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SXSW RIP

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Re: SXSW RIP

#51

Post by bennyg »

TylerE wrote: post #43
ghshephard wrote: post #23

This comment caught my attention: "I won't be coming back. I'd have had better luck by just looking at the schedule and punching names into YouTube, then waiting for those bands to come to SF." I wonder what the odds are we'll see within 10 years Occulus like VR environments that can capture the concert experience, reducing somewhat the need to track down bands in crazy canceling venues like this if all you are inter…

Won't happen. No amount of VR wizardry will ever replace massive arrays of 12" woofers driven by vacuum tubes.

Nor should they.

Don't try to abstract away the experience of going to a live concert. That's the whole point.

Re: SXSW RIP

#52

Post by chrissnell »

nsxwolf wrote: post #30
gkoberger wrote: post #15

Seems he's talking exclusively about SXSW Music, whereas most people in our community probably think of SXSW Interactive (the techie-er of the three annual SXSW events) when they hear "SXSW".

I was about to post along these lines regarding my confusion. I had no idea it was a music festival.

This comment is the essence of the problem. SXSW was first and foremost a music festival. For me, the interactive emphasis signaled the impending decline. When my tech company employer started launching major products at SXSW, I knew that the music festival was fucked.

I really don't mean to come across as some curmudgeonly asshole but I just don't understand why every great festival ends up getting ruined by people who want to make it into something else. Why can't we be happy with simple excellence? Sundance Film Festival, for example, used to be about movies. The movies are still there but the private parties and the celebrity product giveaways and Main St. celebrity interviews on the E! channel are what most tourists come to SFF these days. It's tragic.

Re: SXSW RIP

#53

Post by guiambros »

newfund wrote: post #19

FWIW- My thoughts are similar on SXSW interactive. I have been going for several years, always finding that there was some amount of serendipity to putting so many nerds and vc-types in a very small space (see PG's essay on SV: http://www.paulgraham.com/siliconvalley.html ). This year I found it too chaotic. It's a nightmare to get in anywhere or know what's going on, even if you are "VIP." I had the good fortune to…

My experience this year was exactly the opposite to yours. I too have been going for several years, and after a couple of "I'm done; not coming back next year", I decided to have change my approach.

This year I established 5 basic principles:

1. Absolutely no panels. Only solo or dual sessions.

2. No marketing sessions (nor sessions by marketing folks)

3. No keynotes (except for Snowden and Assange)

4. Go beyond the headline, and analyze the speaker. At minimum the person must have an interesting personal or professional story, regardless the talk.

5. The more technical or obscure the session, the better.

In the end this strategy paid off nicely. This was one of the best years, and the first to make me want to come back next year. I watched some gems like Philip Rosedale (Second Life, now High Fidelity), Pinterest engineers talking about their dev stack in a candid and informal conversation, Carl Bass from Autodesk, Print the Legend (the movie, and then the discussion with the film directors, plus Max from FormLabs and an ex-MakerBot), NASA, DARPA, nice demos at Startup Accelerator, and a lot more.

I certainly missed a few nice keynotes (like Neil deGrasse Tyson), but hopefully some of the sessions will be posted later.

Re: SXSW RIP

#54

Post by skyebook »

TylerE wrote: post #43
ghshephard wrote: post #23

This comment caught my attention: "I won't be coming back. I'd have had better luck by just looking at the schedule and punching names into YouTube, then waiting for those bands to come to SF." I wonder what the odds are we'll see within 10 years Occulus like VR environments that can capture the concert experience, reducing somewhat the need to track down bands in crazy canceling venues like this if all you are inter…

Won't happen. No amount of VR wizardry will ever replace massive arrays of 12" woofers driven by vacuum tubes.

Well, the vacuum tubes have already been replaced. (I do agree with you though)

Re: SXSW RIP

#56

Post by meepmorp »

IvyMike wrote: post #16
imjk wrote: post #14

Hate to go on a tangent but I can't believe jwz still hasn't updated his site to a more reader friendly color scheme.

Once upon a time green on black was all some of us had, 24/7. Somehow we coped.

Or amber on black, depending on what what terminals were available in the lab.

As I recall, I coped with Usenet. In some ways, the Internet used to be much better than it is now.

Re: SXSW RIP

#57

Post by reeses »

chrissnell wrote: post #52
nsxwolf wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was about to post along these lines regarding my confusion. I had no idea it was a music festival.

This comment is the essence of the problem. SXSW was first and foremost a music festival. For me, the interactive emphasis signaled the impending decline. When my tech company employer started launching major products at SXSW, I knew that the music festival was fucked. I really don't mean to come across as some curmudgeonly asshole but I just don't understand why every great festival ends up getting ruined by people…

Amen. I had to do double takes in the past few years when I read about some tech thing at SXSW. This year I thought there must have been a hash collision on SXSW and I was reading about some other convention or conference.

It's like CES suddenly becoming all about crazy Ukrainian 36-bit vinylcore bands that were barely allowed into the country because CBP was afraid they'd claim asylum.

Re: SXSW RIP

#58

Post by reeses »

aashishkoirala wrote: post #5

To the person who commented "One organizational failure in a string of massive successes doesn't sound like a data point." in the original article - that is exactly what a data point is. Maybe they meant to say it was not a trend or a pattern?

I think their wit was clouded by their desire to be a twat.

Re: SXSW RIP

#59

Post by reeses »

meepmorp wrote: post #56
IvyMike wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Once upon a time green on black was all some of us had, 24/7. Somehow we coped.

Or amber on black, depending on what what terminals were available in the lab. As I recall, I coped with Usenet. In some ways, the Internet used to be much better than it is now.

That's because no one cared about the Internet back then. You could read everything interesting on Usenet, refresh rn, have a few new articles, and then...nothing.

The web was the same way, except that we could kill time looking for material for our one-page sites on deformed baby skeletons.

Re: SXSW RIP

#60

Post by bluthru »

nsxwolf wrote: post #30
gkoberger wrote: post #15

Seems he's talking exclusively about SXSW Music, whereas most people in our community probably think of SXSW Interactive (the techie-er of the three annual SXSW events) when they hear "SXSW".

I was about to post along these lines regarding my confusion. I had no idea it was a music festival.

They don't call Austin the "Live music capital of the world" for nothing.
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