From my quick research online, it seems they've gone digital-only for season tickets because they don't want people just reselling them to turn a profit. They want actual season-long fans, so now if you transfer too many games they can track it and ban you. This is essentially anti-scalping. There's a legit justification.
You can still buy paper tickets at the stadium for a single game. But not for season passes anymore.
Apparently they've been making exceptions for him in years past where he was able to pay hundreds of dollars to have them custom printed for him. And this year they've decided to no longer provide that exception.
Honestly, this doesn't seem unreasonable to me. At some point, you have to cut off previous technologies because virtually everyone's moved to something better. You also can't buy tickets any more by snail mail with an enclosed check.
If this guy has the money for a season pass (!) he has the money for a smartphone. It seems like he just likes the nostalgia of paper tickets. But that's not a reason to add a separate ticketing flow just for him any more, like they had been up till now.
> If this guy has the money for a season pass (!) he has the money for a smartphone.
Maybe it's not about the money. Maybe he does not want the negative consequences that come along with having a smartphone. Maybe he has dexterity issues that make using a smartphone difficult. Maybe he doesn't want to install their invasive app. Maybe he finds that paper tickets are easier to manage. Maybe he recognizes that the vendor made this change to benefit themselves at the expense of the fans, as it allows them greater control of the resale market.
I own a smartphone but prefer paper tickets. Luckily I can (and do) still get them at my team's stadium, although I have to pick them up in person.
He shouldn't even need a reason. "I don't want a smartphone" should be sufficient and should not lock one out of commerce, events, and other cultural experiences.
In 50 years, everyone's going to have an advertisement-injecting brain implant, and stores are going to require you to have one in order to purchase anything, and they'll lock you out of commerce as a filthy Luddite if you don't get one. And, 50 years from now, commenters on HN will defend those businesses because the implant is "modern" and supporting those ancient smartphones and credit cards is hard to do.
> Maybe it's not about the money. Maybe he does not want the negative consequences that come along with having a smartphone.
In my country right now there's a lot of hand-wringing about the impact of social media and smartphones on teenagers' mental health and education. We've got schools banning phones, and the government wanting to introduce age checks for social media. Infinite doomscrolling in your pocket, endless brainrot short-form videos, it's not healthy and we need to get smartphones out of the hands of the young.
So there are good reasons people might choose not to get a smartphone.
Then exactly the same government also proposed people wouldn't be allowed to work without a 'Digital ID Card' - making smartphones (and google/apple accounts) mandatory.
I’m not sure how exactly this should be worded in law, but I really wish they would pass a law requiring supporting people without smartphone apps. Obviously there would be some exceptions where justified, even for things other than “the app is the whole point” and those need to be thought through, but in this case and plenty of others, there’s just no reason they can’t accommodate non app users. “It costs more to support non app users” is not a sufficient justification.
The law that he can invoke in a weaponized way is the ADA.
It’s vague enough about what a disability is, that something like “my hand tremor and farsightedness preclude using a touchscreen, I request a reasonable accommodation” is a valid request. If they deny admission and accommodation to somebody incapable of using a smartphone, there is a whole army of lawyers that will gladly take the case on contingency.
As you note, the app is not inherent to seeing a game, or preventing resale. There’s no reason an id and confirmation number can’t be used to get him in.
There is a special ring of hell reserved for people who abuse the ADA.
Such abuse is an insult to everyone who needs it, everyone who engages with it in good faith, everyone who spends gobs of money to make events and services accessible to those with genuine need.
I don’t rule the world but if I did abusers of protective rules would be summarily executed. (Don’t vote for me. I’ve got a short but significant list of similar policies. Scammers those guys would have targets on their heads, kidnap for ransom criminals those guys too)
The ADA was a rare "great" law, in that it is sweeping, applies broadly to many different forms of disability, and it provide companies very little leeway to weasel their way out of complying. It also provides us with a very, very good generic framework for consumer protections, should we ever get an administration who cared about consumer freedom over corporate interests. I'd love to see other (not disability related) ADA-like laws that compel companies to make other reasonable accommodations to be inclusive of reasonable consumers. All kinds of amazing "consumer bill of rights" regulation could be modeled after the ADA.
> I’m not sure how exactly this should be worded in law
No policy or law shall be enacted that directly or indirectly requires a use of a computing device where any other alternative at all is possible. Where offering other alternatives presents a cost, that cost (and only that cost, with no markup) may be passed on to the consumer.
That could still get prohibitively expensive. Take the example from this article, where there's only one person still using the paper ticket option...
I could see someone arguing you need a specially trained staff member or supervisor to verify your ID for anti-scalping, which they don't need to do for other e-tickets. Say only one person uses this option all season, they could be asked to pay for an entire employee's salary/benefits.
It's a bit hyperbolic, but supporting non-standard workflows is organizationally expensive with many non-quantifable costs.
>Maybe it's not about the money. Maybe he does not want the negative consequences that come along with having a smartphone.
Maybe he doesn't then get any of the benefits of having a smartphone.
I don't understand why we need to bend over backwards for folks who have chosen to ignore modernity. There was a woman in my neighborhood association at one point who would throw a fit about us using email for communication because "not everyone has a computer you know." This was in 2018. As a society, we've gone completely out of our way to make living on your own terms legal and doable. You don't even have to get you or your kids vaccinated if you don't want to! But then going even farther and expecting to get all the same benefits as folks who've decided to accept and use modern technology is ridiculous... the Dodgers don't owe this man physical season tickets, just like Google doesn't owe me the ability to physically mail in a search term and have the results physically mailed back to me.
Your idealism is fine, and I think regulation of this is completely reasonable, but this isn't much different than private automobile or bicycle companies for transportation. The biggest issue here is an anti-trust concern about two app stores, which should not be allowed. That has nothing to do, however, with having a portable computer to help you with high-end exchanges of goods and services.
Have you had the pleasure of coaching a technologically illiterate grandparent through the process of learning how to use a smartphone? It’s a never-ending job and disheartening for all parties involved. Modern mobile UX is not designed with accessibility for the elderly in mind, and it is constantly changing in a way that demands constant re-learning. Not to mention the disabilities and neurological conditions often involved.
I'm in my 40s, there is a shit ton of modern UX I struggle with. Basically anything gesture based for example, but really a lot of apps are just shit and have no sensible UX design behind them, so you need to try to click everything and hope you don't mess something up.
To me it's easy to see how someone over 70 might simply refuse to use an app. Especially if it doesn't support scaling the UI to well.
"Share" is one of the worst inventions of all. What it does in phones is random across apps and platforms, and usually has nothing to do with what the word "share" means in any other context.
You're sharing data between apps. It's an app->app API, essentially. You can easily send an app store listing to your Reminders "Wishlist" section if you want, for example.
I wasn't even thinking social. Problem is, the actual operation being done is one of:
- Give the other app a temporary/transient copy of a document or a file
- Give the other app the actual file (R/W)
- Give the other app the actual file but some other way (there's at least two in Android now, I believe?)
- Give the other app some weird-ass read-only lens into the actual file
- Re-encode the thing into something else and somehow stream it to the other app
- Re-encode the thing into something else and give it that (that's a lossy variant of transient copy case - example, contact info being encoded into textual "[Name] Blah\n[Mobile] +55 555 555 555" text/plain message).
- Upload it to cloud, give the other app a link
- Upload it to cloud, download it back, and give the other app a transient downloaded copy (?! pretty sure Microsoft apps do that, or at least that's what it feels when I try to "Share" stuff from that; totally WTF)
- Probably something else I'm missing.
You never really know which of these mechanisms will be used by a given app, until you try to "Share" something from it for the first time.
Now, I'm not saying the UI needs to expose the exact details of the process involved. But what it should do is to distinguish between:
1. Giving the other app access to the resource
2. Giving the other app an independent copy of the resource (and spell out if it's exact or mangled copy)
3. Giving the other app a pointer to the resource
In desktop terminology, this is the difference between Save As, Export and copying the file path/URL.
Also, desktop software usually gives you all three options. Mobile apps usually implement only one of them as "Share", so when you need one of the not chosen options, you're SOL.
I don’t think people understand the scale of the issue. Each decade that goes by we welcome a new class of elderly, and each decade that goes by, we continue to write off those elderly users.
The failure of the well-intentioned but insufficient currents solutions is well underlined by this case. Sure, you could get this guy an android phone with a custom launcher, or an iPhone on Assistive Access, and he might be able to place a call. But good luck setting him up on Ticketmaster, or the Dodgers website, or wherever they expect him to go to redeem and utilize his tickets.
At airports and drugstores, the magazine racks will usually have a "Guide to iPhone/Android" type publication with a ton of pictures that are aimed at this market. I picked one up and realized while flipping through it that there is way too much for a brand new user to be able to absorb. The gestures needed on iOS to pull up options that are otherwise invisible in the UI will be nonsensical to someone whose UI/UX frame of reference is an ATM screen or a gas pump (or self-checkout kiosk which they might not use) where every option is shown on screen without needing additional navigation. Just like the first iPhone, come to think of it.
This guy has a flip phone. Seems like that was the last “new” thing he could learn. Its user flows never change and he’s memorized it. The idea that the average old person is so obstinate that they would refuse to learn the new technology if it was easy to do so is not something I can accept. Not being able to communicate and interact with the modern world on its terms isn’t fun for anyone.
