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Comment by donaltroddyn | Hacker News Reader

I disagree vehemently with rules 1,2,4, and 7. I value my privacy and don't want to provide my name and details to everyone I pass and every vendor I talk to.

At every conference I've attended, I remove or flip my badge immediately after entering. I've never felt that this impacted my ability to meet new people and connect with them, so I don't accept the author's assertion that it's necessary (or even helpful) to make new connections. The remainder of the rules are predicated on rule 1, which I think leaves them irrelevant.

I'd go so far as to say that if a conference tries to enforce rules 1 and 7 (everyone has to wear a badge and no flipping), then I will simply decline to attend. The only badge that I'd be happy to wear continuously is a badge with no legible PII that's used purely for access control, and even then, most of the time, conferences don't require that kind of access control.

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This sounds like a good case for something like the "traffic light" system for indicating who's happy to have photos taken of them. Doing it with lanyards makes it nice and simple to rectify afterwards: if you see a red lanyard in the photo then you've made a mistake.

(Obvious point: badges that are highly readable by humans squinting to see your name are also highly readable in photographs. And please consider if there's a solution for badges for female attendees that doesn't encourage people to look at their chests to read their names.)

I've seen badges for how willing people are to have conversations - a traffic light system for 'please talk to me about anything' to 'I'd rather mind my own business'.

> And please consider if there's a solution for badges for female attendees that doesn't encourage people to look at their chests to read their names.

As a conference organiser who'd love to provide a great event experience to as many people as possible, I was wondering if you (or anyone else) might have ideas for potential alternatives?

> I remove or flip my badge immediately after entering

You may find that the terms and conditions of the conference, that you've agreed to, require you to keep the front of your badge visible.

If you don't like that then, as you say, you should probably not attend, rather than go against your agreement.

That is beautiful. Not even trolling I'm sure.

Forget about T&Cs, it's a part of the social norms of most conferences. Don't like it? Don't attend.

> Forget about T&Cs, it's a part of the social norms of most conferences. Don't like it? Don't attend.

You wouldn't know it by looking at the current sad state of tech culture in 2019, but a lot of people in the "Hacker" culture aren't particularly inclined to capitulate to social norms and much prefer freedom.

The freedom you have is to not attend the event, rather than to attend and then not follow the norms there.

There are tons of casual community events of various sizes that are just fine with you identifying or not identifying yourself to whatever degree you want to.

What's being discussed here is mostly badges for commercial events like Google I/O. If you don't like the norms of these types of events--scanned badges, real names, probably a fair bit of photography and video of those attending--you have lots of other options.

It's not. Sitting in a conference, no one has one.

Know enough conferences with only wrist bands.

And no the people making them probably care more for attendance than for showing your name.

This is a great point. I would add that conferences should allow attendees to register and attend anonymously; i.e. possibly known to the conference at the time of registration (if otherwise required), but not necessarily known to all other attendees at all times. The badge should then simply not show a name on it.

Some conferences allows for pseudonyms to be used, which is good, and should also be allowed, but allowing pseudonyms doesn’t really solve this problem, and I don’t think it was really meant to do that.

(Of course, for those people, like me, who do want to have their name on their badge, those rules which you oppose are still very good and relevant.)

> allowing pseudonyms doesn’t really solve this problem

If it allow pseudonyms like throwawayRandom123, I'd say it's solved.

Technically, maybe, but it’s ugly, since at first glance the badge seems to have a name on it, but anyone who then makes the effort to read it get nothing for the effort. (Yes, it takes a conscious effort to read a name off a badge.) It would be better if it was immediately obvious that the badge had no name, to spare everyone the wasted effort.

If not, lie. Also solved.

>I'd go so far as to say that if a conference tries to enforce rules 1 and 7 (everyone has to wear a badge and no flipping), then I will simply decline to attend.

That is probably your appropriate response for most conferences then. To give just one example, if I'm working a booth and someone wants to ask me questions, I will probably not do so unless I know who they are. It's a common trip of financial analysts to flip their badges so they're incognito.

Knowing the name gives you what practical information? Seriously.

I think that you are an outlier. I rarely have badge visible except when going through doors and have yet to meet booth or any other service that would decline to answer or give me food etc due to missing badge.

> Knowing the name gives you what practical information? Seriously.

If someone talks to me about a topic it's helpful to see their name so I know what they've worked on in the past. Partly so I don't try to explain their own work back to them.

You can guess what I worked on from my name?

Yes if you've written about it and I've read the work. My field is pretty small so both things are usually true for people I meet who want to talk to me about technical things.

That does not sound like quite special situation. Most fields are bigger and overwhelming majority of tech people dont write publicly.

People don’t write blog posts, give talks or be publicly responsible for any projects in your field?

Most people don't, no. A very tiny subset of people in any given field do this.

Also disagree with 1. Wearing badges seems like something out of kindergarten. If you want to know someone's name, just ask, like in every other situation in life.

For me, it's a cheat. I'll absolutely ask your name, but I'm meeting a ton of people at a conference and am likely to forget or mix you up with someone else I just met. It's a heck of a lot easier to glance at a badge to keep people straight.

I really liked the system where you had to fill in a nickname which you would be comfortable with - it was only information about you on the badge

I agree with you.

I would like to have a double-sided badge, one with and one without my name, and be allowed to decide which to display.

The best privacy solution is to lie. Make up a conference name. This way, you're in control of who you meet and who can stalk you.

Many (most?) conferences check IDs at registration. You might be able to get a name change on the spot but I wouldn't be surprised if you were told it's not possible for some reason.

I know several people with long or 'strange' names who use their easy to pronounce nickname for their name badges. Never been a problem.

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