Not only that, but the calibre of questions asked is likely to be higher, resulting in better answers too. If the answer could be given as a comment reply on an equally banal blogpost level talk, then was the ticket price really worth the opportunity to ask the question face-to-face? I'd pay money to ask the leading expert at x university in machine learning a question. The leading "expert" in ClownJS? Not so much.
I mean - this shouldn't come as a surprise. Any sufficiently large community is going to self-organize and attempt to be self-sustaining (there's a named law about this self-perpetuation, I forget the name). I suspect your mental model of conferences infers too much decorum: there's a whole bunch of conferences for computer games, juggulos, furries, comics, "over-unity" energy, and anime. Why can't JS frameworks have thier own fandom?
Pournelle's iron law of bureaucracy:
In any bureaucracy, the people devoted to the benefit of the bureaucracy itself always get in control and those dedicated to the goals the bureaucracy is supposed to accomplish have less and less influence, and sometimes are eliminated entirely.
It was the first real conference I've attended (luckily not at my expense) and will likely be my last.
* Networking with other attendees
* Getting to meet face to face with AWS employees
That said, I attend lots of events. But it's mostly for meeting with people and absorbing the general zeitgeist. Breakouts/booths are just the window dressing.
One way I've seen this done is with hackathons, but they're uncommon enough to be notable whenever an employer supports them.
Is it really? It doesn't comment on the article or its content in any way. (The same was true the first time you posted it, when it was also top comment and received plenty of discussion.)
Let me tell you this story: October 2019 we did something similar, but took it to the extreme: We created 8 conventions on 8 days in 8 major cities in Germany to learn more about private investors and our customers. Time-wise, almost no rational person would've invested so much time.
We talked to almost 1000 real and some prospective customers. The learnings were amazing. In the following 4 weeks, we managed to improve product and reduce churn by 3X (~24% to 6%), which is generally unheard of. It was one of the best ways ever to build up user empathy and understanding real, underlying needs as well as a ton of UX problems.
"... am I the only one that thinks there are... too many conferences? Sometimes it seems as if almost any new sufficiently large JS framework now has a conference. Slap the word "conf" or "con" on the end of whatever random noun you chose for your framework and boom, start sending out ticket invites and request for papers. Conferences were originally for leading experts in a particular field to share new research and present papers that were going to be published, and give people the chance to ask questions and find out more from the authors.
Conferences now feel more like a show and tell with blogpost level quality writing. Most non-academic conference talks I see could have been summarised easily in a blogpost and a few screenshots or at most a slide deck.
I recognise the networking aspect of them can be useful, but I couldn't justify spending the ticket price of some of them, to go to a conf based around one very narrow tech (unless it was a narrow but widely used and lucrative tech, and I was looking for work in that area currently)." (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21874372)