Re:What I've learned sending proposals to conferences
by shioyama on Wednesday December 25, 2019 @08:42AM
(#21878452)
Sorry, I disagree with the reference to academia: the median quality of academic conference talks is abismal in my experience. Sure they are more technical, but they are also that much less engaging, and target a much more narrow audience. No experimenting with styles and flows, just cookie-cutter formats with lots of text and plenty of citations.
Programmer conferences may have a more open format and obviously that invites some low quality talks, but it also leaves the door open to really amazing, totally experimental formats and topics. I'm thinking of stuff like Gary Bernhardt's "The Birth and Death of Javascript" [1], which would never fly at an academic conference in my experience (or at least would not be appreciated), but was immensely influential in programming circles.
[1] https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/the-birth-and-death...
Don't get me wrong, that it's casual isn't necessarily a problem, but literature, journalism, even scientific publications are all seeing wider distributions of quality now that it's so much easier for the average person to find a platform. And I think the predominant expansion is at the lower end of the distribution given that there was previously a strong effective selection pressure for quality, since it took substantial resources just to publish any media.