It depends on the context. For example, with business meetings slides tend to be jam packed with information. They're already a glorified document with a narrat

It depends on the context. For example, with business meetings slides tend to be jam packed with information. They're already a glorified document with a narrator. The speaker is there to enhance the slides. It works well to hand those out ahead of time. For a proper presentation, like at a conference, IMO slides should be there to supplement the speaker. Not the other way around. Thus the amount of hard information on the slides themselves should be minimal. Because of this, hand outs don't make as much sense. And of course a third angle. If one follows my philosophy for conference talks & such, then there's the problem that distributing slides after the fact are useless, because all the important information was conveyed by the speaker. But that's another discussion altogether.