A big part of the problem here is that Universities have increasingly begun attaching prestige to specific “top” conference publications for both ranking and faculty promotions. A good example of the phenomenon can be seen in [1] (sorry for the noun-citation!) which only gives credit for approximately three conferences in each field. Combine this with a flood of new researchers entering CS, you have a recipe for “top” conferences being essentially destroyed and filled with uninspired work.
(And contrary to the joke in the article, even your own work becomes uninspired when you ship it to those conferences. You can’t afford to be quirky or interesting.)
Fortunately every field has a fourth or fifth-tier conference that isn’t on this list (or a specialized topic conference that the rankings folks don’t care about), and those still serve the purposes that conferences were made for. You just might not be able to convince a ranking-obsessed administrator that your work has any value if you publish there.
(I imagine you agree, so this is just to expand) a secondary, insidious issue is that administrators diffuse their rules through the bureaucracy. In the case of CS, you start seeing references to csrankings in recommendation letters for grad applications, faculty applications, or even tenure letters. At that point, it can be hard to fight against it.
csrankings considered harmful. Three conferences per area (networking only gets two as apparently it is not an important fiedl) seems crazy - note they had to split AI into a number of subfields.
IIRC Usenix ATC (and maybe Eurosys?) were not originally included on csrankings.
Coincident with Meyer's "fossilization" complaint, csrankings seems to ignore many conferences focused on emerging work, new ideas, or industry developments.
There also seem to be various field omissions such as theory, cloud computing, multimedia, optical networking and computing, storage and file systems, quantum, etc.
Although a good venue can increase visibility, and impact to some extent, ultimately the quality of the work is what matters most.
(And contrary to the joke in the article, even your own work becomes uninspired when you ship it to those conferences. You can’t afford to be quirky or interesting.)
Fortunately every field has a fourth or fifth-tier conference that isn’t on this list (or a specialized topic conference that the rankings folks don’t care about), and those still serve the purposes that conferences were made for. You just might not be able to convince a ranking-obsessed administrator that your work has any value if you publish there.
[1] https://csrankings.org/