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What is the point of an online conference?

140 points by jamii 2y ago

aaron695 2y ago
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jamii 2y ago
I think https://bangbangcon.com/ https://bangbangcon.com/ also had some interesting answers to this question. It's a shame they've had to shut down.
benreesman 2y ago
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- benreesman 2y ago
  Now let’s talk about something I don’t really do, go in someone’s mouth taking food. I’d rather be eighty year old me than twenty year old you.
Sevii 2y ago
I held a number of online conferences a few years ago. The attendance sweet spot was 5-15~ just using zoom. Under 5 is just not enough people. Beyond 15 it's very difficult to talk naturally. Becomes more of a consumption only medium. I hadn't tried having dedicated chats for different talks before.
- jamii 2y ago
  HYTRADBOI 2022 had 571 attendees (https://www.scattered-thoughts.net/writing/hytradboi-2022-postmortem/ https://www.scattered-thoughts.net/writing/hytradboi-2022-po...). At that point even one matrix chat room per track became hard to follow. I'm looking forward to doing it on zulip instead. Having unread counts per thread should make it much easier for speakers to keep track of which questions they haven't answered yet.
  - crabmusket 2y ago
    As someone who has recently started using Zulip I'm really excited you made that call. Its topic model really is unreasonably effective at improving the whole chat experience.
voidfunc 2y ago
To redistribute wealth from pockets of fools and corporations willing to pay.
- tightbookkeeper 2y ago
  Exactly. The customer being served is the companies that made money on in-person conferences.
foxbarrington 2y ago
> They typically borrow the form and structure of an in-person conference without considering whether those still make sense online, and whether the goals of an online conference should even be the same as an in-person conference. Been having a similar debate with a client about their (remote) company all hands. If it’s just going to be a few execs talking at the camera, it shouldn’t be a live group video call.
- rplnt 2y ago
  All hands should be followed by Q&A, rare opportunity to have execs together so the right one can answer. And it makes sense to listen live to know what (not) to ask. What you are describing could be just an email.
  - nmadden 2y ago
    Have you ever attended an all hands that couldn’t have been an email?
    - watwut 2y ago
      To be fair, no one would read that mail.
      - rokkamokka 2y ago
        To be fair, no one listened to the all hands either
        serial_dev 2y ago
        When it’s all hands, it’s workout time, so I do listen to things in the background.
    - dx034 2y ago
      Yes, a lot gets lost in an email vs. video. I'm not saying it has to be a live meeting, but videos of execs talking about strategy often make their ideas much clearer than a written text. And live has the big advantage that it cannot be re-recorded, so it's more natural and not as rehearsed as a recorded video.
Brian_K_White 2y ago
I think the opening questions are strong and the answers are valid but weak to the point of insubstance. Hallways. Con suite. Room parties. Cafe. Whoever is sitting near you at a talk. The filk room. The dealer room. The art auction. The gaming room. The movie room. The panels that involve the audience. That excellent question or that excellent pun someone said in the lull. The dance. The weekend long game of icehouse in the hallway with giant pieces on the floor. Meeting authors face to face and having conversations. Winding up at the diner with people you only just met. Any of those things from sf cons that tech cons don't have, that's unfortunate, but the principle still holds. None of that exists via zoom. The collectivism of "we all decided to do this this day, and we all recognize that everyone else did too" is something, but it's just not very much.
- wkat4242 2y ago
  It does exist in VR. In fact I've met interesting people this way when I was in the virtual auditorium in horizons watching meta connect 3 years ago. But the last 2 years meta didn't pay much attention to the VR part and everyone just started watching it in a browser. 3 years ago it was pretty amazing. For every speaker the VR environment changed and you saw products and even avatars synced in 3D. So there was this attraction to the VR experience.
wodenokoto 2y ago
I think this post turned out to be a pretty good sell on hytraboi. Last time the conference was held, appears to also be the first time it was held, in 2022: https://www.hytradboi.com/2022 https://www.hytradboi.com/2022 I'm giving the talk list a try now that I hve read the organizers thought on it.
adityaathalye 2y ago