There's an older guy at my office who often says "if you don't want to do something, don't learn how" and I think this attitude is common. It's not that they can't learn this smartphone stuff, they just don't want to use it.
That's their choice, but they also choose to suffer the consequences. Expecting the world to cater to your needs specifically is such a typical boomer attitude and should no longer be tolerated.
And, expecting people who are happy with what they already have and have already paid for to switch to your newer, more complicated, more expensive system so that your numbers go up is another attitude that should not be tolerated.
Horses, no. That would impose quite a lot on everyone else. But walking, or taking the bus, vs. owning an expensive personal transportation device... yes.
While we're at it, let's get rid of the ADA. Those disabled people expecting the world to cater to their needs specifically are so abusive to those of us with perfectly functional bodies and flexible minds.
Using a battery powered electronic device as a “pass” detected by another handheld electronic device, both of which are contacting cell towers, exchanging data with data centres 100s of kms away, filling out detailed profiles of user behavior … rather than a paper ticket?
You will be the "boomer" some day. I wish people had more empathy.
An example: Presbyopia came on hard for me in the last couple of years Now I really appreciate low-vision affordances that, as a younger person, I couldn't have cared less about and would have seen as an unnecessary cost.
I used to laugh about the 'picture signs'; like the universal nose in book sign that means library. Or the airport logo on the exit sign on the freeway.
Until I spent some time in a country whose predominate language (and signage) was not english.
Maybe those pictorial signs are a good idea after all.
When OP is 85, I hope some whippersnapper 20 year old says to him, "Come on, grandpa. You need to get that neural advertisement brain implant like the rest of us, or you can't buy anything. Why should businesses need to support your lame smartphone? Step into the 22nd century, pops!"
No it’s often just stubbornness. My dad is 85 and he can take the time to learn anything he wants to learn. But refuses to change when he doesn’t.
My mom is 83, a retired school teacher and she has been using computers since 1986 and has an entire networked computer setup in her office with multiple computers and printers. She went from the original Apple //e version of AppleWorks to Office now.
> My dad is 85 and he can take the time to learn anything he wants to learn. But refuses to change when he doesn’t.
I think that's natural and reasonable. I'm certainly less tolerant of drains on my time as I get older. I can imagine that, at 85, I would be making a lot of calculations about ROI on my time.
This is why it's so important to iteratively adapt. I'm not saying you have to catch every new version, but to go from a NES to a PlayStation 5 would be a jarring experience like going from a dumb cell phone (or landline?) to an iPhone 17.
I would say catch enough iterations to keep the basic premise in mind, because there is a bit of personal responsibility to maintain technological literacy in the modern age. A telephone isn't really an esoteric device, either.
I think the most frustrating thing is that UI's largely haven't improved in 10-15 years, yet we still get constant changes from people trying to justify their jobs or manufacture "impact".
My Dad and I have had about 7 sessions just on copy-and-paste on the computer. He kind of got it for a minute there, but didn't use it enough, so now it's gone and he's back to just re-typing everything.
The second biggest reason (after freedom to install apps) why I don't use an iphone is: for the love of God I can't use the gesture to switch windows. It used to be simple swipe up from bottom. Now you have to do an arc or something from the corner. I can never get it right.
It's not possible to make counterfeits with a modern ticketing system. Each ticket is a unique code, and they are scanned on entry to match with the codes in the system.
As for resale: The attendee name is tied to the ticket in these cases, and ID is checked at the door. I guess an app could be more effective for preventing this than normal digital/paper tickets.
> At some point, you have to cut off previous technologies because virtually everyone's moved to something better.
I don't agree that it's better. Why should I have to worry about my ticket running out of battery power or being such a high-value pickpocket target once I'm already in the venue?
The latter is a huge issue at music festivals for example:
I'm not a fan of the "something better" phrasing myself. It's very much anti-systems-thinking.
Engineers should be honest that everything is a tradeoff. For the up-front convenience you get with phone tickets, you impose additional failure modes, dependency chains, and accessibility issues that simply weren't a problem with paper ticketing.
The "phone-ification" of everything will probably bite us in the behind in the future, just like the buildout of out car-centric environments does now.
>For the up-front convenience you get with phone tickets
Even as a person who does have a smartphone, I feel like phone tickets are anti-convenience because they rely on terrible apps like TicketMaster. It's only a positive trade-off for venues or whoever. If they texted or emailed me a QR code, that would be a positive tradeoff (and a texted QR code would probably work for this guy's flip phone too)
> I feel like phone tickets are anti-convenience because they rely on terrible apps like TicketMaster.
Case in point: I traveled from St. Louis to Houston for a concert a few years ago. Before I left home to catch my flight, I installed the Ticketmaster app on a phone and verified that I could bring up the tickets. When I tried it again in my hotel an hour before the conference, it no longer worked because the fraud detection in their app was apparently confused as to why I was now in Houston.
Fixing this took 45 minutes on hold to get a support agent and a frantic call to my wife so she could check the disused email address I used to sign up for Ticketmaster 20 years earlier and get the verification code they sent.
There are a lot of reasons to dislike digital tickets, but this is one of them. I used to go to dozens of concerts every year. Now it's such a hassle that I don't bother unless it's small venue that doesn't play these games.
That's fucking nightmarish. That's exactly the kind of scenario I'd think up and be told is "science fiction" by the kind of apologists who think forced usage of technology is okay.
We attended a once-in-a-lifetime show last fall (a performer who is aging and likely won't tour again) a two hour drive away. I wouldn't install the Ticketmaster app and played an old man "character" with the box office to get them to print my tickets and hold them at will call. I played the "we are driving in from out of town" card, etc, and they accommodated me.
I tried that with a closer venue a couple of months ago and got told, in no uncertain terms, "no app no admittance". I knuckled-under and loaded the app on my wife's iPhone (which she insists on keeping because Stockholm syndrome, I assume). I feel bad that I gave in (because it makes me part of the problem). I really wanted to see the show and I wasn't willing to forego it on principle. (Kinda embarrassing, actually.)
This is how I feel with the places that want to lock up your phone. There are safety considerations in that. But we're just astrotrufed into the "well this is better" PR campaigns from yondr.
In most cases, digital event tickets are a QR code which is just an alphanumerical code. You can easily print them, so you don't have to worry about your phone.
I've never seen digital tickets which aren't printable.
There's an amusement park we like to go to. We get season passes, which normally means renewing the small plastic card we got the first year. They've switched to app only this year, with the option of getting a card, if for some reason you cannot or will not use the app. I believe there's a small fee for issuing the card.
I believe their reasoning is much the same. They have some types of tickets, which can technically be handed over to others and abused. Think weekend ticket, where you hand the tickets to someone else for them to use on Sunday, or tickets that can be converted to season passes, if you do it the same day.
Blaming scalping doesn't seem entirely plausible to me, because there was always the option of making the tickets and season passes non-transferable. There are other methods. Especially if you're only issuing paper tickets as an alternative, e.g. yes we will sell you a paper version, but understand that it is absolutely non-transferable and non-refundable.
Some people might not want to bring a phone to these types of events and venues, which I can completely understand, neither do I, but I can live with it. The thing that bugs me is the lack of an alternative, which isn't really that expensive and which most won't even use. Because to some, the app really don't provide value and in those cases they solely exists for the benefit of one company. If you're paying the price of season passes to pretty much anything these days, I think you're entitled to some small level of personalized service and customization.
> Blaming scalping doesn't seem entirely plausible to me, because there was always the option of making the tickets and season passes non-transferable.
That's not desirable either. You often can't make it to all the games, so they want you to be able to give some tickets to friends, etc.
They're trying to prevent people who purchase the season pass to almost exclusively resell tickets to individual games.
So you really do need data to tell the difference -- are a third of the tickets mostly going to the same 5 other friends (OK, desirable), or are 95% of the tickets going to a different random person each time (scalping)?
>They're trying to prevent people who purchase the season pass to almost exclusively resell tickets to individual games.
Why do you need a smartphone to do this when a white list checked against ID at the door would suffice? As the other respondent says, you either generate a badge for the passholder, or have an approved list of guests that can use the season pass if the passholder chooses to offer it to others.
Generating badges has loopholes. (Trust me I’ve used them). And IDing every person can be a mission on itself. Pretty sure they will just start using biometrics in the next decade with or without your consent.
This seems to be an area where people will always find loopholes. Should this be a race-to-the-bottom in an attempt to make the most foolproof system possible, or do we at some point accept that maybe there's never going to be a perfect way to do this?
>And IDing every person can be a mission on itself.
I've worked the door at venues of various sizes, so it's not like I suggested this from ignorance. What we're talking about doesn't need to be "every person", just a specific set of ticketholders.
>Pretty sure they will just start using biometrics in the next decade with or without your consent.
I know I'm just me, speaking for me, and am a sample size of 1 that doesn't look like the general population in this regard, but there's no "with or without my consent" if I decide to opt out of going to games entirely. It'll be a cold day in hell before I give someone my biometrics just so I can watch someone try and hit a ball.
For sure you can ID everyone. Nightclubs, music festivals and even airports do this sort of thing all the time.
You just need good organisation, plenty of security stations, and an atmosphere that rewards people who arrive early - checking a stadium's worth of IDs over the course of 2-3 hours rather than over the course of 20 minutes.
What you can't do is charge $20 for a glass of beer then expect people to arrive 2-3 hours before the game starts.
It could slow it down for everyone, or just the season passholders. If it does, oh well - there are worse things than taking an extra 10-15 minutes to get into a stadium.
