@naruto11eth: Why Solana Conference impressed me more than Ethereum events

Ethereum has lost to Solana on events side imho. and no, this is not an engagement bait tweet. i was at @SolanaConf last week in nyc, and i was very impressed by solana community. here are somethings that i noticed: 1. everyone in the eco is very very supportive. I took a flight because @therealchaseeb said he'll show me around and hang out since I knew 0 people in solana. I definitely got intro'ed to some cool folks. 2. Solana eco is supportive to each other as well. Ethereum eco is highly pvp and competitive where everyone wants to kill everyone. It's always base vs arbitrum or risc0 vs succinct or polygon vs zksync or uniswap vs every other swap etc etc. While yes, there is a need for competition to breed innovation, we tend to start "disliking/hating" the people/employees for what or where they work at. This is an automatic bias that we tend to build up. I have seen more than one case and i probably suffer from that too. however, it was different at solana conf. I met people at orca and out of curiosity asked what they thought about people at raydium, their response: "they are great people, we always have fun vibing with them. our founders even wore each other's tshirts at a dinner table." this was validated by a friend who said the same thing about both the teams in a separate conversation, so i'd say this is true and not a fake appreciation on the outside. 3. people listened to panels and main stage: as compared to empty chairs we have in ethereum eco, people did listen to speakers. one reason that i can think of is the fact that any big conference EthDenver/Ethcc/Devcon tend to have multiple multiple stages and too many speakers. Because of this, it affects the number of chairs filled. if we were to take in account only EF sponsored event, i.e., devcon, i believe it suffered the same stuff with too many speakers and rooms. this is actually not a shade at devcon and their organizers. What's happening, for any conference, is that we want to accommodate everyone and due to that our curation suffers heavily. Another possible explanation is that we have too much to talk about -- for eg, state of zkVM or what's new on OP side. the problem lies when we introduce same, repetitive topics like: what is a rollup, what is restaking etc etc. 4. Solana has REAL users: unlike many ethereum competing projects or L2s, there are people building AND using those apps. We have too many airdrop farmers or same echo chambers of friends who don't really do much. 5. The L2 landscape hurt us a bit on the previous point as well. When was the last time there was a project that launched on Ethereum and not any L2? I cant remember much besides NFTs from last cycle. rest of the projects were deploying on blast, base, arb or other chains. So no only our UX is fragmented, but our users as well and it adds to their frustration. 6. food was very good lmeow 7. it was small: this might be a bug that turned into a feature, but solana community is significantly smaller than eth community. devcon had what like 12k people? so it is just hard to feel that connection on such a big level and everyone feels lost. I think solana will suffer from similar case when their community size increases, and while there is no real solution to it, it made the conf better. 8. there were no or little side events at the same time: i love this. Eth centric companies tend to host their own events which takes away the shine from the main event. Solana conf didn't have "too many" side events as they shouldn't. This way, everyone concentrated on single event. This is actually not EF issue, this is every other company issue and i wish we realized to do better, but then we need to have that presence otherwise our competitor will take over us + we need to justify company's event organisers. 9. Solana does ship fast vs what took us 4 years to do. there is no real solution to it tbh. new EF leadership will hopefully do better, but we lack that for sure. 10. the curation of speakers and workshops was really good. this was actually one of the few conferences where i sat down and listened to the speaker fully instead of saying "i will watch it at home on YT" and never did that. so all in all, i think solana really has great event organizers, they care about their community and how everything should be worked on. A lot of conferences suffer from that apart from devcon. While devcon is probably Etherem's best event, it suffers due to it's size and other details, which is a hard problem to solve tbh. regardless of all this, i stay bullish on Ethereum. We all can learn from solana and make things better as a community. thanks to some of the best people who showed me around and made my time better at @SolanaConf @arihantbansal @yrschrade @julian_arcium @chainyoda @arcium @therealchaseeb @jacobvcreech