&a during the talk answering questions while pre-recorded-you is still speaking! This could give a lot more time for focused interaction.

The first one was great; I still get more traction from the 10 minute video I posted at HYTRADBOI-1 than any talk/paper I've presented at SPLASH. I had more salient questions about Mech than I've ever gotten from SPLASH, VC head hunters setting up meetings, and even Graydon Hoare stopped by for a chat.

What's the point of an online conference? Well you gotta go where your audience is, and for us that's online.

The first online conference in the COVID era I attended opened my eyes to an enormous benefit: suddenly a lot of people from restofworld were attending. Yes, online conferences are weird and everything except the lectures are hard to organize well or at all, but I think we shouldn't underestimate sharing with people we otherwise wouldn't share with. I kinda think it's a pity this seems to be over now.

We saw the benefit of moving online in academic conferences too. Often faculty from even developed countries do not have budgets to travel for conferences. For example, one professor from Italy told me that he had a travel budget of €400 per year. That would not even pay his conference registration for most conferences.

The visa issue mentioned in the article is also quite real. Although the US visa is more difficult to get, it is usually for five to ten years for the citizens of most countries. In contrast, most European countries will issue Schengen visas for the duration of the conference! Online conferences avoid all these issues.

That was my reaction back in 2020, too. It was exciting to meet and talk with people from many different countries without leaving home.

Now that I’m back to attending in-person conferences occasionally, I do appreciate the stronger personal connections that form there. However, though weaker, the connections I’ve made online over the past four years have been worth something, too, and they never would have happened if not for those online meetings.

I think https://bangbangcon.com/ also had some interesting answers to this question. It's a shame they've had to shut down.

I moved reasonable driving distance from OSCON right around the last time it was held. Too busy to get tickets, I’ll just go next year. There was no next year. Four years now and I still think about it monthly.

O'Reilly Conferences were pretty good overall although, given how things went down, I assume they were on the bubble even before COVID hit. OSCON was the real crown jewel though that I couldn't always justify attending but did when I could.

The advantages for an online conference depend on the scale and goals of the conference.

If your goal is to get your information out to "attendees" who may not have the means (time/money) to travel and that info is high value to both the receiver and attendee, its a great medium.

If your goal is to connect 1:1, its not great, but virtual versions of Braindate where 1:1's can be scheduled make it more useful. During lockdown, people had a lot more incentive to connect virtually because that was the only way to connect. And a virtual conference provided access to people you may not have access to in your usual spheres.

I personally prefer in person as I enjoy the vibe and learn as much or more in the hallways as I do in the sessions... At large conferences, I don't attend sessions in person that will be available to stream later so that I can take advantage of the other features that are only available in person.

We have a new tool in our toolbox that was developed greatly during lockdown and in the subsequent years and the value will be based on how much people use them as much as by their intrinsic features.

There is so much more one could say, but in the end, I don't think its an either/or ... its about fit.

IMO online vs in-person isn't the only comparison to make. In 2024, you also have to compare against podcasts & Youtube. Beyond simply starting your own content channels, there's a speaker circuit for interview format podcasts, who have the audience and logistics already nailed down.

Using the author's own criteria:

1. Coordination. Podcasts solve this by fitting into various niches. Audiences self-select by topic pretty effectively. Expert speakers can easily see various proxies for audience: downloads, ratings, subscriptions, comments, etc, and review past guests and topics for matching suitability. Whereas with this conference you really have no idea about the audience size.

2. Distillation. Most podcasts I listen to are an interview between a host and a series of subject matter experts. This format substantially lowers the participation barrier for the expert: hop on a webex and chat for 60 minutes. On YouTube I think there's probably room for an "invited talks" format, like a tight ten - fifteen minutes on a topic, without the usual banter. Arguably HYTRADBOI is a concentrated version of that, but none of the videos are findable anywhere other than it's own site, and hasn't really seen traction on HN. Which brings up to...

3. Serendipity. YouTube kinda does this by default, though admittedly watching a KubeCon video is likely to recommend another KubeCon vid that was uploaded at the same time than something from a different tech conf.

