I think Chris makes a lot of good points here and in the more thought out post here https://devopsish.com/193/ 

But I respectfully disagree with the conclusion https://twitter.com/ChrisShort/status/1330121850362470400

First of all I completely agree with some of the points specifically about the Intrado platform. It is the worst virtual platform I've used as a speaker and attendee. I really hope CNCF conferences move away from it.

It feels very awkward "lift and shift" as Chris says

I also don't know many platforms that can handle 20,000+ registered attendees

Event planning take a TON of work! Mad respect to the LF events team who have had smooth events (except for weather and other things outside of their control) for many years.

Events the size of Kubecon can't change quickly. There is a lot of money at play from vendors attendees etc. You can't just throw all that away and say "we've moving to youtube/twitch/etc" because companies get value (perceived or real) from conferences. It's why they exist

Chris' argument here doesn't make sense because it's the whole "bundled cable" vs "streaming apps" argument. Traditional conferences are the bundles. You don't want everything but there's always something on. https://twitter.com/ChrisShort/status/1330130655972384770?s=20

Streaming apps don't scale because "spending an hour or two" might work if you have 1 vendor but in the real world you're going to have lots of places to spend your time. Between openshift tv, #containersfromthecouch, and #tgik8s you wouldn't get any work done

It's also cost and time prohibitive for smaller companies to create streams from scratch. They can rely on all the hard work of conference organizers and create 1-2 talks and maybe a booth and get all the benefits.

An individual creating a lot of content is great. But only 1 vendor is paying for that and reaping most of the rewards. The exact same thing can be said for any vendor sponsored streams, podcasts, etc.

It takes a lot of time to make good content https://twitter.com/ChrisShort/status/1330130659814363137?s=20

I loved the hallway tracks the #kubecon community created for this conference. It was really fun. Romo, rambly, slack were all fun places to hang out but I don't think they're the solution.

If you don't play video games rambly is going to be hard to engage with. Not to mention accessibility concerns for people with motor function, sight, or hearing disabilities.

Romo is a neat idea but IMO only really works at <200 people. The floors and spaces concept breaks down

I loved that I got to meet some new faces to kubecon but a lot of the hallway track felt like the insiders club. If you didn't know where to look or who to talk to it would have been easy to feel left out.

There's two things that I think are the real problem

Employers (and employees) don't respect the time for virtual conferences. You can't "unplug" for a day because all of the work distractions are right there on your computer. https://twitter.com/ChrisShort/status/1330130654072344582?s=20

Expectations aren't set and maybe they shouldn't be. To Chris' point, trying to spend 3+ days not doing regularly scheduled work is going to be hard. Not just from your employer but also from your family.

I mentioned in one of the live streams I missed part of the keynote because we're trying to potty train and that was more important at the time.

For in person conferences I also usually stay up late hacking on new projects or learning new things. That doesn't work with stay at home conferences.

For all of the conferences I've seen that spread out shorter bits of content over a longer period of time I don't see them working either.

Maybe the first couple of days get interest but after a while people just forget about it and go back to regular work.

You have to prove there's value to your employer to attend the conference sessions. That's much harder to do when you're sitting in the same chair, at the same desk, and ignoring your work email.

The second big problem I see is the conference talk content isn't engaging. We're all tired of looking at our screens. Watching a video is going to have 2 minutes of attention and then you'll alt tab or read twitter.
We need to do better as speakers

I obviously tried to do that with my talk. There was nothing about my talk that was traditional and the feedback I've been getting I think has paid off.

That doesn't mean every session needs to be a mini movie. But it does mean we need to be more creative than slide transitions

We as speakers need to show there's value to our employer to let us spend time speaking too. You'll probably need to spend more time but I'm positive you have some creative ideas on how to make content that people will like and can learn from.

Personally, I'm looking forward to "speaking" at more virtual events. I have so many ideas for how to reach new audiences and how to engage with regular attendees.