As an attendee, I don’t understand why you can’t just only do a few 1-1s with people who you are confident it would be useful to talk to, and go to talks or work for most of the conference time.
I assume that’s how the famous people you mentioned navigate these events.
I can imagine that for speakers it can be demoralizing to spend a lot of time preparing a talk for an empty audience, but that’s separate from the issues you mentioned.
The main problem is that even if you do this as an individual, the whole setup creates a new (and mostly bad) set of social norms about what everyone else is doing, whether you can even say hi to them, etc.
As an attendee, I don’t understand why you can’t just only do a few 1-1s with people who you are confident it would be useful to talk to, and go to talks or work for most of the conference time.
I assume that’s how the famous people you mentioned navigate these events.
I can imagine that for speakers it can be demoralizing to spend a lot of time preparing a talk for an empty audience, but that’s separate from the issues you mentioned.
The main problem is that even if you do this as an individual, the whole setup creates a new (and mostly bad) set of social norms about what everyone else is doing, whether you can even say hi to them, etc.