Comment by ams6110
7 years ago
I guess it's no worse than the other main use of conference talks I've seen, which is to hawk the speaker's latest book. Maybe that's diminished somewhat, I have not been to many conferences lately but 10-15 years ago it seemed like most talks were peppered with phrases like "I talk more about this in my book..."
It's possible I was lucky with some of the conferences I went to, which had talks very much in the vein of "here's a new/different way to think about things". And I don't mind people using their own projects/products as a demonstration of what they're trying to communicate. But when they start to feel like Apple's product announcement keynotes, it feels something has gone wrong.