The author seems to lean heavily on the value of community chat but frankly, annual conference communities are kinda bad at it. Either there's too many people trying to talk to The Expert or not enough and the moderator has to beg for participation. I kinda prefer the discord / slack / IRC 24x7x365 community discussion model, where there's more incentives to help each other out versus the transactional conference window after which you will likely never see these people again.

I agree with some of this.

My experience of tech podcasts though has been that it's often the same old people being interviewed, and that a 60 minute interview is often less interesting than a 10 minute talk where the speaker spent a bunch of time thinking about how to explain a subject. The latter is definitely more work, but I've had no problem finding speakers.

Outside of tech, I've seen a few podcasts avoid this pattern. The host of https://podcast.clearerthinking.org/ is really good at picking interesting speakers, preparing questions, ans gently but persistently pushing back when they try to gloss over a weak point in their argument. I'd love to listen to a tech version of that podcast.

Not being on youtube might be a mistake. I definitely don't want to use youtube for the conference itself because I don't want attendees to have to sit through ads. But maybe I should mirror to youtube afterwards. I'll think about it.

The chat at the last hytradboi was pretty dense. That may have been down to having quite a high ratio of experts in the audience though. I'm not sure if that will continue to be the case.

I have mixed experiences with discords. The persistence is much better for community building, but in big discords it's rare to have an actual conversation because everyone is only half paying attention. The ones that do feel interesting are again the ones with a high ratio of experts who are actively engaged in the subject. Or small invite-only discords that also hold regular mini-confs, which is maybe a kind of sweet spot.

I'm definitely not tied to running a conference. Last time was kind of a whim, but people enjoyed it and wanted to do it again. So this post is less an argument in favor of conferences and more me trying to figure out what I accidentally did right so I can do more of it.

> I definitely don't want to use youtube for the conference itself because I don't want attendees to have to sit through ads.

Does Youtube show ads if you disable monetization? I feel like most conference presentation uploads don't have ads, but I also switched to YT premium last year and maybe I'm just misremembering.

It's definitely possible to get rid of them but:

https://blog.youtube/news-and-events/updates-to-youtubes-ter...

> ads can now appear on videos from channels not in the YouTube Partner Program (YPP), and we will begin gradually placing ads on brand safe videos

You have to be eligible for ads and sign up for an ad account in order to turn ads off on your own videos.

Youtube also often shows ads if they misdetect part of the video as copyrighted material, which seems to happen more and more often.

I held a number of online conferences a few years ago. The attendance sweet spot was 5-15~ just using zoom. Under 5 is just not enough people. Beyond 15 it's very difficult to talk naturally. Becomes more of a consumption only medium. I hadn't tried having dedicated chats for different talks before.

HYTRADBOI 2022 had 571 attendees (https://www.scattered-thoughts.net/writing/hytradboi-2022-po...). At that point even one matrix chat room per track became hard to follow.

I'm looking forward to doing it on zulip instead. Having unread counts per thread should make it much easier for speakers to keep track of which questions they haven't answered yet.

As someone who has recently started using Zulip I'm really excited you made that call. Its topic model really is unreasonably effective at improving the whole chat experience.

Same as an in person conference - getting answers to questions that you didn't know you had. Learning what is possible to learn, instead of only what you know you can learn.

Reminds me of the contrast between a small Bayesian Modeling conference that was a discourse chat and a big one of a snake themed programming language. They had a custom game where ypu could walk around, a custom video player and all sorts of fancy stuff.

Obviously the discourse conference worked great and the other one was an unmitigated disaster. The tech didn’t work, the talks were bad and the interaction was 0. Only a few influencers hyping themselves.

I think the point of an off-line conference is to afford the speakers. Which then is put online as high quality content.

The cost thing is a main argument the author notes, but I suppose they're all doing this for free. Which only lasts as long as the author has time.

As an attendee I can say that online conferences make absolutely no sense at all and I don't know a single co-worker or dev who actually likes them.

Here are some of the reasons why online conferences are extremely shit:

- Live streams often don't work reliably

- If live streams work they have other issues, which make it pointless, like having the speaker in view but not the slides they share, so you don't see what they talk about, or they have zoom issues, or they have issues with the angle of the camera, or audio sync issues

- Many online conferences use weird never-heard of software, which never works for all participants, have unintuitive UIs and chat functionalities, etc.

