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Comment by azangru | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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> 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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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