> The MOST unfortunate thing about slide presentations is that in many contexts (particularly academic talks, and investor pitches, among other things) is that

> The MOST unfortunate thing about slide presentations is that in many contexts (particularly academic talks, and investor pitches, among other things) is that people ask for your slides before or after the talk, as a substitute for listening during the talk. I don’t know about the other contexts, but unfortunately it’s a fact of life in academia that half your audience is not really motivated to attend your talk a priori, and that a significant fraction of the other half will be distracted at some point and stop following for 5 to 30 seconds. You lose too much of the audience if the slides are not enough to follow. Another common case, besides the “I could not attend because of diary conflicts” is sending the slides to someone who could be interested but did not attend for whatever reason (after asking politely the author whether they were ok with it). Now, that’s not an excuse for how dreadful most of academic presentations are, but you just cannot go too deep into the minimalism rabbit hole.