The "Hallway Track" is my favourite thing about conferences. By far the best one of those I've had, so far, is at Functional Conf 2022 online edition (because of you know what), where I ended up hanging out for almost six hours with a bunch of APL nerds discussing APL, Life, The Universe and Everything in one of the "breakout rooms" of their conference software. Everybody had their favourite beverages coming to them and were in their favourite jammies at their favourite spot in their home city/country talking about their favourite things and demo-ing their favourite stuff. I do love in-person gatherings and online ones, when done right, both cases. Online can be serendipitous in ways that in person can't (and vice-versa). Next time I get a chance to organise an online conference, I'll steal from Jamie's playbook and invert the model. Viz. ask for pre-recorded talks, distributed to attendees just prior to the conference, with curated live chat + demo sessions with the speaker(s) about the talk. Make the Hallway Track as big and boisterous and charming as possible.
- huskyr 2y ago
  > Next time I get a chance to organise an online conference, I'll steal from Jamie's playbook and invert the model. Viz. ask for pre-recorded talks, distributed to attendees just prior to the conference, with curated live chat + demo sessions with the speaker(s) about the talk. Make the Hallway Track as big and boisterous and charming as possible. Agreed. This is so much better than having to watch live talks of people stumbling with their camera setup causing the Q&A to be canceled because of that.
  - em-bee 2y ago
    when i spoke at an online conference in india i insisted that my talk be prerecorded to make sure there were no interruptions since i was worried that from china the quality might suffer some times. i sent the talk to the organizers to stream and after the talk we did a live q&a. i don't know if the participants felt a difference, but i thought it was the prudent thing to do.
    - acidburnNSA 2y ago
      That's very smart. You could even be in the q&a during the talk answering questions while pre-recorded-you is still speaking! This could give a lot more time for focused interaction.
deleted 2y ago
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jldugger 2y ago
IMO online vs in-person isn't the only comparison to make. In 2024, you also have to compare against podcasts & Youtube. Beyond simply starting your own content channels, there's a speaker circuit for interview format podcasts, who have the audience and logistics already nailed down. Using the author's own criteria: 1. Coordination. Podcasts solve this by fitting into various niches. Audiences self-select by topic pretty effectively. Expert speakers can easily see various proxies for audience: downloads, ratings, subscriptions, comments, etc, and review past guests and topics for matching suitability. Whereas with this conference you really have no idea about the audience size. 2. Distillation. Most podcasts I listen to are an interview between a host and a series of subject matter experts. This format substantially lowers the participation barrier for the expert: hop on a webex and chat for 60 minutes. On YouTube I think there's probably room for an "invited talks" format, like a tight ten - fifteen minutes on a topic, without the usual banter. Arguably HYTRADBOI is a concentrated version of that, but none of the videos are findable anywhere other than it's own site, and hasn't really seen traction on HN. Which brings up to... 3. Serendipity. YouTube kinda does this by default, though admittedly watching a KubeCon video is likely to recommend another KubeCon vid that was uploaded at the same time than something from a different tech conf. The author seems to lean heavily on the value of community chat but frankly, annual conference communities are kinda bad at it. Either there's too many people trying to talk to The Expert or not enough and the moderator has to beg for participation. I kinda prefer the discord / slack / IRC 24x7x365 community discussion model, where there's more incentives to help each other out versus the transactional conference window after which you will likely never see these people again.
- jamii 2y ago
  I agree with some of this. My experience of tech podcasts though has been that it's often the same old people being interviewed, and that a 60 minute interview is often less interesting than a 10 minute talk where the speaker spent a bunch of time thinking about how to explain a subject. The latter is definitely more work, but I've had no problem finding speakers. Outside of tech, I've seen a few podcasts avoid this pattern. The host of https://podcast.clearerthinking.org/ https://podcast.clearerthinking.org/ is really good at picking interesting speakers, preparing questions, ans gently but persistently pushing back when they try to gloss over a weak point in their argument. I'd love to listen to a tech version of that podcast. Not being on youtube might be a mistake. I definitely don't want to use youtube for the conference itself because I don't want attendees to have to sit through ads. But maybe I should mirror to youtube afterwards. I'll think about it. The chat at the last hytradboi was pretty dense. That may have