Whats the purpose of a conference in the youtube era?  I mean, medieval jousts are kind of obsolete so we don&#x27;t do them either, outside renn faires.  I have some theoretical reasons conferences still exist:<p>1) There&#x27;s corporate money sloshing around to be soaked up in giveaways, free food, fancy rentals, honorarium payments...<p>2) The American obsession with uncivilized amounts of vacation is partially (only partially) made up for in som white collar fields by providing a fake vacation aka a conference.  Of course some really cheap companies not only don&#x27;t pay expenses to attend but don&#x27;t even pay salary, which is off the charts cheap.  But at least some attendees are getting conf week in place of civilized euro-style vacation schedules.  Historically you take some brogrammers and give them a non-beach spring break at a conf, they act like they&#x27;re back in the frat flirting on the beach, and next thing you know its social media meltdown mode, which is at least funny to watch.<p>3) Only that rare bird of very rich noob will attend to learn.  Everyone else there &quot;knows the score&quot; and if the &quot;bad guys&quot; are buying lunch, we&#x27;ll I&#x27;m glad to reduce shareholder value by eating their lunch.  On the internet we have agreed we have to LARP that everyone is a noob, the public are all noobs, only noobs matter, but once in a while its OK to admit expensive conferences are for non-noobs, possibly even for experts.  And its impolite to speak down to all the experts and tell them they&#x27;re all idiots for not noticing what they probably noticed back when you still wore diapers.  Sit back and listen to grandpa talk about military sponsorship of university research back in the hippie decade half a century ago.. This is only &quot;news&quot; if you&#x27;re not observant.<p>4) I had the misfortune to have a presidential debate in my home town less than a mile from where I work, so at least some form of evil on earth was talking nearby while coworkers and I had those supposedly valuable &quot;hallway conversations&quot; at work.  I&#x27;m seeing a parallel with letting the evil empire sponsor the official track which doesn&#x27;t matter because conferences are all about meeting people in the halls or sitting at the (subsidized by the evil empire) bar.<p>This is a good example of the net loss to society caused by excessive social signalling on the internet.  Yes he earns exactly 332515 whuffie by making an air tight politically correct (at least by our standards) accusation, but the big picture is it does nothing for anyone and doesn&#x27;t matter.  Even worse 332515 Whuffie and $7 will get you a cup of coffee at starbucks, its worthless and can&#x27;t be converted into anything useful in general, or specifically it can&#x27;t be converted into anything more useful than hanging out at a conference and talking to people.