Solving Online Events — Benedict Evans

What if you could reap the benefits of an in-person gathering—the ability to meet interesting speakers, network with like-minded people, and soak up the knowledge of a curated slate of experts—without the perennial drawbacks: the cold convention centers, the misplaced business cards, and the hassle of travel and parking?

In order to imagine where the future is headed, let’s first lay out the three main steps of connection building to examine how the physical and digital worlds fare at each:

• Discovery : you find someone you want to meet, or that person finds you 


• Connection : some initial contact is established


• Connection strengthening : further interactions st

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I rarely go to conferences or traditional networking events. Doing so feels like a waste of energy, like trying to stand on your tiptoes at a parade.

after seeing some 800~ events take place at The Commons i've learned 3 things: 1) plausible deniability: if you say we're here to make friends, friendship doesn't happen. if you say we're here to research or talk about niche topic x and y, friendships always form. same applies to dating. 2) communities are built from strong 1-1 relationships. a... See more

We’re now observing that consumer social experiences are starting to look and feel like games at every level. Remote networking events in Roomkey are not a panel of Zoom screens; instead, attendees create virtual avatars and can navigate around a virtual conference room on their phones. On the education platform Koala, teachers can create virtual c... See more

People will struggle to structure their time now that virtual activities carry more social weight than they did in the past. IRL hangouts have more tangible controls and barriers to entry that prevent people from engaging endlessly, and physical anchors that help form habits and routines. Without that, people are going to either burn out or quickly... See more

The final edge we have over language models is that we can prove we're real humans by showing up IRL with our real human bodies. We can arrange to meet Twitter mutuals offline over coffee. We can organise meetups and events and conferences and unconferences and hangouts and pub nights.

In 

Markets for Lemons and the Great Logging Off, Lars Douce

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