been down to having quite a high ratio of experts in the audience though. I'm not sure if that will continue to be the case. I have mixed experiences with discords. The persistence is much better for community building, but in big discords it's rare to have an actual conversation because everyone is only half paying attention. The ones that do feel interesting are again the ones with a high ratio of experts who are actively engaged in the subject. Or small invite-only discords that also hold regular mini-confs, which is maybe a kind of sweet spot. I'm definitely not tied to running a conference. Last time was kind of a whim, but people enjoyed it and wanted to do it again. So this post is less an argument in favor of conferences and more me trying to figure out what I accidentally did right so I can do more of it.
hinkley 2y ago
I moved reasonable driving distance from OSCON right around the last time it was held. Too busy to get tickets, I’ll just go next year. There was no next year. Four years now and I still think about it monthly.
- ghaff 2y ago
  O'Reilly Conferences were pretty good overall although, given how things went down, I assume they were on the bubble even before COVID hit. OSCON was the real crown jewel though that I couldn't always justify attending but did when I could.
ic_fly2 2y ago
Reminds me of the contrast between a small Bayesian Modeling conference that was a discourse chat and a big one of a snake themed programming language. They had a custom game where ypu could walk around, a custom video player and all sorts of fancy stuff. Obviously the discourse conference worked great and the other one was an unmitigated disaster. The tech didn’t work, the talks were bad and the interaction was 0. Only a few influencers hyping themselves.
azangru 2y ago
> What is the point of an online conference? The article seems to be written from the standpoint of a conference organiser. Which is quite different than the perspective of a learner. As someone who hasn't attended a single tech conference in my life, yet watched hundreds of recorded talks, I think the point of an online conference is to create an occasion for people to produce high-quality content in their field that others will enjoy watching. I would, of course, prefer that these people created such content regularly, without needing to be prompted by the occasion of a conference, but very few do.
- thierrydamiba 2y ago
  Can you please share your favorite high quality content creators? This is something I am chasing and I’m curious what you consider good content.
  - dvh 2y ago
    https://youtube.com/watch?v=g8pjrVbdafY https://youtube.com/watch?v=g8pjrVbdafY (My favorite part is somewhere in the middle of the video when he realizes sat solvers are magic)
    - ryukoposting 2y ago
      Wow, this was phenomenal.
  - jamii 2y ago
    https://m.youtube.com/@CMUDatabaseGroup https://m.youtube.com/@CMUDatabaseGroup
  - notpublic 2y ago
    Andrej Karpathy https://www.youtube.com/@AndrejKarpathy/videos https://www.youtube.com/@AndrejKarpathy/videos Sasha Rush (an underrated creator who deserves more eyeballs) https://www.youtube.com/@srush_nlp/videos https://www.youtube.com/@srush_nlp/videos
  - 2y ago
dustedcodes 2y ago
As an attendee I can say that online conferences make absolutely no sense at all and I don't know a single co-worker or dev who actually likes them. 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
- crabmusket 2y ago
  The article does address all those issues, which, while I agree heartily with your comment, makes it feel a little bit redundant?
- eatonphil 2y ago
  Folks who run conferences like hytradboi and p99 were likely not going to run any in person conference at all. So it's not like they picked this over any other option other than not doing any conference at all. Is it really better these organizers do nothing rather than create an online conference? I don't see how that's better personally. If you don't like online conferences that's totally cool. I think Jamie addressed most of your points too. But hytradboi and p99 are actually excellent and this comment would feel quite demoralizing to me if I were running one of these online conferences.
sklivvz1971 2y ago
I have been speaking at about 50 conferences over the years and I refuse to do online ones. Why? - Conferences are usually not paid, except expenses. In fact the "compensation" for a speaker is to be able to travel and attend in person. Maybe for some this is a drawback, for me it's not. - In person conferences allow you to meet and network with other speakers. Online conferences do not (unless you count "come to our discord" as networking, I don't) - The value I get from conferences is also interacting with the public and listening to them, outside of the talks. - I also don't really get any of the promotion value for my company, which obviously I represent. In short, I understand they are cheaper to organize but the value is simply not there at all, so I will not speak at them, attend them, or sponsor them.
- ghaff 2y ago
