(2021-04-21) Hon S09e18 Cursed Takes Multiplayer Figma And Low Ping Bastards Digital Isnt Better Than Paper

Dan Hon: s09e18: Cursed Takes; Multiplayer Figma and Low Ping Bastards; Digital Isn’t Better Than Paper.

1.0 Some things that caught my attention

Cursed Takes

there’s a non-zero chance that there are a bunch of Crypto boosters out there absolutely convinced that the only viable way to defund the police is to use Crypto (i.e. blockchain)

Blockchain tends to be used as a snake-oil techno-solutionist (solutionism) approach to a problem that doesn’t exist, or to one that is completely attacking the wrong problem. Yes, people don’t trust the police. But that’s not because bodycam footage isn’t reliable, or that bodycam footage isn’t publicly available even though in general it should be. It’s because police are killing people, and are racist, and are operating in a system that doesn’t see that as a problem.

Make Work Play Again And Ruin Both Things? Also, Where The Internet Comes From

Figma, a design tool, had its annual conference (because that’s how products and services announce new features now), and announced [tweet] real-time collaboration for up to 500 users on a single design file. I quipped that this is like massively multiplayer PowerPoint, which I expect a bunch of people have already experienced in terms of a bunch of people messing around in a Google Doc/Spreadsheet etc. (MMO)

Thing two: Earlier today, Mike Davidson complained that “all of the time I used to spend commuting, I now spend signing back into SaaS products.”

which I imagine involves 2FA and security policies that require authentication every 2 hours

so my helpful advice was “Perhaps try living closer to the cloud?”

Meanwhile, the Figma->tool->gaming association brings up interesting (to me, anyway) directions like:

Can you have campers [Urban Dictionary] in tools like Figma? People who don’t play fair by just loitering around strategic locations to “win”?

Multiplayer games have lobby services:

If you want a game to be fun, though, you want to play with people roughly your own ability otherwise you’re just going to lose a lot. So lobby services are much about matching people for, hopefully, a fun game. Is there a need for a lobby service in SaaS work/productivity tools?

intranet tools for talent/“human resource” discovery?

You know, let’s just go for it. If you’re really good at Figma, then why not just have a Figma eSports league?

Ben Hammersley [tweet] and Anil Dash [tweet] both chimed in later to remind me about Layer Tennis, which used to be both a website (perhaps initially community run, and then unsurprisingly and smartly sponsored by Adobe) and then a live event (Ben’s got a photo from 2009).

Not better than paper

What Happened When the U.S. Government Tried to Make the Immigration System Digital

But digitizing a broken paper process doesn’t make it better. Sometimes it even makes it worse…

One of my most recent examples is a ServiceNow workflow implementation of a previously paper/ad-hoc digital based process for approvals. The current implementation doesn’t allow for fallbacks, so if someone is out/sick...