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What is the point of an online conference?

I've been thinking a lot about this in preparation for the next HYTRADBOI. My experience of online conferences has mostly been underwhelming.

(You can make friends online, but it tends to happen through repeated interactions in a persistent scene rather than during a single ephemeral event.) And I think this is something we can actually do slightly better than an in-person conference, because the combination of pre-recorded talks, asynchronous chat, and no travel requirements leads to a much smaller investment of time and effort. My favourite is the ability to move messages to a different thread, which is nice for topics where I don't want to shut them down entirely, but I do want to prevent them from derailing an existing conversation.

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