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