  They're mostly not comparable. High-quality streaming keynotes (especially for conferences I couldn't otherwise justify attending) not-withstanding. Two very different experiences, and the fact that a lot of conference presentations would probably be better at half the length also not withstanding, a bunch of YouTube videos may be fine for some but, as someone who has probably attended hundreds of conferences, they're really not the same. During COVID, I resigned myself to attending and presenting at online conferences, but it was mostly a waste of time.
- johannes1234321 2y ago
  For me giving a talk to a quite camera is also a lot more exhausting. Got to make sure I remain in focus of the cam, hope the audio works and get no feedback (did the joke work? Am I too fast or too slow?) And not being there also has the consequence that I do other things on the day and it's a lot more "in between" than focus. All that, I assume, also reflects to the experience for the audience.
  - 0x457 2y ago
    Even watching recordings of online-only conferences isn't interesting. You would think for a remote viewer it's the same, but it's not.
  - 2y ago
hkon 2y ago
Physical conferences are more like paid vacations. The best talks I've seen, I watched on stream.
langsoul-com 2y ago
I think the point of an off-line conference is to afford the speakers. Which then is put online as high quality content. The cost thing is a main argument the author notes, but I suppose they're all doing this for free. Which only lasts as long as the author has time.
brnt 2y ago
The first online conference in the COVID era I attended opened my eyes to an enormous benefit: suddenly a lot of people from restofworld were attending. Yes, online conferences are weird and everything except the lectures are hard to organize well or at all, but I think we shouldn't underestimate sharing with people we otherwise wouldn't share with. I kinda think it's a pity this seems to be over now.
- tkgally 2y ago
  That was my reaction back in 2020, too. It was exciting to meet and talk with people from many different countries without leaving home. Now that I’m back to attending in-person conferences occasionally, I do appreciate the stronger personal connections that form there. However, though weaker, the connections I’ve made online over the past four years have been worth something, too, and they never would have happened if not for those online meetings.
- malshe 2y ago
  We saw the benefit of moving online in academic conferences too. Often faculty from even developed countries do not have budgets to travel for conferences. For example, one professor from Italy told me that he had a travel budget of €400 per year. That would not even pay his conference registration for most conferences. The visa issue mentioned in the article is also quite real. Although the US visa is more difficult to get, it is usually for five to ten years for the citizens of most countries. In contrast, most European countries will issue Schengen visas for the duration of the conference! Online conferences avoid all these issues.
cmontella 2y ago
The first one was great; I still get more traction from the 10 minute video I posted at HYTRADBOI-1 than any talk/paper I've presented at SPLASH. I had more salient questions about Mech than I've ever gotten from SPLASH, VC head hunters setting up meetings, and even Graydon Hoare stopped by for a chat. What's the point of an online conference? Well you gotta go where your audience is, and for us that's online.
stronglikedan 2y ago
Same as an in person conference - getting answers to questions that you didn't know you had. Learning what is possible to learn, instead of only what you know you can learn.
SubiculumCode 2y ago
to take your money while you sit at an empty virtual poster.
rkhassen9 2y ago
The advantages for an online conference depend on the scale and goals of the conference. If your goal is to get your information out to "attendees" who may not have the means (time/money) to travel and that info is high value to both the receiver and attendee, its a great medium. If your goal is to connect 1:1, its not great, but virtual versions of Braindate where 1:1's can be scheduled make it more useful. During lockdown, people had a lot more incentive to connect virtually because that was the only way to connect. And a virtual conference provided access to people you may not have access to in your usual spheres. I personally prefer in person as I enjoy the vibe and learn as much or more in the hallways as I do in the sessions... At large conferences, I don't attend sessions in person that will be available to stream later so that I can take advantage of the other features that are only available in person. We have a new tool in our toolbox that was developed greatly during lockdown and in the subsequent years and the value will be based on how much people use them as much as by their intrinsic features. There is so much more one could say, but in the end, I don't think its an either/or ... its about fit.

