https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SxdOUGdseq4 this one comes to mind. A talk by Rich Hickey explaining that “simple” and “easy” are different concepts in software design, and that systems become better when we aim for simplicity (few intertwined parts) rather than ease (things that feel convenient at the moment).
You can't attend all 30+ tracks at once anyway, you need to see recordings afterwards anyway if you are remotely interested in consuming the conference. I'd say the experience is just as much about meeting the people behind all the internet handles, getting into a full lecture room one talk in advance and listening in to something you otherwise wouldn't, join something bigger than email lists and matrix rooms, it's a unique wibe you can't find anywhere else.
I wonder if it naturally regulates itself in the way that people who get fed up by the queues don't come back the next year. You can definitely start by adding measures to limit the capacity or whatnot, but in both cases you exclude a certain part of the potential participants. I think I'd rather keep the wibe and ensure people can at least experience it once, than start gatekeeping.
I've been thinking about the same, but use old cassette tapess and just print a small QR code on the back, then rip out the intestines on an old cassette player and put in a raspi and camera to read the QR and play the equivalent song/album.
Nice to see tooling like this pop up. At previous company, when we built our, mostly self-hosted, analytics platform, and had devs average on one schama migration per day, we spent so much time dealing with this semi-manually, leading to all kinds of breaking and hiccups downstream. We had something working rather automatically at the end, but it really felt like tooling that should exist for everybody.