Conferences cost money. You have to rent an appropriate venue, people tend to expect refreshments, etc. Why would it be free just because you are presenting there? So are most of the attendees.

Two things.

The person walks away after this $600 poorer. We've found ways to do things of arguably far less social value then say, a new medical discovery, such as stand up comedy or say a club dj without them having to fork over $600 to do what they're being advertised for.

In fact, they actually get paid.

Second, the enterprise for expanding human knowledge shouldn't come with a door fee, full stop. If we want to progress the sciences we should find out how to collectively pay for it without charging amounts to all involved that they cannot afford.

If we want, say, 1,000 Einsteins as Jeff Bezos believe we should be aiming for, we should try funding the process and not sticker shock it at every step.

Stagnation is always a structural problem. This is so fixable if we actually exercise the will to do it

It’s not a good analogy. Gigs and stand-up comedy have big audiences. Academic conferences don’t. Hiring a venue, paying for dinner, these things have cost. $600 isn’t unreasonable. By contrast $12,000 to publish a PDF on a website is criminal.

> Academic conferences don’t.

Untrue, as shown by there being a conference in the first place.

Not only but there's plenty of 20 seat comedy nights and tiny drive bars where the performers gets paid.

This isn't a necessary artifact of a structural reality. It's a political choice that we can exercise the freedom to change.

Some conferences are big. Many are 20 people.

Whenever I speak at a tech event, my attendance cost is free. (I'm still on the hook for flight and hotel, usually.)

Those events usually aren't the ones where most of the attendees are presenting, though sometimes things like Bar Camps can get the venue etc. sponsored. Finding sponsors to foot the bill can be harder for conferences for academics who aren't interested in leaving their tenure-track position to configure Kubernetes at a hot new Uber for Guinea Pigs startup.

Still, church picnics, potluck dinners, and wedding parties usually don't cost US$600 a person. Do we really need the Anaheim Convention Center or the Four Seasons Hotel to hang out and chat about capability-secure hardware architecture or isopiestic measurements of deliquescence points? Or could we maybe pitch some circus tents in a field somewhere and rent some folding chairs and tables? Instead of whiteboards we can use 4'x8' melamine sheets.

I like your style. We should start StateFairCon someday

Ooh, that's an excellent point! State fairs never cost US$600 per person, even when you include all the funnel cakes and donut-bun hamburger sandwiches bought from the concessionnaires. Typical admission prices in the US are maybe US$20 per day? But they have plenty of space, lots of conference rooms, bathroom facilities, handicapped accessibility, folding chairs, and so on. I bet you could hold an academic conference at a state fair fairgrounds for under US$100 a person. But I've never heard of a sci-fi con doing this, so maybe there's a fatal flaw in this idea I'm not seeing.

Academic conferences are usually "comfortable" environments with plenty of air conditioning. It might undermine the prestige a bit if we did that.

Or maybe it'd have a different charm than the norm.

It might be worth it if people could present their research without having to fork over US$600 or US$6000 to register for the conference. Air quality is worth a lot, though. I recall falling asleep from too many people crowded into a room at the physics department when they announced they'd discovered the top quark. Fairgrounds in lots of places do have air conditioning.

We held CodeCon in a nightclub --- during the day, when it would normally just be closed. This caused problems for aaronsw, because legally they couldn't let him in, and he didn't want to accept special treatment unavailable to other people his age, so he just didn't attend. Len got pretty mad at me when I took Aaron's side.

Sure, but $600 felt like a massive over expenditure to me.

And there was no conference - this was in 2020, so the entire thing was virtual. No refreshments either. Also, every staff member I met was a “volunteer”.

Also, they are fundraising mechanisms for the professional societies that put them on. The pandemic killing conference attendance no doubt put a lot of them in a budget crunch.

I understood that the $600 is not the attendance fee but am additional charge for the privilege of presenting. The only reason they can get away with that is that people may need to have such things on their CV.

Governments and sponsoring companies should pay for it. The rest of us a presenters and private inviduals should get it free. Knowledge should be free flow not at every steps being VAT-ed.

doesn't it cost to go to the conference?

I would expect the people who are listening to the presentation to be the ones paying, not the one giving the presentation.

It costs a separate $45 to attend as well. If you present, they don’t combine these fees.

Usually, most listeners are presenters too.

Conferences are social gathering events. They are better attended if there are organized in better and more accessible places. Taking care of everything at conference, and do it at some better location has a cost.

Some conferences are institutions, have a formal organization that stands behind them and it is well organized so has some of these costs figured out and planned well in advance. Many are not. Many conferences are organized by different institutions each year, and are organized in turns by the hosting institution at locally available venues.

Imagine a small conference organized by a small department and it's total budget: - 100 presenters * $500 registration + 100 attendees * $100 registration = $60000

You need a venue. Many departments do not have resources to organize conferences in a presentable manner (lack of space, lack of rooms/halls). So you need a venue. Plus if the conference is in a nice venue, for a cheaper price - it will certainly be attended more.

Let's say that you were lucky and that some hotel accepted to be exclusive venue and they offered all of their equipment and halls, if at least 50 participants decided to book a room for the duration of the entire conference and there were 50 such participants. That way, you don't have to rent the hotel's halls and their projectors/laptops/screens/microphones.

You will still need to pay for this:

- costs to get respectable keynote lecturers and pay for their travel fees, room, meals, etc.

- organizing teams costs (even if they volunteer their time, they still have traveling expenses to visit the venue at least several times and organize local issues)

- hosting for a dedicated web-site for many years to come + web designer to support it 24/7 during the call for papers and during the conference

- print/publish the proceedings + editor

- venue for either the opening or the closing ceremony or some joint excursion or museum visit or all of these if you want to leave an impressiong that you are a host that wants to pamper their guests (if you don't pay for at least some of these, most people will not come next year, as the point of the event is to be a socializing trigger, and socialization always happens in the margins of the conference, at these social events, so the whole point of the conference will be lost if you don't take care for at least several such events)

- at least 2/3 photographers to cover social events and parallel sessions

- finger food / coffee / drinks / even water during breaks, maybe lunch for all participants

- banners, badges, posters, ...

I have organized an international conference and I can say that this is just the surface. If you organize an IT conference, you need to take into account that each participant will have at least 2 online devices, maybe more. So you will need wifi access points and routers capable of peaks in new wifi associations ranging from 200-300 per minute, or more. You will need a lot of electricity cables and plugs, power convereters etc. Most hotels doing small gatherings for 100-200 persons, are in fact organized to accomodate weddings and not IT professionals and their net streaming needs.

Do you own total, depending on wherever you are. In some countries this will cost much more than the budget, in some less so their might be something left to pay the organizers and even volunteers for their effort. Not much, but at least something so they do not avoid you when you decide to organize another conference in two years.