140 points by jamii 2y ago

[dead]

I think https://bangbangcon.com/ https://bangbangcon.com/ also had some interesting answers to this question. It's a shame they've had to shut down.

benreesman 2y ago

[flagged]

benreesman 2y ago
Now let’s talk about something I don’t really do, go in someone’s mouth taking food. I’d rather be eighty year old me than twenty year old you.

Sevii 2y ago

I held a number of online conferences a few years ago. The attendance sweet spot was 5-15~ just using zoom. Under 5 is just not enough people. Beyond 15 it's very difficult to talk naturally. Becomes more of a consumption only medium. I hadn't tried having dedicated chats for different talks before.

jamii 2y ago
HYTRADBOI 2022 had 571 attendees (https://www.scattered-thoughts.net/writing/hytradboi-2022-postmortem/ https://www.scattered-thoughts.net/writing/hytradboi-2022-po...). At that point even one matrix chat room per track became hard to follow. I'm looking forward to doing it on zulip instead. Having unread counts per thread should make it much easier for speakers to keep track of which questions they haven't answered yet.
- crabmusket 2y ago
  As someone who has recently started using Zulip I'm really excited you made that call. Its topic model really is unreasonably effective at improving the whole chat experience.

voidfunc 2y ago

To redistribute wealth from pockets of fools and corporations willing to pay.

tightbookkeeper 2y ago
Exactly. The customer being served is the companies that made money on in-person conferences.

foxbarrington 2y ago

> They typically borrow the form and structure of an in-person conference without considering whether those still make sense online, and whether the goals of an online conference should even be the same as an in-person conference. Been having a similar debate with a client about their (remote) company all hands. If it’s just going to be a few execs talking at the camera, it shouldn’t be a live group video call.

rplnt 2y ago
All hands should be followed by Q&A, rare opportunity to have execs together so the right one can answer. And it makes sense to listen live to know what (not) to ask. What you are describing could be just an email.
- nmadden 2y ago
  Have you ever attended an all hands that couldn’t have been an email?
  - watwut 2y ago
    To be fair, no one would read that mail.
    - rokkamokka 2y ago
      To be fair, no one listened to the all hands either
      - serial_dev 2y ago
        When it’s all hands, it’s workout time, so I do listen to things in the background.
  - dx034 2y ago
    Yes, a lot gets lost in an email vs. video. I'm not saying it has to be a live meeting, but videos of execs talking about strategy often make their ideas much clearer than a written text. And live has the big advantage that it cannot be re-recorded, so it's more natural and not as rehearsed as a recorded video.

Brian_K_White 2y ago

I think the opening questions are strong and the answers are valid but weak to the point of insubstance. Hallways. Con suite. Room parties. Cafe. Whoever is sitting near you at a talk. The filk room. The dealer room. The art auction. The gaming room. The movie room. The panels that involve the audience. That excellent question or that excellent pun someone said in the lull. The dance. The weekend long game of icehouse in the hallway with giant pieces on the floor. Meeting authors face to face and having conversations. Winding up at the diner with people you only just met. Any of those things from sf cons that tech cons don't have, that's unfortunate, but the principle still holds. None of that exists via zoom. The collectivism of "we all decided to do this this day, and we all recognize that everyone else did too" is something, but it's just not very much.

wkat4242 2y ago
It does exist in VR. In fact I've met interesting people this way when I was in the virtual auditorium in horizons watching meta connect 3 years ago. But the last 2 years meta didn't pay much attention to the VR part and everyone just started watching it in a browser. 3 years ago it was pretty amazing. For every speaker the VR environment changed and you saw products and even avatars synced in 3D. So there was this attraction to the VR experience.

wodenokoto 2y ago

I think this post turned out to be a pretty good sell on hytraboi. Last time the conference was held, appears to also be the first time it was held, in 2022: https://www.hytradboi.com/2022 https://www.hytradboi.com/2022 I'm giving the talk list a try now that I hve read the organizers thought on it.