>Not to mention that HN users will then whine about the surveillance state.
Pretty sure, given the comments in this very thread, that HN collectively understands there's more surveillance happening on your phone than with another person making sure the name on your ID matches the name on your ticket, or that your badge photo matches your face.
And HN users are not knowledgeable. When I challenge people to tell me how much surveillance can a third party app do on iOS without your permission…crickets.
But you can do that the same way you do with the app. The does this by tying you ticket to your season pass, and to you. If you want to give the ticket to someone else, call the ticket office, ask them to re-register the ticket to your friend. If the ticket office notices that X number of tickets tied to that season pass has been re-registered, just refuse, or better, have the system refuse.
Fans can pick the easy option with the app, or if they really want, the expensive option where they need to go pick up the re-registered ticket if they want to give them to a friend. You can do this without the app, it's just more work, which isn't much of a hassle, as most won't pick this option and the passes are expensive enough that you can justify the extra handling cost of maybe 5% of the tickets.
They could force you to re-sell your tickets through the team MLB site, and to sell them for face value.
If the tickets come in at less than face value because of the season sale (not unreasonable), that can work OK (particularly for good seats for a team like the Dodgers). Most folks simply won't be able to sell all of the tickets. The goal isn't to make ad hoc ticket sales a necessarily profitable enterprise, the goal is to sell season seats, so you have to be somewhat accommodating. Pretty hard for anyone to go to all 81 homes games.
This can only go so far, unless you make the sold ticket not transferable.
They can also allow some margin to be just outright sold at market. I know several season ticket holders who sell the tickets to the big games (like Dodgers/Yankees) at a premium to help offset the entire season ticket package.
The last time I had a season pass to something, they printed me the equivalent of an employee id badge with my face and name printed on it. The badge was the ticket. How do you resell an individual ticket?
You literally hand them your badge. Requires a lot of trust sure, but I did this to see Real Madrid in spain via hotel concierge, their friends just handed us their badges.
It's pretty common for people who rely on networking to have season passes and hand out various games as "gifts" to whoever they want to get on the good side of.
Forcing the app is almost certainly for tracking purposes and justifying the decision for whatever braindead higher-up decided it was a good idea, therefore it must be made to work.
>They have some types of tickets, which can technically be handed over to others and abused. Think weekend ticket, where you hand the tickets to someone else for them to use on Sunday, or tickets that can be converted to season passes, if you do it the same day.
This is not abuse. If they sell a ticket for days worth of resources and you use two days of resources it's not abuse at all. That is a very consumer hostile attitude. If their business model relies on you not using what you paid for then they need a new business model.
The ticket is for “two days of resources that you personally can use”, not “two days of resources that can be used by any number of ticket-holders.”
It’s like the “free as in beer” explanation, I can’t pull up to my local bar running a promotion and fill up a tanker truck. Maybe they’re being hostile to me, a would-be customer, for that, but it’s simply not what’s being offered up.
> If this guy has the money for a season pass (!) he has the money for a smartphone.
This logic justifies buying any other unrelated product as a condition of being allowed to buy baseball tickets. Does this mean that the Dodgers should be able to make "owning a car" also a condition of being allowed to buy baseball tickets? After all, if you can afford season tickets, you should be able to afford a car payment. Maybe they should only let people in who own rolexes because, hey, a season ticket holder should be able to afford a nice watch, too.
I can't think of any other case pre-smartphone, where I'd be denied the ability to buy a product simply because I didn't want to have to buy another totally unrelated product as a condition. There's probably an example that's not immediately coming to mind, but I don't think it was common or justified.
In some stadiums, the seat and the ticket are sold separately (example: Levi's Stadium [0]). You have to buy the seat and if you want to see a game, then buy a ticket to sit in the seat you own to watch that game (or rock concert).
Even before computers there were companies that required you to pay for a phone (call) in order to transact with a business. Or interact with a mail carrier to order something by mail order.
> I can't think of any other case pre-smartphone, where I'd be denied the ability to buy a product simply because I didn't want to have to buy another totally unrelated product as a condition.
Then you must not have been around pre-smartphone? Those of us who were will remember having to buy either banknotes or checks. Later, some would accept a certain type of card that you could buy. If you weren't willing to buy any of those things there was little chance of a deal taking place. Showing up with your goat to offer in exchange would get you laughed out of the room, even though there was an even earlier time where bringing a goat would have been considered quite reasonable. Realistically, the most desperate vendors will still accept your goat as payment if that is what's on the table, but, as I am sure you can imagine, it isn't worth the effort for those who have the luxury of choice. Where technology makes a seller's life simpler, they will demand it. Why wouldn't they?
None of this is comparable lock-in. You could buy checks from hundreds of different vendors and none had any lock-in on you. You could use a different vendor each time if you wanted. By certain type of card I assume credit cards, which can also be had from thousands of different banks.
Also, credit cards are free to get and checks cost a few pennies.
Not remotely comparable to being forced to buy a phone to get to a game.
So what you are saying is, it's ok to exclude the Amish, and others who chose not to use a cell phone for religious (or other) reasons, from buying a season ticket. That sounds like discrimination on the basis of religion ;)
It does seem pretty unreasonable to me. He’s an 81yo life long dodgers fan. You make exceptions like you’ve always done. It’s what makes human, and sets us apart from computers.
Someone at the soulless corporation fucked up, and there will be no consequences, even though there should be.
> you have to cut off previous technologies because virtually everyone's moved to something better.
It’s hard to argue that having to manage a smartphone and its ever-changing apps and UI flows for purchasing and handling tickets, is simpler than buying a paper ticket with paper money. Is it really better?
This. It's just another form of hidden inflation at play.
Smartphones, appification, and self-service is usually a downgrade from immediately preceding solutions for everyone except young folks who are money-poor and time-rich, so think nothing of wasting the latter. But this state flips for most around the time they start their career, or at the latest when they start families.
I don’t think this policy would pass muster under the ADA though.
The guy might not be sufficiently disabled to qualify - but for example if you have a blind person without a smartphone, you can’t tell them they’re out of luck - because you can clearly reasonably accommodate them without causing “undue financial hardship” by giving them tickets at will-call.
I think you’d be hard-pressed to find a blind person / person with low vision without a smartphone these days: they’re a near-essential window into services that aren’t accessible though plain paper.
If they have already moved away from paper tickets for everyone else, now there is financial hardship, not to mention the loss to the team's economic position from scalping. Also smartphones have supported usage by the blind for years, particularly on iOS.
Visually impaired people use smartphones too. If the app isn't supporting the accessibility features of the platform, it should still be held liable under the ADA.
(Unfortunately it won't as was found when Southwest Airlines was sued over this. Congress hasn't updated the ADA to include web sites since the ADA precedes the web and so it wasn't enumerated explicitly. Also unfortunately, the GOP who have never been huge fans of the ADA have blocked any attempts at patching that hole.)
But check out the settings on your iPhone/iPad or Android device. Whole sections dedicated to accessibility, especially for the visually impaired.
Visual impairment was just my naive example - but maybe there’s a better one that still persists.
Regardless, maybe there’s a path to legislation forbidding smartphone requirements for huge monopoly businesses like national professional sports leagues. I’d hate for ownership of a consumer device to become codified as a requirement for participation in activities like this.
Many stadiums make it near impossible to buy paper tickets. Even then they start arguing with you to prevent you from doing that.
> If this guy has the money for a season pass (!) he has the money for a smartphone. It seems like he just likes the nostalgia of paper tickets. But that's not a reason to add a separate ticketing flow just for him any more, like they had been up till now.
If you have money for a tea or coffee, you have money to send to me. Just because someone may have the means to buy something doesn't mean they they should be excluded from participating in cultural events for not purchasing and maintaining that particular thing. (Citizens often times over subsidize the stadiums in which the team is based in)
I think it's the golden state warriors that forces you to give them your biometrics to enter the stadium.
IMO, the right thing to do is grandfather in any existing season ticket holders, if they ask. Have them go to a specific entrance where someone can check an ID and mark them off a list. Simple job for an intern or whatever.
> Honestly, this doesn't seem unreasonable to me. At some point, you have to cut off previous technologies because virtually everyone's moved to something better.
It is completely unreasonable, but for a different reason. This is not technology A (paper ticket) vs tecnhology B (phone).
It is about open vs. proprietary. Paper is paper, it does not forcefully tie the user to anything. A phone is a requirement to be forced to do business with one of only two megacorporations, for something completely unrelated. He wants to buy a game ticket, not a phone.
Imagine you want to buy a sandwich but are told you must first buy an earring, completely unrelated and not something you want.
This is a strong disagree from me. What this is implying is that the customer now has to buy into two ecosystems: the expensive, Dodgers, tickets, and stadium world; and the far more perilous, casino in your pocket, attention sucking, hell, that's smartphones. Countless articles are being written on the effect of smartphones on the elderly (and teens). But you know what? Fuck'em. Because progress.
Another comment suggested grandfathering in customers like this. Sure, that's one idea. But generally, don't punish the masses because of the crimes of the few.
I'm certain VIPs don't scan their phones when they come to the game. This man is nothing short of a VIP.
> Honestly, this doesn't seem unreasonable to me. At some point, you have to cut off previous technologies because virtually everyone's moved to something better. You also can't buy tickets any more by snail mail with an enclosed check.