- Zero community vibes

- Despite it being online they still impose maximum limits on how many people can view a single session, like WTF? Unlike with a real conference where you just have to show up 5 minutes early to a talk you find yourself unable to view the online talk you wanted to see unless you start queueing in the virtual queue an hour or longer in advance

- 0 networking opportunity, which is the main reason why people go to conferences

- Tickets are still expensive even though you only get 1% value of the in-person equivalent and that 1% is still shit

Overall online conferences are a complete waste of time and I will never attend one again. Most speakers don't give a complete new talk at big conferences either, so every single talk that people give were already given at smaller conferences, or tech meetups and you can find almost every talk on YouTube in a much better more convenient format so really the value of the online conference is near ZERO. Networking is the main reason and that is non existent online.

Just my 2 cents

Folks who run conferences like hytradboi and p99 were likely not going to run any in person conference at all. So it's not like they picked this over any other option other than not doing any conference at all.

Is it really better these organizers do nothing rather than create an online conference? I don't see how that's better personally.

If you don't like online conferences that's totally cool. I think Jamie addressed most of your points too. But hytradboi and p99 are actually excellent and this comment would feel quite demoralizing to me if I were running one of these online conferences.

>Is it really better these organizers do nothing rather than create an online conference? I don't see how that's better personally.

It may well be. I regularly attend one small conference that is very much about the personal interactions with the presentations mostly an add-on. There would have been no point in having people submit a bunch of YouTube videos.

I really can't relate to this attitude at all. :) Agree to disagree.

Fair enough but if I'm running a small non-commercial conference, and can't get people together in person, not sure of the value of giving people a tag to upload YouTube videos and having some sort of real-time schedule given that they can do so with or without my help. My experience is that viewership of such conference presentations is very low. And people can always upload their own videos.

We did Instant Premier on YouTube for TigerBeetle Systems Distributed videos and it was a cool experience to have everyone chatting about the video in real time for a few minutes. This is basically the same thing that p99 and hytradboi do.

It's also curated by the organizers. People subscribe to newsletters like Postgres Weekly for the same basic reason. Someone you trust gets interesting people you (probably) don't know and you get to chat about it with other randos.

It is not remotely the same thing as an in-person conference. But it's a neat thing in its own way. p99 is free, and hytradboi was like 10% the cost of a typical North American conference.

Don't kill the messenger. I'm sorry that that's how I feel, but as the consumer I'm just saying that I don't like the product (online conferences). Sorry that this is demoralising, but I'm not gonna start liking a shitty product all of a sudden to make someone feel better about it.

I'm sure there are other people who feel differently, I have not met them yet, which makes me believe that the group of folks who find an online conference okay is significantly smaller than those who hate them but don't let yourself getting stopped by my personal opinion, if it gives you joy to run an online conference then be my guest and best of luck!

The article does address all those issues, which, while I agree heartily with your comment, makes it feel a little bit redundant?

I think the opening questions are strong and the answers are valid but weak to the point of insubstance.

Hallways. Con suite. Room parties. Cafe. Whoever is sitting near you at a talk. The filk room. The dealer room. The art auction. The gaming room. The movie room. The panels that involve the audience. That excellent question or that excellent pun someone said in the lull. The dance. The weekend long game of icehouse in the hallway with giant pieces on the floor. Meeting authors face to face and having conversations. Winding up at the diner with people you only just met.

Any of those things from sf cons that tech cons don't have, that's unfortunate, but the principle still holds. None of that exists via zoom. The collectivism of "we all decided to do this this day, and we all recognize that everyone else did too" is something, but it's just not very much.

It does exist in VR. In fact I've met interesting people this way when I was in the virtual auditorium in horizons watching meta connect 3 years ago.

But the last 2 years meta didn't pay much attention to the VR part and everyone just started watching it in a browser. 3 years ago it was pretty amazing. For every speaker the VR environment changed and you saw products and even avatars synced in 3D. So there was this attraction to the VR experience.

to take your money while you sit at an empty virtual poster.

Physical conferences are more like paid vacations.

The best talks I've seen, I watched on stream.

To redistribute wealth from pockets of fools and corporations willing to pay.

Exactly. The customer being served is the companies that made money on in-person conferences.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com