adityaathalye 2y ago

The "Hallway Track" is my favourite thing about conferences. By far the best one of those I've had, so far, is at Functional Conf 2022 online edition (because of you know what), where I ended up hanging out for almost six hours with a bunch of APL nerds discussing APL, Life, The Universe and Everything in one of the "breakout rooms" of their conference software. Everybody had their favourite beverages coming to them and were in their favourite jammies at their favourite spot in their home city/country talking about their favourite things and demo-ing their favourite stuff. I do love in-person gatherings and online ones, when done right, both cases. Online can be serendipitous in ways that in person can't (and vice-versa). Next time I get a chance to organise an online conference, I'll steal from Jamie's playbook and invert the model. Viz. ask for pre-recorded talks, distributed to attendees just prior to the conference, with curated live chat + demo sessions with the speaker(s) about the talk. Make the Hallway Track as big and boisterous and charming as possible.

huskyr 2y ago
> Next time I get a chance to organise an online conference, I'll steal from Jamie's playbook and invert the model. Viz. ask for pre-recorded talks, distributed to attendees just prior to the conference, with curated live chat + demo sessions with the speaker(s) about the talk. Make the Hallway Track as big and boisterous and charming as possible. Agreed. This is so much better than having to watch live talks of people stumbling with their camera setup causing the Q&A to be canceled because of that.
- em-bee 2y ago
  when i spoke at an online conference in india i insisted that my talk be prerecorded to make sure there were no interruptions since i was worried that from china the quality might suffer some times. i sent the talk to the organizers to stream and after the talk we did a live q&a. i don't know if the participants felt a difference, but i thought it was the prudent thing to do.
  - acidburnNSA 2y ago
    That's very smart. You could even be in the q&a during the talk answering questions while pre-recorded-you is still speaking! This could give a lot more time for focused interaction.

deleted 2y ago

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jldugger 2y ago

IMO online vs in-person isn't the only comparison to make. In 2024, you also have to compare against podcasts & Youtube. Beyond simply starting your own content channels, there's a speaker circuit for interview format podcasts, who have the audience and logistics already nailed down. Using the author's own criteria: 1. Coordination. Podcasts solve this by fitting into various niches. Audiences self-select by topic pretty effectively. Expert speakers can easily see various proxies for audience: downloads, ratings, subscriptions, comments, etc, and review past guests and topics for matching suitability. Whereas with this conference you really have no idea about the audience size. 2. Distillation. Most podcasts I listen to are an interview between a host and a series of subject matter experts. This format substantially lowers the participation barrier for the expert: hop on a webex and chat for 60 minutes. On YouTube I think there's probably room for an "invited talks" format, like a tight ten - fifteen minutes on a topic, without the usual banter. Arguably HYTRADBOI is a concentrated version of that, but none of the videos are findable anywhere other than it's own site, and hasn't really seen traction on HN. Which brings up to... 3. Serendipity. YouTube kinda does this by default, though admittedly watching a KubeCon video is likely to recommend another KubeCon vid that was uploaded at the same time than something from a different tech conf. The author seems to lean heavily on the value of community chat but frankly, annual conference communities are kinda bad at it. Either there's too many people trying to talk to The Expert or not enough and the moderator has to beg for participation. I kinda prefer the discord / slack / IRC 24x7x365 community discussion model, where there's more incentives to help each other out versus the transactional conference window after which you will likely never see these people again.

jamii 2y ago
I agree with some of this. My experience of tech podcasts though has been that it's often the same old people being interviewed, and that a 60 minute interview is often less interesting than a 10 minute talk where the speaker spent a bunch of time thinking about how to explain a subject. The latter is definitely more work, but I've had no problem finding speakers. Outside of tech, I've seen a few podcasts avoid this pattern. The host of https://podcast.clearerthinking.org/ https://podcast.clearerthinking.org/ is really good at picking interesting speakers, preparing questions, ans gently but persistently pushing back when they try to gloss over a weak point in their argument. I'd love to listen to a tech version of that podcast. Not being on youtube might be a mistake. I definitely don't want to use youtube for the conference itself because I don't want attendees to have to sit through ads. But maybe I should mirror to youtube afterwards. I'll think about it. The chat at the last hytradboi was pretty dense. That may have been down to having quite a high ratio of experts in the audience though. I'm not sure if that will continue to be the case. I have mixed experiences with discords. The persistence is much better for community building, but in big discords it's rare to have an actual conversation because everyone is only half paying attention. The ones that do feel interesting are again the ones with a high ratio of experts who are actively engaged in the subject. Or small invite-only discords that also hold regular mini-confs, which is maybe a kind of sweet spot. I'm definitely not tied to running a conference. Last time was kind of a whim, but people enjoyed it and wanted to do it again. So this post is less an argument in favor of conferences and more me trying to figure out what I accidentally did right so I can do more of it.

