Hyper-personalization has become cognitive punishment.

observation — attributed to Colja Dams

Nobody wants to open an app with seventeen tracks and five thousand sessions and navigate it while trying to have a meaningful conversation with the person standing next to them. Nobody wants to trust an algorithm to curate their three days in a convention hall. Dams argues that what brand-owned events can offer, and large public conferences increasingly cannot, is editorial judgment: the willingness to reduce the program to what the audience actually needs, cut the white-paper content and the Teams-call material that has no business on a stage, and give people the one thing they came for.

For conference programmers tempted to solve scale with more tracks and an app. The counterintuitive move is reduction. Fewer, better-chosen sessions signal respect for the attendee's attention rather than abdicating the curation to them.

cognitive-load, conference-design, editorial-judgment, program-reduction