As long as the technologies you move to are equally freedom- and privacy-respecting. If I have to use a non-free spyware app to buy your tickets I'm not buying. Now, if you let me pay for and download a PKPASS that I can use on my fully-libre GrapheneOS smartphone then sure.
> At some point, you have to cut off previous technologies because virtually everyone's moved to something better.
Perhaps. But in this case, they've moved to something worse. Digital tickets have their benefits, but paper tickets are still superior because they don't tie you into big tech relationships and don't require supporting infrastructure to work.
Phones, on the other hand, can be charged. And if they're smashed, you can just log into your account on a friend's phone if you haven't replaced yours yet. If you can't even do that, you can go to the ticket window and they can look up your account information and verify your ticket.
In New York the commuter trains use etickets and if you smash your phone you can just log into your account on a friends phone, but they track how many times you do that any only allow 3 switches. They don't say 3 switches in a certain period, it just says you can only log in 3 times and then the account is locked. After that you have to call them -- and who knows what....
> It doesn't have any more information than the info you give it to buy the tickets in the first place.
Many apps ask for permission to use your GPS position and other sensor data, even though they don't need it. Most non-technical people don't understand what that means and will just allow it.
I have absolutely never in 15+ years of having an iPhone had an app ask for GPS or sensor data when it clearly wasn’t necessary for functionality like a maps app or Uber.
You can set location to only while you're using the app. And when you open it to scan the ticket, they already know where you are. You're at the entrance to the stadium where they scan your tickets.
And that's when you find out the app considers this usage pattern as a signal of fraud, so then you can't get into the event and have no recourse. Their app, their rules, your loss.
>If you don't give the app any permissions, it doesn't spy on you either.
We're talking about an 81 year-old who has never had a smartphone before and you're starting the sentence with "if"? And that's just that app, not the phone itself or anything else that someone brand new to, and ignorant towards, this ecosystem is going to encounter and not know what to do with.
Great. If you're that paranoid, only turn your phone on to buy the tickets and when you're at the stadium. And don't use it for anything else.
This dude has previously paid hundreds of dollars per year because he wanted custom-printed tickets. He can pay a hundred for a cheapo Android to use exclusively for tickets and not give up any privacy at all, if he's more paranoid about tracking than the other 99+% of the population who uses smartphones just fine.
> If this guy has the money for a season pass (!) he has the money for a smartphone.
Right, but he is wanting to choose the season pass over the smartphone. If he buys a smartphone then he won't have the money for a season pass anymore. It turns out you only get to spend x units of currency once.
Amazon also only sells digitally. So now he has to buy a smartphone in order to get a smartphone from Amazon in order to get tickets? The guy doesn't even want one smartphone let alone two.
>Honestly, this doesn't seem unreasonable to me. At some point, you have to cut off previous technologies because virtually everyone's moved to something better.
I've gone entire years at work where no one ever mentions baseball or MLB. It is a dead sport. The NBA? Sure. NFL? It's practically an official US holiday. So if they want to chase off an octogenarian fan who will buy their season tickets because they demand he get a smart phone that he doesn't want to learn to use and wouldn't use anyway... why not? They've signed their own death certificate with that. This is firmly in "Please drink a verification can" territory, and I have no idea why anyone would be apologizing for them.
I agree, this is a good way to stop scalping and reduce costs by not having to print physical tickets. It's interesting to see the negative sentiment here given other threads about scalping overwhelmingly suggest we need government regulation to stop it. Well, here's a private solution to that problem but apparently that's also bad and requires threats of government action via the ADA... incredible.
Nothing's perfect. Some ideas to fight against things we don't like will come up, and then we'll see the collateral and go, "Oh, maybe that's actually not the best way to do it". That's okay! That's the way life goes! It's not "incredible" or hypocritical or whatever else you're trying to imply. What you're seeing is merely folk working through things.
Are we supposed to always jump at the first "solution", consequences be damned?
It is not required to watch a game. At least not unless you are not using it as some kind of vision aid — although even then there are likely reasonable alternatives.
It is required to satisfy the desires of a vendor wanting to sell something. They make a smartphone a part of satisfying their desires because it makes their life a whole lot simpler. Same reason they won't give you season tickets in exchange for 12,000 bushels of wheat. They could, but why would they? If you don't want to play ball, so to speak, they are happy to sell their product to someone else who will.
> Honestly, this doesn't seem unreasonable to me. At some point, you have to cut off previous technologies because virtually everyone's moved to something better. You also can't buy tickets any more by snail mail with an enclosed check.
The problem is, in the end it leads to a society where you NEED a smartphone to enjoy basic human existence - and yes, access to cultural and sports events is a fundamental part of being a human.
That in turn almost always means: your smartphone must be either Apple or a blessed Google device. And that in turn means: no rooting (because most apps employ anti-root SDKs these days), no cheap AOSP phones, no AOSP forks like Graphene OS. And that is, frankly, dystopian when your existence as a human being depends on one of two far too rich American mega corporations. Oh and it needs to be a recent model too, because app developers just love to go the easy route and only support recent devices on recent OS versions.
And that's before we get into account bans (which particularly Google is infamous for), international sanctions like the one against the ICC justices, or pervasive 24/7 surveillance by advertising SDKs or operating systems themselves.
My wife and I had an appointment last week to apply for a line of credit. We talked it all through with the clerk and decided to go for it, so he started the whole process on his computer.
His jaw dropped half-way through when he asked for my wife's and my phone number, and I had to tell him that I don't own a smart phone.
Turns out you must have a smart phone because the system sends you some kind of code to verify your identity. Let that sink in: I am sitting in front of the clerk, but in order to identify me, he needs me to give him some phone number.
The only way we could finalize the application is by me asking my mother whether I could use her phone number briefly to get this over with. She forwared the code to my wife's phone. That worked in the end -- but so much for "identifying me".
We should stop accepting this ridiculous excuse. Our phone numbers are not identifiers. How does me telling a bank "My phone number is 123-456-7890" give them any assurance whatsoever that I am the person whose name will be printed on a loan document?
Well, my case is the best proof of that: the phone number I ended up using was my mom's.
It's most definitely baloney because I also had to provide ID. So, certainly there is no way I could identify myself "even more" by giving them a phone number than by giving them a government issued ID.
As the sibling commenter pointed out, in their case, it totally failed to create a meaningful identifier, because he used some other person's phone to get past the ridiculous gate.
It's not necessarily just for the 2FA snakeoil. The worst places snap on a glove and proctologize your network identity metadata (spilled by all the underlying carriers, IIUC), and sometimes even billing records with your name and address (more vulnerable if you're still on a postpaid). The US desperately needs a port of the EU's GDPR, for starters.
I don't think the assumption that SMS is enough is valid anymore.
My wife's elderly aunt has a flip phone that can receive SMS but not MMS. We just went thru an "identity verification" procedure with a major bank last week that sends MMS, not SMS, and could not reach her flip phone.
The whole ordeal was a huge pain in the ass and if my wife and I weren't there to help her it would have been completely impenetrable to her.
Sometimes the code must be received through the bank’s app. I went though this process recently to open a new account (at a bank where I already had other accounts). I didn’t think much of it at the time, but if you didn’t have or want a smartphone, this could be a major problem.
The uncomfortable truth is that they most probably need your phone to check the online accounts you have. I believe most bank applications do it automatically as part of fraud prevention. May I ask, what is the country?
Had a similar process when helping my parents settle in after relocating to Spain recently. I ended up having to ask an acquaintance to put down their phone so I could get some verification codes or information about an appointment in order to sign them up for... a Home internet + mobile phone lines bundle.
Cherry on top of this dystopian situation was that the number needed to be a Spanish phone number. Couldn't be from a different country code.
I know I'm in the minority but I value privacy higher than convenience. I'm aware that not having a smart phone does not automatically equal total privacy, but I just cannot get myself to have a personal tracking device on me 24/7.
Imagine being on hacker news and having an iPhone instead of a Pinephone /jk.
I'm always annoyed when some real-world good or service is only available to people with a smartphone, especially when it wasn't always so. Blue Bikes (rentable bicycles) were in the past usable with a membership card, but it got phased out in favour of an app.
My 75-year-old, retired construction worker dad’s fingers are nearly useless on capacitive screens; half a century of handling cement apparently has that effect. His deep East Texas accent was still only semi comprehensible to Siri the last time I had him try with my phone.
He recently missed several notifications from his truck’s dealership that the part they ordered was in and ready for installation, because they sent text messages that he didn’t read, instead of ever calling and leaving a message when no one responded to the texts. I’m terrified that there’s going to be a doctor’s office sometime that does the same, with more serious consequences.
He’s fine flying as long as one of us can buy the ticket for him and he just needs his ID at the airport; I dread the day airlines start requiring their stupid apps.
This happens to everyone's fingers to some extent because the fingertips dry out as you age. It's a huge source of frustration for elderly folks since it adds to the confusion around using touch interfaces. My family members have had some success moistening their fingers with a wet paper towel periodically as they use their devices, though of course that is impractical on the go.
Do iphones not have "increase touch sensitivity" as a setting? Thats all I had to do for my dad for him to be able to easily use it again, on a samsung though.
There are also phones with buttons again, the unihertz titan 2 elite looks good btw. Or Clicks addon keyboards.
There are various extensions you can get to automatically redirect Twitter links to xcancel or something, very much recommended.
I don't like that these get submitted either, but unfortunately people do post worthwhile stuff there and only there, and I don't want to just categorically forbid those posts.