hinkley 2y ago

I moved reasonable driving distance from OSCON right around the last time it was held. Too busy to get tickets, I’ll just go next year. There was no next year. Four years now and I still think about it monthly.

ghaff 2y ago
O'Reilly Conferences were pretty good overall although, given how things went down, I assume they were on the bubble even before COVID hit. OSCON was the real crown jewel though that I couldn't always justify attending but did when I could.

ic_fly2 2y ago

Reminds me of the contrast between a small Bayesian Modeling conference that was a discourse chat and a big one of a snake themed programming language. They had a custom game where ypu could walk around, a custom video player and all sorts of fancy stuff. Obviously the discourse conference worked great and the other one was an unmitigated disaster. The tech didn’t work, the talks were bad and the interaction was 0. Only a few influencers hyping themselves.

azangru 2y ago

> What is the point of an online conference? The article seems to be written from the standpoint of a conference organiser. Which is quite different than the perspective of a learner. As someone who hasn't attended a single tech conference in my life, yet watched hundreds of recorded talks, I think the point of an online conference is to create an occasion for people to produce high-quality content in their field that others will enjoy watching. I would, of course, prefer that these people created such content regularly, without needing to be prompted by the occasion of a conference, but very few do.

thierrydamiba 2y ago
Can you please share your favorite high quality content creators? This is something I am chasing and I’m curious what you consider good content.
- dvh 2y ago
  https://youtube.com/watch?v=g8pjrVbdafY https://youtube.com/watch?v=g8pjrVbdafY (My favorite part is somewhere in the middle of the video when he realizes sat solvers are magic)
  - ryukoposting 2y ago
    Wow, this was phenomenal.
- jamii 2y ago
  https://m.youtube.com/@CMUDatabaseGroup https://m.youtube.com/@CMUDatabaseGroup
- notpublic 2y ago
  Andrej Karpathy https://www.youtube.com/@AndrejKarpathy/videos https://www.youtube.com/@AndrejKarpathy/videos Sasha Rush (an underrated creator who deserves more eyeballs) https://www.youtube.com/@srush_nlp/videos https://www.youtube.com/@srush_nlp/videos
- 2y ago

dustedcodes 2y ago

As an attendee I can say that online conferences make absolutely no sense at all and I don't know a single co-worker or dev who actually likes them. 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

crabmusket 2y ago
The article does address all those issues, which, while I agree heartily with your comment, makes it feel a little bit redundant?
eatonphil 2y ago
Folks who run conferences like hytradboi and p99 were likely not going to run any in person conference at all. So it's not like they picked this over any other option other than not doing any conference at all. Is it really better these organizers do nothing rather than create an online conference? I don't see how that's better personally. If you don't like online conferences that's totally cool. I think Jamie addressed most of your points too. But hytradboi and p99 are actually excellent and this comment would feel quite demoralizing to me if I were running one of these online conferences.

sklivvz1971 2y ago

I have been speaking at about 50 conferences over the years and I refuse to do online ones. Why? - Conferences are usually not paid, except expenses. In fact the "compensation" for a speaker is to be able to travel and attend in person. Maybe for some this is a drawback, for me it's not. - In person conferences allow you to meet and network with other speakers. Online conferences do not (unless you count "come to our discord" as networking, I don't) - The value I get from conferences is also interacting with the public and listening to them, outside of the talks. - I also don't really get any of the promotion value for my company, which obviously I represent. In short, I understand they are cheaper to organize but the value is simply not there at all, so I will not speak at them, attend them, or sponsor them.

