back

by eatonphil·1y ago·view on hn ↗
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.

2 comments
>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.

I really can't relate to this attitude at all. :) Agree to disagree.
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.
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.

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!