Twitter still does have quite a lot of unique content that either appears there first or isnt accessible anywhere else at all, unlike paid article websites, previews without logging in actually work for the most part, and xcancel as you said is a thing. Which extension are you using for redirects?
My late mom couldn't receive the verification SMS from her bank. After investigation, it appeared it was actually an MMS that required a smartphone.
She could still go to her bank counter but service there degraded considerably for everyday things, and she was always told to do things online.
In the end the bank rep was kind enough to give her an old smartphone. But, for her, it sucked because it was much more complicated, had to be charged constantly and so on...
As a technologist, it is eye opening to do the tech support of loved ones...
Other people covered under ADA who might agree: partially sighted/blind people (yes there's screen readers and such but a piece of paper is often simpler to handle), people with reduced mobility or tremors in their hands, and probably more.
My vision has gotten pretty bad the past couple years (not correctable with lenses)... I'm now using a 45" display and still have to zoom in a bit. I have my phone close to maxed out on text/display size options.. and only then it becomes unusable in most apps if I move the slider to the final position...
While I can use my phone for a lot of things, some UX with the larger text/display settings is absolutely unusable... so many modal dialogs where the buttons are off-screen and cannot be pressed, for example.
I can understand a small group/org not going through the effort in a lot of places... but for multi-billion dollar organizations, corporations and large govt entities, there's really no excuse.
The OP video actually addressed this: He went to the physical box office, and they seem to be able to print individual tickets. Just not a season ticket, for some reason.
No, it's not. If you are physically incapable of operating a piece of technology, the ADA covers reasonable accommodations for that. If you are simply unwilling to learn how to use a piece of technology, it doesn't and shouldn't cover that.
Look at how conveniently you chose to ignore the fan's age, attributing his behaviour to unwilling or luddite! Or do you really have absolutely no idea, what it means to be 81 years old? Still, I would bet you have met at least some people of such an age.
I love technology but having to give money to google and apple should not be a reason with stop people from doing things that CLEARLY don't need technology.
Also that is not what luddite means, like come on even in the bastardization of the term, he is not precisely smashing the ticketing machines, he is just an old guy don't be such a redditor with this senior.
If your ticket was in the form of a piece of music that you had to perform on your violin to gain entry, would you feel the same way? Keep in mind, it’s only in the last 15 years that playing the violin in this world became commonplace and only in the past 5 that these performances became required to access common goods and services. Violins also still cost hundreds or thousands of dollars.
The problem with this argument is that forcing people to use technology, without proper training and against their will, introduces them to risks as well. Anyone with older parents/family can tell you the harms that come with phishing and other fraud scenarios that cost more than just accommodating people not using technology, both at the micro and macro level. Insulting people and bullying them into technology adoption when there are relatively simple fixes to the problem seem better than increasing risk exposure for no reason other than 'I believe that people who don't use technology are somehow lesser'.
The worst thing about this entire discourse is the root of the entire "just print this one guy his tickets on-demand" argument is that it assumes, at its base, that once you hit a certain age you immediately become a moron incapable of learning anything new or adjusting your day-to-day life at all.
And 80-year old person is just as smart as a 20-year old. He's perfectly capable of learning how to use a $50 smartphone to access his $5-200k/yr season tickets, he just doesn't want to. It sounds like he was told years and years ago they were moving this direction, and they've been printing him tickets as an exception, and they've decided to stop the exception. He's had 20 years to get a smart phone and learn how to use it. The fact that he now has to choose is a prison of his own making.
I don't think the discourse is about just this one guy, it's about an entire class of people for whom swiping around a smartphone is a bewildering experience they managed to live their whole life so far without. If you're not adept at it, it makes you feel stupid, maybe you haven't had that experience but there's more to being a luddite than stubbornness.
If I can get along with the rest of my life on a flip phone, it seems pretty unreasonable to buy a device just to buy sports tickets.
> If I can get along with the rest of my life on a flip phone, it seems pretty unreasonable to buy a device just to buy sports tickets.
I would agree. It also seems unreasonable to expect the organization to make an exception to a completely legitimate anti-scalping measure for one person.
Do you know how many old people get scammed per year in the United States because they are using technology that they are trained on, but assume that they have to use the technology in order to function each year with minimal practical gain relative to the costs? Its around 12.5 billion dollars in 2024, up from 10 billion in 2023 [1]. Why is introducing someone to that risk worth it to watch a baseball game?
Asserting that individual 'get smart' doesn't actually solve for the actual harms and if it were just simple, we would not be seeing the upward trends in fraud that we are seeing within the elderly.
80 year old people do not have the same neuroplasticity as 20 year olds. It is not reasonable to expect them to quickly learn new things that are constantly changing.
In particular, it's very reasonable to be 80 and decide "I don't want to deal with learning how to use a smartphone and getting one".
> It is not reasonable to expect them to quickly learn new things that are constantly changing.
Of course it is. Maybe if we didn't normalize people refusing to learn things for no other reason than "I don't wanna" they'd have better neuroplasticity.
> it's very reasonable to be 80 and decide "I don't want to deal with learning how to use a smartphone and getting one".
I agree with you 100% on this but it doesn't logically follow from that that you get to make the Will Call clerk for the Dodgers print your ticket for every game even though you've been told for multiple years that season tickets are going paperless as an anti-scalping measure.
In this case nobody is forcing them to buy a dodgers ticket. It’s a completely optional and absurdly expensive luxury good that is purely for leisure. They can simply not but a ticket if they don't want to accept conditions of sale.
Yeah... I mean, who says I should have to put in wheelchair ramps for my ballpark that seats tens of thousands? I mean, so few people use/need them, I should just be able to refuse service to those people. Right?
So, you want to force people to give money to specific, monopolistic, corporations? Why would I want a smart phone if I'm blind... how am I expected to use a smart phone when I am blind, exactly?
Because quality of life doesn't have a value in of itself. Especially for the elderly, they should be excluded from enjoying the end of their life simply because no wants to think of a solution to the problem that doesn't require them to introduce massive amounts of risk into their life which, also, negatively impacts their quality of life.
Most Amish under 30 have secret cell phones. It would only be the oldest generations without them. There are even lots of wink & nod arrangements where they may even have electricity in some outbuilding but they unplug it when elder comes to visit. It also depends on the Order as some are more strict than others. They generally aren't allowed to have electricity in "the house" but batteries and other workarounds exist.
They aren't as isolated these days as they used to be. If you go to Costco, you see them with 3 carts loaded 3 feet high of all the same crap everyone else is buying. A lot of times, they don't even transport it back via buggy but call the "Amish taxi service" which is people who drive them around town in large passenger vans. Even from a work source perspective, a lot have moved on from farm work and work in construction, roofing and other trades. If you go to a gas station in the morning, you'll see work trucks roll up and only Amish rollout to go buy soda and lunches or whatever.
[Source: I live in Lancaster and have for many years.]
There are large populations of Amish who don't use cell phones, landline phones, or anything. The closest they'd get to a phone call is asking a neighbour to call 911 in an emergency (assuming they're even willing to do that).
One group I am aware of will only use a payphone in the nearest town. They actually filed to force AT&T to keep a payphone there because the relevant tariff required AT&T to do so, and were the only people who ever bothered to make AT&T do this. So there is one payphone in that town that they go to and drop their quarters in to make phone calls.
They don't really receive special accommodation for not using technology outside of being allowed to submit some required tax forms on paper instead of e-filing them, the logic being that the government requires them to do so under pain of punishment, so the government has to find a way to let them do it without violating their religious beliefs.
But there is not a general accommodation provided.
I was referring specifically to the idea that the Americans with Disabilities Act should cover people who simply choose not to utilize or learn a particular piece of technology which has been around for the better part of two decades.
The "poor people don't belong in society?!?" trope is completely different (and kind of boring).
Well context is important and this was in directly response to the (spurious strawman) claim that if you can't spend $500 on a phone then you are excluded from society.
I love it how they can't think of any other way to pay for parking than via smartphone, but if you just park there without paying, they'll offer you many ways to pay the fine.
They can think of other payment flows, they don't want them because an app gets them data they can resell or abuse.
I was (pleasantly?) surprised when my office parking lot implemented paid parking because it's doable via SMS and webpage (not an installed app). [thankfully my employer is picking up the tab, so I didn't have to do anything beyond providing my license plate numbers]
And sometimes, it seems like there's no fallback if you have no [working] smartphone. I knew someone who had a working smartphone, but a broken camera for few months. Couldn't scan any qrcodes to use these services till the phone was replaced.
don't you understand that this means a data trail to your location and government ID ? connecting to your ability to pay a legal fine? You are consenting to that ?
The Dodgers could have so easily turned this into a huge win. After 50 years they could have just awarded him a paper lifetime pass. Scan this and get in for any game! It would have been so easy.
Or if they really wanted him to go digital, just buy him a smart phone and install the app for him!
In Brazil you already can't access some government services without a smartphone, such as paying for municipal parking in various cities. So if you own a car but not a smartphone, you get a fine. Sadly the least of the country's problems.
There should be more noise about this here, but to whoever you talk about that issue they don't seem to grasp the situation, or simply don't care, and call you crazy/paranoid. I have been told you also need the GOV app for certain things related to companies.
Inconsistent paywalls are a product now. The Times (the original) has shoe-horned in some kind of AI paywall [1] which claims to maximise conversions by varying how much you get to see and for how long. It pissed me off because I was logged-in to my subscription but it was blocking me anyway.