ghaff 2y ago
They're mostly not comparable. High-quality streaming keynotes (especially for conferences I couldn't otherwise justify attending) not-withstanding. Two very different experiences, and the fact that a lot of conference presentations would probably be better at half the length also not withstanding, a bunch of YouTube videos may be fine for some but, as someone who has probably attended hundreds of conferences, they're really not the same. During COVID, I resigned myself to attending and presenting at online conferences, but it was mostly a waste of time.
johannes1234321 2y ago
For me giving a talk to a quite camera is also a lot more exhausting. Got to make sure I remain in focus of the cam, hope the audio works and get no feedback (did the joke work? Am I too fast or too slow?) And not being there also has the consequence that I do other things on the day and it's a lot more "in between" than focus. All that, I assume, also reflects to the experience for the audience.
- 0x457 2y ago
  Even watching recordings of online-only conferences isn't interesting. You would think for a remote viewer it's the same, but it's not.
- 2y ago

hkon 2y ago

Physical conferences are more like paid vacations. The best talks I've seen, I watched on stream.

langsoul-com 2y ago

I think the point of an off-line conference is to afford the speakers. Which then is put online as high quality content. The cost thing is a main argument the author notes, but I suppose they're all doing this for free. Which only lasts as long as the author has time.

brnt 2y ago

The first online conference in the COVID era I attended opened my eyes to an enormous benefit: suddenly a lot of people from restofworld were attending. Yes, online conferences are weird and everything except the lectures are hard to organize well or at all, but I think we shouldn't underestimate sharing with people we otherwise wouldn't share with. I kinda think it's a pity this seems to be over now.

tkgally 2y ago
That was my reaction back in 2020, too. It was exciting to meet and talk with people from many different countries without leaving home. Now that I’m back to attending in-person conferences occasionally, I do appreciate the stronger personal connections that form there. However, though weaker, the connections I’ve made online over the past four years have been worth something, too, and they never would have happened if not for those online meetings.
malshe 2y ago
We saw the benefit of moving online in academic conferences too. Often faculty from even developed countries do not have budgets to travel for conferences. For example, one professor from Italy told me that he had a travel budget of €400 per year. That would not even pay his conference registration for most conferences. The visa issue mentioned in the article is also quite real. Although the US visa is more difficult to get, it is usually for five to ten years for the citizens of most countries. In contrast, most European countries will issue Schengen visas for the duration of the conference! Online conferences avoid all these issues.

cmontella 2y ago

The first one was great; I still get more traction from the 10 minute video I posted at HYTRADBOI-1 than any talk/paper I've presented at SPLASH. I had more salient questions about Mech than I've ever gotten from SPLASH, VC head hunters setting up meetings, and even Graydon Hoare stopped by for a chat. What's the point of an online conference? Well you gotta go where your audience is, and for us that's online.

stronglikedan 2y ago

Same as an in person conference - getting answers to questions that you didn't know you had. Learning what is possible to learn, instead of only what you know you can learn.

SubiculumCode 2y ago

to take your money while you sit at an empty virtual poster.

rkhassen9 2y ago

The advantages for an online conference depend on the scale and goals of the conference. If your goal is to get your information out to "attendees" who may not have the means (time/money) to travel and that info is high value to both the receiver and attendee, its a great medium. If your goal is to connect 1:1, its not great, but virtual versions of Braindate where 1:1's can be scheduled make it more useful. During lockdown, people had a lot more incentive to connect virtually because that was the only way to connect. And a virtual conference provided access to people you may not have access to in your usual spheres. I personally prefer in person as I enjoy the vibe and learn as much or more in the hallways as I do in the sessions... At large conferences, I don't attend sessions in person that will be available to stream later so that I can take advantage of the other features that are only available in person. We have a new tool in our toolbox that was developed greatly during lockdown and in the subsequent years and the value will be based on how much people use them as much as by their intrinsic features. There is so much more one could say, but in the end, I don't think its an either/or ... its about fit.