IMO the article seems more like a standard case where there was some particularly exceptional "green field" days of Ruby around 2002 when everything was shiny and you could do something as important as "first real package manager" overnight. Even by 2007 things had matured well past that, and RubyConf shifting directionally towards what a Dentist Convention is like seems entirely natural.
The article directly contradicts this.
> and connections are probably more important for ongoing future progress.
Then why are so many of these “networking/socialization” events held in forms which don’t facilitate either? With darkness, deafening music and copious hard liquor, the amount of socializing you can do is severely limited in scope and kind. (And non-partyers get to stay home and stay out of the loop, I guess.)
Regarding Werewolf, it is certainly slightly more amenable to networking/socialization, but all things should be taken in moderation, which the original article argues it had exceeded. And, like drinking, Werewolf is not everyone’s cup of tea; do non-players simply get to stay home and get nothing?
> things had matured well past that
Had it really, or did Werewolf simply meme-infect the conference population? There is no way to tell without more data.
I'm someone who really doesn't enjoy Mafia/Werewolf, but it's just the reality that it's impossible to include everyone: some people don't want to X for any X. Overnight hacking sessions until 4am are also exclusionary. Werewolf seems better than binge drinking in terms of inclusion.
> did Werewolf simply meme-infect the conference population
The evidence would be essentially all other conferences, which are "bad" in the way the article is griping about and which rarely involve Werewolf. 2007 Rubyconf sounds normal, so it seems like it would have been more productive to try to discuss what made 2002 Rubyconf special rather than what made 2007 Rubyconf not-special.
If a conference, which has the putative goal to advance the field which the conference covers, is allowing too much of these other attractive activities, attendees will of course prefer these other activities, and the conference will not advance towards its supposed goal. There are some people whose definition of “conference” is simply “getting together with the people you know and doing whatever you feel like”, and with that definition, of course, any activity is fair game and any outcome for the field is irrelevant. But for me, who do not share that definition, the goal of a conference – like in this instance RubyConf – should be to advance the field in the maximally best way it can do so, not simply to be a social bash where fun should be maximized. Such an occasion should more accurately called a “party”, not a “conference”.
(Always when I write these things², there are comments pretending that I “hate fun” and want to eliminate partying (or Werewolf, as it were). But if you read more carefully, that is not what I write. For many people, fun is a required component of productivity, so fun should be included. But “fun”, like paperclips, should not be the goal to be maximized.)
There is an even worse situation which reportedly³ sometime happens: When the supposedly optional “fun” activities turn out to be not-so-optional if you want to actually get full value out of the conference.
1. https://web.archive.org/web/20130808111450/http://ryanfunduk...
2. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6373983
3. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16176891