I daily drive a Light Phone III, haven't had a smartphone in years and would rather never use one again. Our local concert venue requires an app for tickets, so I have just given up on the idea of going to major concerts or seeing our local hockey team play.
The Light III is a great improvement over the II. If you are trying to use your phone less the II will encourage that just because the epaper is pretty janky and annoying. I gave my Light II to my son, which I hope gives him a generally negative first impression of phones.
8 trackers, 49 permissions. Whatever reason they gave for requiring the application, evidently they couldn't resist selling out their users in the end. Disgusting.
I was in LA for the week recently and went to see a Dodgers/Angels exhibition game at Dodger Stadium. $27 for the nosebleeds at the best stadium to sit high up at; easiest $27 ever spent!
Except it wasn't that easy. Though the tickets were purchased through mlb.com, I ran into trouble logging in once I got to the stadium. Couldn't for the life of me get a verification code. Doing the walk of shame to concessions crossed my mind, but this wouldn't have helped none since there was already a couple at the window who were getting help from the person working the booth...on how to get the tickets through the app.
Fortunately I got the verification code and was able to get my tickets shortly thereafter.
Queue my frustration when I ran into the EXACT SAME FUCKING THING when I went to see a show in Chicago some time later. Only way to enter was by downloading some ridiculous-ass app to get my tickets. Couldn't even get them by email. Couldn't even get them by website!
I wasn't expecting to yell at clouds this close to my 40s, but I really guess it do be like that.
Can't imagine Boston or New York doing this. In Boston the'd end up giving the fan lifetime Dunkin Donuts or something on TV and just let him walk into the park since all of the ushers probably know him already. Dodgers are really missing the point here.
People like to say "vote with your wallet, your privacy is your problem" with regard to smartphones, but like going to a baseball game has for a couple years now required you to have an Android or iOS device, same with many concerts and shows.
It's simply not reasonable to have to give up baseball and concerts to avoid your phone spying on you. And when accessing your bank or your local sports teams or your favorite band is tied up on your choice of phone, voting with your wallet becomes impossible -- I'm to give up patronizing my favorite artist because the venues use digital tickets? It obviously changes the balance of the equation such that nobody would ever choose their privacy over access to the world, and the vendors know this.
Drawing the line at skipping music concerts is a choice, which to you is impossible, but to others is trivial... There have always been these lines. It gets slightly harder every year to choose privacy because of people with your mindset about their specific thing they aren't willing to give up, but this ticketing change is just another brick in the wall, not anything substantially different. People who thought it was simply unreasonable and impossible to vote with their wallet about <every previous thing> have created the environment where this ticketing change happens. And your comment here goes on to create the environment where something even more important is smartphonified later.
My concern here is not that a simple transaction like purchasing a ticket to a baseball game requires a smartphone, but that the purchase now binds the customer to a personal and irreversible relationship to multiple entities (MLB, the Dodgers, the ticket agency, etc.) that (1) is not necessary, and (2) adds no benefit to the customer.
This reminds me of a story my grandfather told me about how they needed to have a bunch of infrastructure and employees devoted to telegraph based notifications in 1970s India, because some bureaucrats refused to move everything over to telephone, and didn't want to be inconvenienced by having to use new technology.
Stuff like this should always have an analog failsafe like a printable ticket. I can’t be the only one who has a phone actually die out and about. Especially as this device gets a little old, battery drops maybe 1% every 2 min of screen on use. Even worse in crowded cell service situations like baseball games.
Also a good fallback if your phone screen cracked 2 hours before. But I can imagine part of the challenge they are facing here are scalpers. TicketMaster app 'rotates' the actual ticket every 30 seconds. Can't rotate paper.
I'd think that having a 2nd factor like presenting ID that matches the ticket would be sufficient there though.
Ticket counterfeiting is the core problem that they are trying to prevent. If there's a fallback method then that fallback method can be abused to forge tickets.
EDIT: I know complaining about downvotes is a downvotable offense itself, but I'm genuinely curious as to what is objectionable about this comment.
China's solution: your passport is your ticket. Not great for privacy, but persumably you also want to check that people banned from a stadium for their behaviour don't get in anyway.
The first time we traveled domestically in China I kept thinking that my wife had to be mistaken, there has to be some kind of confirmation we need to show in order to board. But nope, it literally is just show up with your ID.
The point is it doesn't have to be life. We can make things so that you don't need a smartphone, but we choose not to. That's a choice, not some immutable reality of the universe.
Can we make things so that you don't need a smartphone? I don't think this is as trivial as you're making it out to be.
Having a non-exfiltratable bearer token is really really hard. In order to present a zero-knowledge proof of the possession of a token you need to have some sort of challenge-response protocol. The simplest one, and the one in most common use (such as this) is a time-based method, where the shared knowledge of the current time represents the challenge.
The other method is to use civil identity as the challenge, and use government-issued IDs as the bearer token that the ticket is tied to. This doesn't scale well to larger events, and presents real challenges involved centralization of ticket exchange.
You can argue whether or not forgery is a significant enough problem to be worth this trouble, but that's a business decision, and as live events like this get more expensive forgery and resale become more and more of a problem, which end up locking out people like this who have legally and legitimately bought tickets but can't gain access to events because someone has stolen and resold their ticket.
It's a moving target. Forging tickets has gotten easier and easier, and as tickets get more expensive it becomes more and more lucrative. Law enforcement is generally not helpful for this sort of petty larceny so they are looking for structural ways to prevent it.
In past eras they used holograms and watermarks and special papers in an attempt to prevent forgery but these methods keep getting challenged by an ever more sophisticated criminal element. Moving into cryptographically secure methods is the last barrier here.
They could also rely on the state to match identities to tickets, but this approach does not scale and is frankly undesirable for the majority of people anyway.
Forgery is a non-issue -- this guy is a season ticket holder. Literally all they need is his government ID checked against a list.
The "problem" they were trying to "solve" is letting people sell some of their tickets to third parties, but not all of them. That is understandably how they arrived at a mobile application as a solution
But the problem of admitting the original ticket holder is simple as shit. Just .... check his ID?
Decades upon decades of holograms and watermarks on tickets to make them unforgeable. But it keeps getting easier to forge them. Meanwhile ticket prices keep increasing (venue space is one of the last things that's truly scarce) and the incentives for forgery keep increasing.
Even if we could make them truly unforgeable, people generally want electronically transferrable tickets. How do you propose to do this?
Go ahead and require a special gadget to get an "electronically transferrable ticket," no skin off my back. That is a feature I will never use.
Don't bother your season ticket holders about getting their own person admitted! I am standing in front of you, bearing identification, and you are whining about a mobile app?
If you work in an industry that is solely based off of customer delight, stories like these are what you are looking avoid due to brand damage. It is going to cost more time/energy to deal with the backlash than just coming up with a simple solution in the first place.
Because the future will be very dystopian if we place two tech companies as gatekeepers of everything in life. If Google locks your account and won't help you (which happens!), you don't want that to also take away your ability to bank, go to baseball games, etc.
If that is your threat model (it isn't for 99.999% of people), you can set up your own email domain for few bucks a year and it takes 20 minutes. Now no one can debank you and take away your ability to go to baseball games simply by killing your email.
But that's not the reason the guy in the video isn't using a smartphone. It's because he literally never bothered to learn or keep up.
Well he has no responsibilities. His entire calendar is free, for the past two decades. They came out 17 years ago. He can go get one and learn how to use it.
I have absolutely no sympathy for people who choose not to get with the times. We all took our time to learn how to use a smartphone. He could have too but chose not to. Probably refused to learn to use tap to pay, ATMs, etc as well. You chose to opt out of society. You are no longer part of it.
(I’m not happy that you need an app to buy tickets, but that’s a different thing — he didn’t choose not to own a smartphone out of principle)
>We all took our time to learn how to use a smartphone
Were you 65 years old when smartphones came around? My grandparents had 8 years of formal education, they never figured out how to use computers when they were alive, not because they didn't want to but because it was too complicated.
In a society where human dignity and respect matter you don't ignore people who can't keep up, you don't treat the elderly like obsolete machines you discard, a lesson you ironically probably learned from how you treat your phone.
From my quick research online, it seems they've gone digital-only for season tickets because they don't want people just reselling them to turn a profit. They want actual season-long fans, so now if you transfer too many games they can track it and ban you. This is essentially anti-scalping. There's a legit justification.
You can still buy paper tickets at the stadium for a single game. But not for season passes anymore.
Apparently they've been making exceptions for him in years past where he was able to pay hundreds of dollars to have them custom printed for him. And this year they've decided to no longer provide that exception.
Honestly, this doesn't seem unreasonable to me. At some point, you have to cut off previous technologies because virtually everyone's moved to something better. You also can't buy tickets any more by snail mail with an enclosed check.
If this guy has the money for a season pass (!) he has the money for a smartphone. It seems like he just likes the nostalgia of paper tickets. But that's not a reason to add a separate ticketing flow just for him any more, like they had been up till now.
https://www.aol.com/articles/81-old-lifelong-dodgers-fan-012...
https://www.reddit.com/r/Dodgers/comments/1s5fkni/la_dodgers...
> If this guy has the money for a season pass (!) he has the money for a smartphone.
