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

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.