What is the point of an online conference?

I have been speaking at about 50 conferences over the years and I refuse to do online ones. Why?<p>- Conferences are usually not paid, except expenses. In fact the &quot;compensation&quot; for a speaker is to be able to travel and attend in person. Maybe for some this is a drawback, for me it&#x27;s not.<p>- In person conferences allow you to meet and network with other speakers. Online conferences do not (unless you count &quot;come to our discord&quot; as networking, I don&#x27;t)<p>- The value I get from conferences is also interacting with the public and listening to them, outside of the talks.<p>- I also don&#x27;t really get any of the promotion value for my company, which obviously I represent.<p>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.

&gt; What is the point of an online conference?<p>The article seems to be written from the standpoint of a conference organiser. Which is quite different than the perspective of a learner.<p>As someone who hasn&#x27;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.

&gt; 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.<p>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.

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:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.hytradboi.com&#x2F;2022" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.hytradboi.com&#x2F;2022</a><p>I&#x27;m giving the talk list a try now that I hve read the organizers thought on it.

The &quot;Hallway Track&quot; is my favourite thing about conferences. By far the best one of those I&#x27;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 &quot;breakout rooms&quot; of their conference software.<p>Everybody had their favourite beverages coming to them and were in their favourite jammies at their favourite spot in their home city&#x2F;country talking about their favourite things and demo-ing their favourite stuff.<p>I do love in-person gatherings <i>and</i> online ones, when done right, both cases.<p>Online can be serendipitous in ways that in person can&#x27;t (and vice-versa).<p>Next time I get a chance to organise an online conference, I&#x27;ll steal from Jamie&#x27;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.

The first one was great; I still get more traction from the 10 minute video I posted at HYTRADBOI-1 than any talk&#x2F;paper I&#x27;ve presented at SPLASH. I had more salient questions about Mech than I&#x27;ve ever gotten from SPLASH, VC head hunters setting up meetings, and even Graydon Hoare stopped by for a chat.<p>What&#x27;s the point of an online conference? Well you gotta go where your audience is, and for us that&#x27;s online.

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&#x27;t underestimate sharing with people we otherwise wouldn&#x27;t share with. I kinda think it&#x27;s a pity this seems to be over now.

I think <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bangbangcon.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bangbangcon.com&#x2F;</a> also had some interesting answers to this question. It&#x27;s a shame they&#x27;ve had to shut down.

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.

The advantages for an online conference depend on the scale and goals of the conference.<p>If your goal is to get your information out to &quot;attendees&quot; who may not have the means (time&#x2F;money) to travel and that info is high value to both the receiver and attendee, its a great medium.<p>If your goal is to connect 1:1, its not great, but virtual versions of Braindate where 1:1&#x27;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.<p>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&#x27;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.<p>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.<p>There is so much more one could say, but in the end, I don&#x27;t think its an either&#x2F;or ... its about fit.

IMO online vs in-person isn&#x27;t the only comparison to make. In 2024, you also have to compare against podcasts &amp; Youtube. Beyond simply starting your own content channels, there&#x27;s a speaker circuit for interview format podcasts, who have the audience and logistics already nailed down.<p>Using the author&#x27;s own criteria:<p>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.<p>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&#x27;s probably room for an &quot;invited talks&quot; 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&#x27;s own site, and hasn&#x27;t really seen traction on HN. Which brings up to...<p>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.<p>The author seems to lean heavily on the value of community chat but frankly, annual conference communities are kinda bad at it. Either there&#x27;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 &#x2F; slack &#x2F; IRC 24x7x365 community discussion model, where there&#x27;s more incentives to help each other out versus the transactional conference window after which you will likely never see these people again.

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&#x27;s very difficult to talk naturally. Becomes more of a consumption only medium. I hadn&#x27;t tried having dedicated chats for different talks before.

Same as an in person conference - getting answers to questions that you didn&#x27;t know you had. Learning what is possible to learn, instead of only what you know you can learn.

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.<p>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.

I think the point of an off-line conference is to afford the speakers. Which then is put online as high quality content.<p>The cost thing is a main argument the author notes, but I suppose they&#x27;re all doing this for free. Which only lasts as long as the author has time.

As an attendee I can say that online conferences make absolutely no sense at all and I don&#x27;t know a single co-worker or dev who actually likes them.<p>Here are some of the reasons why online conferences are extremely shit:<p>- Live streams often don&#x27;t work reliably<p>- 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&#x27;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<p>- Many online conferences use weird never-heard of software, which never works for all participants, have unintuitive UIs and chat functionalities, etc.<p>- Zero community vibes<p>- 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<p>- 0 networking opportunity, which is the main reason why people go to conferences<p>- Tickets are still expensive even though you only get 1% value of the in-person equivalent and that 1% is still shit<p>Overall online conferences are a complete waste of time and I will never attend one again. Most speakers don&#x27;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.<p>Just my 2 cents

I think the opening questions are strong and the answers are valid but weak to the point of insubstance.<p>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.<p>Any of those things from sf cons that tech cons don&#x27;t have, that&#x27;s unfortunate, but the principle still holds. None of that exists via zoom. The collectivism of &quot;we all decided to do this this day, and we all recognize that everyone else did too&quot; is something, but it&#x27;s just not very much.

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

Physical conferences are more like paid vacations.<p>The best talks I&#x27;ve seen, I watched on stream.

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