Maybe it's not about the money. Maybe he does not want the negative consequences that come along with having a smartphone. Maybe he has dexterity issues that make using a smartphone difficult. Maybe he doesn't want to install their invasive app. Maybe he finds that paper tickets are easier to manage. Maybe he recognizes that the vendor made this change to benefit themselves at the expense of the fans, as it allows them greater control of the resale market.
I own a smartphone but prefer paper tickets. Luckily I can (and do) still get them at my team's stadium, although I have to pick them up in person.
He shouldn't even need a reason. "I don't want a smartphone" should be sufficient and should not lock one out of commerce, events, and other cultural experiences.
In 50 years, everyone's going to have an advertisement-injecting brain implant, and stores are going to require you to have one in order to purchase anything, and they'll lock you out of commerce as a filthy Luddite if you don't get one. And, 50 years from now, commenters on HN will defend those businesses because the implant is "modern" and supporting those ancient smartphones and credit cards is hard to do.
He can get a smartphone dedicated to the ticket app if it is such a huge piece of his life/hobby
"Cheap android phone" on Google Shopping shows options for $30. Didn't even know they get that cheap.
Is then logging into your Google account (if you have one) also without cost and tradeoffs?
> Maybe it's not about the money. Maybe he does not want the negative consequences that come along with having a smartphone.
In my country right now there's a lot of hand-wringing about the impact of social media and smartphones on teenagers' mental health and education. We've got schools banning phones, and the government wanting to introduce age checks for social media. Infinite doomscrolling in your pocket, endless brainrot short-form videos, it's not healthy and we need to get smartphones out of the hands of the young.
So there are good reasons people might choose not to get a smartphone.
Then exactly the same government also proposed people wouldn't be allowed to work without a 'Digital ID Card' - making smartphones (and google/apple accounts) mandatory.
No there isn’t a good reason for the nanny state and giving the government more power over your life
I’m not sure how exactly this should be worded in law, but I really wish they would pass a law requiring supporting people without smartphone apps. Obviously there would be some exceptions where justified, even for things other than “the app is the whole point” and those need to be thought through, but in this case and plenty of others, there’s just no reason they can’t accommodate non app users. “It costs more to support non app users” is not a sufficient justification.
The law that he can invoke in a weaponized way is the ADA.
It’s vague enough about what a disability is, that something like “my hand tremor and farsightedness preclude using a touchscreen, I request a reasonable accommodation” is a valid request. If they deny admission and accommodation to somebody incapable of using a smartphone, there is a whole army of lawyers that will gladly take the case on contingency.
As you note, the app is not inherent to seeing a game, or preventing resale. There’s no reason an id and confirmation number can’t be used to get him in.
There is a special ring of hell reserved for people who abuse the ADA.
Such abuse is an insult to everyone who needs it, everyone who engages with it in good faith, everyone who spends gobs of money to make events and services accessible to those with genuine need.
I don’t rule the world but if I did abusers of protective rules would be summarily executed. (Don’t vote for me. I’ve got a short but significant list of similar policies. Scammers those guys would have targets on their heads, kidnap for ransom criminals those guys too)
I don't agree that using the ADA in this way would be abuse.
The ADA was a rare "great" law, in that it is sweeping, applies broadly to many different forms of disability, and it provide companies very little leeway to weasel their way out of complying. It also provides us with a very, very good generic framework for consumer protections, should we ever get an administration who cared about consumer freedom over corporate interests. I'd love to see other (not disability related) ADA-like laws that compel companies to make other reasonable accommodations to be inclusive of reasonable consumers. All kinds of amazing "consumer bill of rights" regulation could be modeled after the ADA.
> “It costs more to support non app users” is not a sufficient justification.
For sure. If that was true the answer would be "charge the non-app users a nominal fee to cover the cost".
Invasive tracking is the point, not the cost. It's anti-consumer.
> “It costs more to support non app users” is not a sufficient justification.
Then why is 'I don't wanna' sufficient justification to force non-critical services to support your preferences forever?
> I’m not sure how exactly this should be worded in law
No policy or law shall be enacted that directly or indirectly requires a use of a computing device where any other alternative at all is possible. Where offering other alternatives presents a cost, that cost (and only that cost, with no markup) may be passed on to the consumer.
That could still get prohibitively expensive. Take the example from this article, where there's only one person still using the paper ticket option...
I could see someone arguing you need a specially trained staff member or supervisor to verify your ID for anti-scalping, which they don't need to do for other e-tickets. Say only one person uses this option all season, they could be asked to pay for an entire employee's salary/benefits.
It's a bit hyperbolic, but supporting non-standard workflows is organizationally expensive with many non-quantifable costs.
>Maybe it's not about the money. Maybe he does not want the negative consequences that come along with having a smartphone.
Maybe he doesn't then get any of the benefits of having a smartphone.
I don't understand why we need to bend over backwards for folks who have chosen to ignore modernity. There was a woman in my neighborhood association at one point who would throw a fit about us using email for communication because "not everyone has a computer you know." This was in 2018. As a society, we've gone completely out of our way to make living on your own terms legal and doable. You don't even have to get you or your kids vaccinated if you don't want to! But then going even farther and expecting to get all the same benefits as folks who've decided to accept and use modern technology is ridiculous... the Dodgers don't owe this man physical season tickets, just like Google doesn't owe me the ability to physically mail in a search term and have the results physically mailed back to me.
If it's so important to modernity then it shouldn't be handled by private companies.
Your idealism is fine, and I think regulation of this is completely reasonable, but this isn't much different than private automobile or bicycle companies for transportation. The biggest issue here is an anti-trust concern about two app stores, which should not be allowed. That has nothing to do, however, with having a portable computer to help you with high-end exchanges of goods and services.
Have you had the pleasure of coaching a technologically illiterate grandparent through the process of learning how to use a smartphone? It’s a never-ending job and disheartening for all parties involved. Modern mobile UX is not designed with accessibility for the elderly in mind, and it is constantly changing in a way that demands constant re-learning. Not to mention the disabilities and neurological conditions often involved.
I'm in my 40s, there is a shit ton of modern UX I struggle with. Basically anything gesture based for example, but really a lot of apps are just shit and have no sensible UX design behind them, so you need to try to click everything and hope you don't mess something up.
To me it's easy to see how someone over 70 might simply refuse to use an app. Especially if it doesn't support scaling the UI to well.
The first time I used iOS I noticed a lot of things it considers "normal" are completely undiscoverable unless you know.
Swipe down from the top. No, the other top.
Click share, now click "find in page". Wait, that doesn't share at all?
"Share" is one of the worst inventions of all. What it does in phones is random across apps and platforms, and usually has nothing to do with what the word "share" means in any other context.
You're sharing data between apps. It's an app->app API, essentially. You can easily send an app store listing to your Reminders "Wishlist" section if you want, for example.
It's definitely not only social sharing.
I wasn't even thinking social. Problem is, the actual operation being done is one of:
- Give the other app a temporary/transient copy of a document or a file
- Give the other app the actual file (R/W)
- Give the other app the actual file but some other way (there's at least two in Android now, I believe?)
- Give the other app some weird-ass read-only lens into the actual file
- Re-encode the thing into something else and somehow stream it to the other app
- Re-encode the thing into something else and give it that (that's a lossy variant of transient copy case - example, contact info being encoded into textual "[Name] Blah\n[Mobile] +55 555 555 555" text/plain message).
- Upload it to cloud, give the other app a link
- Upload it to cloud, download it back, and give the other app a transient downloaded copy (?! pretty sure Microsoft apps do that, or at least that's what it feels when I try to "Share" stuff from that; totally WTF)
- Probably something else I'm missing.
You never really know which of these mechanisms will be used by a given app, until you try to "Share" something from it for the first time.
Now, I'm not saying the UI needs to expose the exact details of the process involved. But what it should do is to distinguish between:
1. Giving the other app access to the resource
2. Giving the other app an independent copy of the resource (and spell out if it's exact or mangled copy)
3. Giving the other app a pointer to the resource
In desktop terminology, this is the difference between Save As, Export and copying the file path/URL.
Also, desktop software usually gives you all three options. Mobile apps usually implement only one of them as "Share", so when you need one of the not chosen options, you're SOL.
I still despise whoever decided that swipe-from-top needs 2 versions somehow
"Buttons" that are just labels, that's on the top of my F* U list.
I don’t think people understand the scale of the issue. Each decade that goes by we welcome a new class of elderly, and each decade that goes by, we continue to write off those elderly users.
The failure of the well-intentioned but insufficient currents solutions is well underlined by this case. Sure, you could get this guy an android phone with a custom launcher, or an iPhone on Assistive Access, and he might be able to place a call. But good luck setting him up on Ticketmaster, or the Dodgers website, or wherever they expect him to go to redeem and utilize his tickets.
At airports and drugstores, the magazine racks will usually have a "Guide to iPhone/Android" type publication with a ton of pictures that are aimed at this market. I picked one up and realized while flipping through it that there is way too much for a brand new user to be able to absorb. The gestures needed on iOS to pull up options that are otherwise invisible in the UI will be nonsensical to someone whose UI/UX frame of reference is an ATM screen or a gas pump (or self-checkout kiosk which they might not use) where every option is shown on screen without needing additional navigation. Just like the first iPhone, come to think of it.
Now have your grandparent try to teach you something you aren't interested in and don't really want to learn, and see how it goes.
