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.
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.
What you are describing could be just an email.
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.
This is very true in my case because I’m dyslexic so I ingest context more easily when heard vs when read.
For other people, it might just be a personal preference. Just like you have the personal preference to read rather than watch.
Arguing that the GP has some major character flaw because of their own personal preference really says more about your own character than it does theirs.
Turns out, people have only so much working memory, but are good at covering for it with emotions.
You’ll see demos from colleagues in different departments who you might not normally work with. And individuals praised for specific wins.
A good all hands should be for the staff, not for the execs. And that’s the harder skill execs need to learn: when to stfu and let their staff have screen time.
If all hands is done well, it brings the business closer and motivates employees in ways that an email couldn’t. However this is lost on most execs and so all hands often ends up being an ego trip for themselves, and when that happens the thats when things need to be communicated via email.
Also it's not personal preference. If you're an executive you need to know how to write properly. Execs rely on oral communication to use their charisma points on you, when you read the plans many times they have nothing to do with what was said or it's much simpler. Same with politicians.
It’s about uniting everyone emotionally as well as academically.
The emotional component is an absolutely a critical part.
And this is one of the tells for a company that cares about staff moral verses those that don’t. One that care make their all hands about the employees too.
Giving them anything is the wrong move. If you think you are getting as much out of the video as they are getting out of you watching them speak, you are wrong. The degree of wrong depends on your affinity with their chosen craft (which is, to be clear, grifting you).
People ingest info differently, and being able to communicate the same info in multiple ways should be table stakes at that level.
It was different before acquisition, back when the 90% of the company fit on one floor of an office building, and the CEO was someone you passed by regularly, and who contributed actual engineering. But company this kind and size, they don't do "all-hands" and "town squares" videocalls...
I have no idea what would I want to ask from leadership. They are so far removed from me.
Unless there's a need to interact (and there rarely is at an all-hands), it would save everyone time to just prerecord it. Any followup questions can be sent via email with reply-to-all (or an internal mailing list).
In some roles you have to over-communicate. All people -- me included-- over estimate how carefully they pay attention to communication. So people will say you could have just sent me an email in good faith and sincerity and the reality is that would not have gotten the point across, the discussion started, or coordination happening.
Yes, they are the ones that happen once or twice a year, not the ones that happen weekly or monthly though, and they covered topics that have a broader scope than what I'm personally working on at any given time.
Can’t even handle unfiltered questions they become so fragile
That's the proven format for a one-to-many conversation on this medium.
His underlings prepared some slides, he reacts to them blindly, live fact checking of chat questions.
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.
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.
https://www.hytradboi.com/2022
I'm giving the talk list a try now that I hve read the organizers thought on it.
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.
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.
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.
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/ 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.
Does Youtube show ads if you disable monetization? I feel like most conference presentation uploads don't have ads, but I also switched to YT premium last year and maybe I'm just misremembering.
https://blog.youtube/news-and-events/updates-to-youtubes-ter...
> ads can now appear on videos from channels not in the YouTube Partner Program (YPP), and we will begin gradually placing ads on brand safe videos
You have to be eligible for ads and sign up for an ad account in order to turn ads off on your own videos.
Youtube also often shows ads if they misdetect part of the video as copyrighted material, which seems to happen more and more often.
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.
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.
(My favorite part is somewhere in the middle of the video when he realizes sat solvers are magic)
Sasha Rush (an underrated creator who deserves more eyeballs) https://www.youtube.com/@srush_nlp/videos
- Many Google dev rels, former or present, are great. For example, Jake Archibald, Paul Lewis, Una Kravets, Adam Argyle, Rachel Andrew, Bramus Van Damme, Surma, Jhey Tompkins
- Web performance community is pretty rad. Harry Roberts is good. Tim Kadlec. Philip Walton's talk on service workers at a Smashing Conf was fantastic. Alex Russell is always good for a sobering perspective on how bad things are with the web. Barry Pollard is good
- Example conferences with great content: CSS Day (2024 was a good one; I remember the talks of Tab Atkins, Sara Soueidan, and Rachel Andrew as being very good), performance.now
- Among speakers on React topics, Ryan Florence is usually great; Mark Erikson too; sometimes Kent C. Dodds...
