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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 s

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.
- ghaff 2y ago
  >Is it really better these organizers do nothing rather than create an online conference? I don't see how that's better personally. It may well be. I regularly attend one small conference that is very much about the personal interactions with the presentations mostly an add-on. There would have been no point in having people submit a bunch of YouTube videos.
  - eatonphil 2y ago
    I really can't relate to this attitude at all. :) Agree to disagree.
    - ghaff 2y ago
      Fair enough but if I'm running a small non-commercial conference, and can't get people together in person, not sure of the value of giving people a tag to upload YouTube videos and having some sort of real-time schedule given that they can do so with or without my help. My experience is that viewership of such conference presentations is very low. And people can always upload their own videos.
      - eatonphil 2y ago
        We did Instant Premier on YouTube for TigerBeetle Systems Distributed videos and it was a cool experience to have everyone chatting about the video in real time for a few minutes. This is basically the same thing that p99 and hytradboi do. It's also curated by the organizers. People subscribe to newsletters like Postgres Weekly for the same basic reason. Someone you trust gets interesting people you (probably) don't know and you get to chat about it with other randos. It is not remotely the same thing as an in-person conference. But it's a neat thing in its own way. p99 is free, and hytradboi was like 10% the cost of a typical North American conference.
- dustedcodes 2y ago
  Don't kill the messenger. I'm sorry that that's how I feel, but as the consumer I'm just saying that I don't like the product (online conferences). Sorry that this is demoralising, but I'm not gonna start liking a shitty product all of a sudden to make someone feel better about it. I'm sure there are other people who feel differently, I have not met them yet, which makes me believe that the group of folks who find an online conference okay is significantly smaller than those who hate them but don't let yourself getting stopped by my personal opinion, if it gives you joy to run an online conference then be my guest and best of luck!

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.

ghaff 2y ago
>Is it really better these organizers do nothing rather than create an online conference? I don't see how that's better personally. It may well be. I regularly attend one small conference that is very much about the personal interactions with the presentations mostly an add-on. There would have been no point in having people submit a bunch of YouTube videos.
- eatonphil 2y ago
  I really can't relate to this attitude at all. :) Agree to disagree.
  - ghaff 2y ago
    Fair enough but if I'm running a small non-commercial conference, and can't get people together in person, not sure of the value of giving people a tag to upload YouTube videos and having some sort of real-time schedule given that they can do so with or without my help. My experience is that viewership of such conference presentations is very low. And people can always upload their own videos.
    - eatonphil 2y ago
      We did Instant Premier on YouTube for TigerBeetle Systems Distributed videos and it was a cool experience to have everyone chatting about the video in real time for a few minutes. This is basically the same thing that p99 and hytradboi do. It's also curated by the organizers. People subscribe to newsletters like Postgres Weekly for the same basic reason. Someone you trust gets interesting people you (probably) don't know and you get to chat about it with other randos. It is not remotely the same thing as an in-person conference. But it's a neat thing in its own way. p99 is free, and hytradboi was like 10% the cost of a typical North American conference.
dustedcodes 2y ago
Don't kill the messenger. I'm sorry that that's how I feel, but as the consumer I'm just saying that I don't like the product (online conferences). Sorry that this is demoralising, but I'm not gonna start liking a shitty product all of a sudden to make someone feel better about it. I'm sure there are other people who feel differently, I have not met them yet, which makes me believe that the group of folks who find an online conference okay is significantly smaller than those who hate them but don't let yourself getting stopped by my personal opinion, if it gives you joy to run an online conference then be my guest and best of luck!