Defunctland
7 HN recommenders · recommended in 4 months, 2021–2024
1:43:00 · 27M views · Nov 21, 2021
A feature-length Defunctland documentary on the history of Disney's FastPass and FastPass+ expedited queue systems. It covers how the systems evolved and how they were designed, with simulation of their effects on park lines.
HN recommends it as an accessible, engrossing lesson in queueing theory and systems design, even for people with no interest in Disney.
8 comments from Hacker News
People who do not understand the role of balking and price information act at their own peril. This economic backpressure is something that executives hate - it keeps line from going up - but people who actually do the work love, because it keeps workloads manageable. If you ever wanted a feature-length explanation of queueing theory and how ignoring it makes everything worse, well... here you go: this video . The context is Disney parks and Fastpass, but the lessons are applicable to basically any business. Everything is a queue.
For anyone interested in the Fast App discussion from this article, I highly recommend this video from Defunct Land -- this video The video not only does a deep dive into fast pass, but also does a statistical model break down to reveal that the modern implementation of fast pass is actually not what you might expect and serves to increase wait times for rides!
It was made a couple of years ago, but Defuncland's "Disney's FastPass: A complicated history" is an incredible documentary that I watched this year. You don't need to know too much about Disney for it to absorb you in. [Defunctland]: this video
After I took my kids day after thanksgiving for the first time last Friday, I was wondering why this problem simply exists. And how is it possible to pay such big amount of money for outdated experiences that we had. There is a nice analysis of everything that Disney tried as far as controlling lines: this video As a person that came from USSR, I see that many of the issues are created by removing money as a control mechanism of supply and demand. If you pay entrance fee and then remove fine tuning for each ride, the result is long lines. My personal opinion is that pay-per-ride is a much better model although I can see how many may disagree. From my childhood in a country where money did not have much meaning, I learned that all-you-can eat mode for a price of entry will be filled with schemes, long lines, and tricks to game the system.
> Concentrated harm and distributed benefit is a recipe to have a few vociferous complainers and many silent beneficiaries A fascinating example of this with queuing humans is the Disney Fastpass system (1). I think the real design goal to avoid "complainers" is to try and optimize the wait time for your resource to avoid a bimodal distribution and try and spread it out for the average rider, rather than make wait times worse for the majority of people but better for the people who game the system. (1) this video , yes this is an 1:45 long video on the history and a simulation of Disney parks, but its worth the payoff.