- Love Ben Lesh (observables and async programming); and Alex Rickabaugh's (Angular team) explanations of Angular signals
That's more or less the first two points I mentioned - coordination and distillation. Getting a big group of interested attendees together is an effective way to get busy experts to distill some of their knowledge.
A typical conference will for me cost transportation, lodging, and meals for several days, in exchange for sitting through a lot of sessions that are poorly presented by poor or inexperienced public speakers, and one or two good ones where I do pick up a nugget or two of useful information.
Generally the talks that are polished and well presented are by speakers who are somewhat well known and are really there to promote their latest book.
As an introverted person, the social aspect of conferences is not an appeal.
The last conference I attended, I bailed after the opening session on the last day and went to a local gym for a couple of hours, then headed to the airport. That was the best part of the whole experience.
A former colleague used to say "if we come home with one or two new ideas, it will have been worthwhile" but I always end up thinking "there's got to be a better way."
What I realized is that the learning was supposed to come from talking to other people working on similar problems, as opposed to an earth shattering realization from the presentation itself. I remember one year when I compared notes with a few people on authorization approaches because we were getting ready to overhaul our authorization systems, and I found the random discussions very helpful.
That said, I still dream about getting to do a stay-conference, analogous to a stay-cation, but for learning.
"The presentation is supposed to get them to want to read the paper and talk to you about it" - or basically, it's not a lecture.
I totally get that some people don't like the other aspects of conference-going and that's fine. They probably really are better off taking some days at home to read and watch videos.
But, if you're not getting anything from the social aspect, and interactions before and after the talks or in the hallways; then conferences aren't a good use of your time. Mostly the talks get recorded and uploaded and are freely available. Sounds like, for you, spending a day reviewing those later is probably better than spending two or three days attending.
But I think you get different presenters for an in-person conference vs a virtual conference vs a periodic video creator. So there's a point to these things even if they don't work for everyone.
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
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.
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.
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.
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!
- 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.
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.
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.
I gave a remote talk a bit earlier this year, and that was the hardest part for me. I didn't quite realize how much I adjusted my speaking based on how the room is reacting. Sometimes my sarcastic humor doesn't land, or it would have landed but I talk way too fast, or people just can't understand what I'm saying and I can see that by looking at peoples' facial expressions.
Probably won't do it again unless there's some kind of emergency. I would have done it in person even this last time, but there was some scheduling conflicts on my end. It's just a lot more fun to do this stuff in person.
For others, perhaps it is, and your point would hold more water for them.
But surely you can see that yours is not a one-size-fits-all answer.
That said, it's not apples to apples. I spend like 60% of my day coding, which of course I can do from pretty much anywhere, and it doesn't really matter if my jokes land. When I do video calls, it's generally in relatively small meetings, and it actually is relatively easy to gauge reactions that way.
It feels like you're extrapolating a bit much here.
In remote work with zoom meetings for me (may be different in other jobs)
* Most meetings are in small groups/teams and more discussion, where the feedback problem works better than a conference talk for 100 people * I know most of the audience, thus know what this expected to present, where the audience got experience and which humor does (not) work * In many meetings I can keep it running on the side while doing some other work and only give attention to the parts relevant for me * and am not involved in all that office noise and all the related distractions, but focus on my actual work
My boss of course has to trust me I do my stuff instead of standing behind me.
For larger milestones etc and socializing having in person meetings once in a while is important. But day to day remote massively reduces distractions and removes a lot of irrelevant stuff.
I not sure how live rehearsal, virtual conference would work. Great for some presenters, not so great for others.
The best talks I've seen, I watched on stream.
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.
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.
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.
What's the point of an online conference? Well you gotta go where your audience is, and for us that's online.
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.