I am re-wording my original post in hopes to provide more constructive feedback.
There are things about the method previously used by the DevRel team that made these events more accessible in my opinion.
First, you just go to one place to find posts about events. If you see an event you’re interested in, you just click “going”. That gets you basically subscribed to that event so you’re notified of updates.
When it’s time to start the event, you just go back to the same post to view the event… super simple.
I can understand why the company would choose to adopt the method they have chosen. They have a need to bring together two communities and clearly communicate when there are events they’d like people to watch. It’s my opinion that hoping an email gets through someone’s spam filters isn’t a super reliable way of getting people the info they need to join.
The next thing I’d like to point out is how interactions between the attendees and the presenter works. Both systems have a method of allowing a moderator to ask questions that were posted in the chat. However, the previous method used in this community had some advantages I’d like to point out.
I think back to the live stream I did back in September for this example
Because this is stored somewhere after the fact, I as a presenter am able to go back and provide any follow ups or additional context to questions that were asked, as well as help out attendees directly in that topic by doing things like providing code examples. It doesn’t seem like this new platform/method allows such interaction, and that’s unfortunate IMO.
I know the teams want to provide the best attendee experience possible, and it’s my hope that they’ll take the things that worked well with the old system the DevRel team used and try and apply that to their new platform