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Comment by jexe | Hacker News Reader

Cofounder of a now-defunct multiplayer, real-time infinite canvas project here (Here.fm)

We could not for the life of us figure out how to make this a meaningful productivity tool. Yes, we had meetings here, and yes, drawing all over someone else's screenshare was actually useful - And building islands of data was an interesting mental model. It descended into messy chaos no matter what you did, and anything you would do to try and combat that undid some of the benefits of the canvas to begin with.

It was a lot of fun to hang out in as a multiplayer live video room, though, so we leaned into that with (relatively) more success.

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Any workspace, real or virtual, descends into messy chaos without someone actively organizing or cleaning things up. It's bad enough by yourself, but the minute it's shared with others, it will devolve quickly. Think about any shared file system, data library, workshop, kitchen, etc...

This is why librarians, janitors, lab managers, document controllers etc. are essential to make spaces functional and organized.

Right after graduation, I worked at a large company that had Data Stewards whose job it was to enforce standardized schema registration for all company datasets following the standardized field names and descriptions from the ontology explorer.

I didn't understand the purpose at the time, but then I landed at a company that had no documented schemas for any dataset and kept adding columns and it drove me mad.

2nd law of thermodynamics -> entropy go up

> It descended into messy chaos no matter what you did

I think this is where AI could be put to work. Before, what would be a toilsome digital clean up process (eg git commits) is now an instruction to an LLM to clean it up. If the chaos was clean-up-able, would your product have worked?

> and anything you would do to try and combat that undid some of the benefits of the canvas to begin with.

Part of the appeal of a canvas like this is spacial memory: that things stay where you put them. So any AI based reorganization could be a frustrating rug-pull for users that value this feature.

We thought about it - but concluded that any auto-cleaning would fall under "undoing many of the benefits of the canvas." Like a housekeeper who straightens up your desk and suddenly your spatial memory is lost and you can't find the important thing you left sitting out yesterday.

Could be wrong, though! Devil is in the details with this one.

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