I think this still has value. Sure, the networking part of it is over. But you still have tens of thousands of people watching this. For a framework like Rails

I think this still has value. Sure, the networking part of it is over. But you still have tens of thousands of people watching this. For a framework like Rails it's usually a nice yearly milestone to talk about the future of the framework, to shed light on some new ill understood features (e.g webpack) etc etc. Railsconf are always watched by more people at home than they are by people attending anyway, that's nothing new.