What is it like to attend a predatory conference?

In-person meetings too. My company used to fly people across the country for one-day meetings. In a shocking revelation, that turned out to be unnecessary when the pandemic forced most meetings to be virtual.

I like them because so long as it's paid for by work it's just a paid vacation, you don't really need to attend anything, just go to some museums, use your allowance to get some food. Nobody asks questions.

I like in-person conferences. Online ones are okay for just giving/watching presentations, but you miss out on the random interactions with others in your field.

I kinda disagree. Even though I absolute loath the networking part of conferences, I came to hate online conferences even more. Listening to researchers with terrible microphones (because who is going to spend money on it if you use it once in a blue moon) is really not worth it.
Poster sessions are even worse. I was sitting in my private zoom call to present my poster, one or two persons dropped in, didn't react when I asked if I should give them the spiel, and then just left.
Online conferences for me concentrate all of the negative aspects with none of the fun parts.

I'm also wondering whether I refused to respond to legitimate demands as well... But, well, let's say that if you phrase your demands like predatory journals/confs do, you should expect some silent treatments from academia...

My guess is they’re cheaper and there’s just so much pressure to add more things to your CV. “Publish or perish” as the also-predatory and exploitative Academy says.

I guess it only requires a few "recommendable" people to get lured into those conferences just because the occasion made them lower their guard (like Loren in the article). Add to that some people just fake-attending for the CV or the occasion to travel to touristy destination, and you can make quite a few bucks for a relatively low investment, I guess? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

In my experience, there are some niche conferences that have no name recognition, but are amazing. A lot of people haven’t heard of the Gordon conferences, and some of the other top ones in my field are open source package user group meetings and company hosted conferences, which could easily appear low-value at first glance.

The 10K+ attendee conferences have lots of name recognition, but I found them to be effectively useless for accomplishing any goal (they’re not even that great for networking), and they could easily be a series of recordings for what you get.

So, I think it’s reasonable for folks to roll the dice on some conferences, because some of them are really hidden gems (and if they suck you can always audible it to a free vacation).