... WikiSym is changing is for the same reason. People are not going to the conference! I think the attendance has been below 100 for some time now. That's not a sustainable number for the amount of work that goes into organizing a conference.
I would like to see an honest comparison of, for example, the reported benefits of in-person conferences compared to their social and economic costs. Meeting people in person is valuable, but I think it happens more often than it needs to in most fields. Until people get serious about organizing workflow around teleconferencing, huge and expensive inefficiencies will persist. People love deductible junkets, but where is the cost-benefit analysis?