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This is a pattern now in greater society, one of the (arguable) downsides to tech is that the bar for publishing or organizing just about anything has been lowe

This is a pattern now in greater society, one of the (arguable) downsides to tech is that the bar for publishing or organizing just about anything has been lowered - so now it isn't tenured professors with years of experience in academic best practices giving carefully prepared talks summarizing months of research, it's programmers with no formal education presenting whatever in a totally casual manner. Don't get me wrong, that it's casual isn't necessarily a problem, but literature, journalism, even scientific publications are all seeing wider distributions of quality now that it's so much easier for the average person to find a platform. And I think the predominant expansion is at the lower end of the distribution given that there was previously a strong effective selection pressure for quality, since it took substantial resources just to publish any media.

shioyama 7y ago
Sorry, I disagree with the reference to academia: the median quality of academic conference talks is abismal in my experience. Sure they are more technical, but they are also that much less engaging, and target a much more narrow audience. No experimenting with styles and flows, just cookie-cutter formats with lots of text and plenty of citations. Programmer conferences may have a more open format and obviously that invites some low quality talks, but it also leaves the door open to really amazing, totally experimental formats and topics. I'm thinking of stuff like Gary Bernhardt's "The Birth and Death of Javascript" [1], which would never fly at an academic conference in my experience (or at least would not be appreciated), but was immensely influential in programming circles. [1] https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/the-birth-and-death-of-javascript https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/the-birth-and-death...

shioyama 7y ago

Sorry, I disagree with the reference to academia: the median quality of academic conference talks is abismal in my experience. Sure they are more technical, but they are also that much less engaging, and target a much more narrow audience. No experimenting with styles and flows, just cookie-cutter formats with lots of text and plenty of citations. Programmer conferences may have a more open format and obviously that invites some low quality talks, but it also leaves the door open to really amazing, totally experimental formats and topics. I'm thinking of stuff like Gary Bernhardt's "The Birth and Death of Javascript" [1], which would never fly at an academic conference in my experience (or at least would not be appreciated), but was immensely influential in programming circles. [1] https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/the-birth-and-death-of-javascript https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/the-birth-and-death...