This guy has a flip phone. Seems like that was the last “new” thing he could learn. Its user flows never change and he’s memorized it. The idea that the average old person is so obstinate that they would refuse to learn the new technology if it was easy to do so is not something I can accept. Not being able to communicate and interact with the modern world on its terms isn’t fun for anyone.
There's an older guy at my office who often says "if you don't want to do something, don't learn how" and I think this attitude is common. It's not that they can't learn this smartphone stuff, they just don't want to use it.
That's their choice, but they also choose to suffer the consequences. Expecting the world to cater to your needs specifically is such a typical boomer attitude and should no longer be tolerated.
And, expecting people who are happy with what they already have and have already paid for to switch to your newer, more complicated, more expensive system so that your numbers go up is another attitude that should not be tolerated.
I am sure that you also think they should have a place for his horses to feed because he doesn’t want to deal with a car.
Horses, no. That would impose quite a lot on everyone else. But walking, or taking the bus, vs. owning an expensive personal transportation device... yes.
While we're at it, let's get rid of the ADA. Those disabled people expecting the world to cater to their needs specifically are so abusive to those of us with perfectly functional bodies and flexible minds.
The ADA forces reasonable accommodations. It doesn’t mean that car manufactures have to build cars for blind people.
There's a big difference between legislating accomodations for people who physically can't do something, vs. those who can but choose not to.
The former makes sense. The latter doesn't. I don't get to park in handicapped spaces that are closer to the store just because I'd like to.
Using a battery powered electronic device as a “pass” detected by another handheld electronic device, both of which are contacting cell towers, exchanging data with data centres 100s of kms away, filling out detailed profiles of user behavior … rather than a paper ticket?
You will be the "boomer" some day. I wish people had more empathy.
An example: Presbyopia came on hard for me in the last couple of years Now I really appreciate low-vision affordances that, as a younger person, I couldn't have cared less about and would have seen as an unnecessary cost.
I used to laugh about the 'picture signs'; like the universal nose in book sign that means library. Or the airport logo on the exit sign on the freeway.
Until I spent some time in a country whose predominate language (and signage) was not english.
Maybe those pictorial signs are a good idea after all.
Exactly.
When OP is 85, I hope some whippersnapper 20 year old says to him, "Come on, grandpa. You need to get that neural advertisement brain implant like the rest of us, or you can't buy anything. Why should businesses need to support your lame smartphone? Step into the 22nd century, pops!"
No it’s often just stubbornness. My dad is 85 and he can take the time to learn anything he wants to learn. But refuses to change when he doesn’t.
My mom is 83, a retired school teacher and she has been using computers since 1986 and has an entire networked computer setup in her office with multiple computers and printers. She went from the original Apple //e version of AppleWorks to Office now.
> My dad is 85 and he can take the time to learn anything he wants to learn. But refuses to change when he doesn’t.
I think that's natural and reasonable. I'm certainly less tolerant of drains on my time as I get older. I can imagine that, at 85, I would be making a lot of calculations about ROI on my time.
And then that’s a you problem no one should be forced to make affordances for things you can do and are unwilling to do
This is why it's so important to iteratively adapt. I'm not saying you have to catch every new version, but to go from a NES to a PlayStation 5 would be a jarring experience like going from a dumb cell phone (or landline?) to an iPhone 17.
I would say catch enough iterations to keep the basic premise in mind, because there is a bit of personal responsibility to maintain technological literacy in the modern age. A telephone isn't really an esoteric device, either.
I think the most frustrating thing is that UI's largely haven't improved in 10-15 years, yet we still get constant changes from people trying to justify their jobs or manufacture "impact".
My Dad and I have had about 7 sessions just on copy-and-paste on the computer. He kind of got it for a minute there, but didn't use it enough, so now it's gone and he's back to just re-typing everything.
The second biggest reason (after freedom to install apps) why I don't use an iphone is: for the love of God I can't use the gesture to switch windows. It used to be simple swipe up from bottom. Now you have to do an arc or something from the corner. I can never get it right.
In a case like this, you just buy the tickets for your grandfather and print them out for him.
If the app is meant to defeat counterfeits or reselling the Dodgers won’t be willing to accept printed tickets.
It's not possible to make counterfeits with a modern ticketing system. Each ticket is a unique code, and they are scanned on entry to match with the codes in the system.
As for resale: The attendee name is tied to the ticket in these cases, and ID is checked at the door. I guess an app could be more effective for preventing this than normal digital/paper tickets.
> At some point, you have to cut off previous technologies because virtually everyone's moved to something better.
I don't agree that it's better. Why should I have to worry about my ticket running out of battery power or being such a high-value pickpocket target once I'm already in the venue?
The latter is a huge issue at music festivals for example:
- https://old.reddit.com/r/OutsideLands/search/?q=phone+stolen...
- https://old.reddit.com/r/electricdaisycarnival/search/?q=pho...
- https://old.reddit.com/r/coachella/search/?q=phone+stolen&in...
Can't just leave it at home if you need it to get in to the thing.
I'm not a fan of the "something better" phrasing myself. It's very much anti-systems-thinking.
Engineers should be honest that everything is a tradeoff. For the up-front convenience you get with phone tickets, you impose additional failure modes, dependency chains, and accessibility issues that simply weren't a problem with paper ticketing.
The "phone-ification" of everything will probably bite us in the behind in the future, just like the buildout of out car-centric environments does now.
>For the up-front convenience you get with phone tickets
Even as a person who does have a smartphone, I feel like phone tickets are anti-convenience because they rely on terrible apps like TicketMaster. It's only a positive trade-off for venues or whoever. If they texted or emailed me a QR code, that would be a positive tradeoff (and a texted QR code would probably work for this guy's flip phone too)
> I feel like phone tickets are anti-convenience because they rely on terrible apps like TicketMaster.
Case in point: I traveled from St. Louis to Houston for a concert a few years ago. Before I left home to catch my flight, I installed the Ticketmaster app on a phone and verified that I could bring up the tickets. When I tried it again in my hotel an hour before the conference, it no longer worked because the fraud detection in their app was apparently confused as to why I was now in Houston.
Fixing this took 45 minutes on hold to get a support agent and a frantic call to my wife so she could check the disused email address I used to sign up for Ticketmaster 20 years earlier and get the verification code they sent.
There are a lot of reasons to dislike digital tickets, but this is one of them. I used to go to dozens of concerts every year. Now it's such a hassle that I don't bother unless it's small venue that doesn't play these games.
That's fucking nightmarish. That's exactly the kind of scenario I'd think up and be told is "science fiction" by the kind of apologists who think forced usage of technology is okay.
We attended a once-in-a-lifetime show last fall (a performer who is aging and likely won't tour again) a two hour drive away. I wouldn't install the Ticketmaster app and played an old man "character" with the box office to get them to print my tickets and hold them at will call. I played the "we are driving in from out of town" card, etc, and they accommodated me.
I tried that with a closer venue a couple of months ago and got told, in no uncertain terms, "no app no admittance". I knuckled-under and loaded the app on my wife's iPhone (which she insists on keeping because Stockholm syndrome, I assume). I feel bad that I gave in (because it makes me part of the problem). I really wanted to see the show and I wasn't willing to forego it on principle. (Kinda embarrassing, actually.)
This is how I feel with the places that want to lock up your phone. There are safety considerations in that. But we're just astrotrufed into the "well this is better" PR campaigns from yondr.
They caught organized outside groups stealing phones from people at these events: https://abc7chicago.com/post/lollapalooza-stolen-cell-phones...
In most cases, digital event tickets are a QR code which is just an alphanumerical code. You can easily print them, so you don't have to worry about your phone.
I've never seen digital tickets which aren't printable.
> I've never seen digital tickets which aren't printable.
Here you go; now you have: https://help.ticketmaster.com/hc/en-us/articles/265843090383...
There's an amusement park we like to go to. We get season passes, which normally means renewing the small plastic card we got the first year. They've switched to app only this year, with the option of getting a card, if for some reason you cannot or will not use the app. I believe there's a small fee for issuing the card.
I believe their reasoning is much the same. They have some types of tickets, which can technically be handed over to others and abused. Think weekend ticket, where you hand the tickets to someone else for them to use on Sunday, or tickets that can be converted to season passes, if you do it the same day.
Blaming scalping doesn't seem entirely plausible to me, because there was always the option of making the tickets and season passes non-transferable. There are other methods. Especially if you're only issuing paper tickets as an alternative, e.g. yes we will sell you a paper version, but understand that it is absolutely non-transferable and non-refundable.
Some people might not want to bring a phone to these types of events and venues, which I can completely understand, neither do I, but I can live with it. The thing that bugs me is the lack of an alternative, which isn't really that expensive and which most won't even use. Because to some, the app really don't provide value and in those cases they solely exists for the benefit of one company. If you're paying the price of season passes to pretty much anything these days, I think you're entitled to some small level of personalized service and customization.
> Blaming scalping doesn't seem entirely plausible to me, because there was always the option of making the tickets and season passes non-transferable.
That's not desirable either. You often can't make it to all the games, so they want you to be able to give some tickets to friends, etc.
They're trying to prevent people who purchase the season pass to almost exclusively resell tickets to individual games.
So you really do need data to tell the difference -- are a third of the tickets mostly going to the same 5 other friends (OK, desirable), or are 95% of the tickets going to a different random person each time (scalping)?
>They're trying to prevent people who purchase the season pass to almost exclusively resell tickets to individual games.
Why do you need a smartphone to do this when a white list checked against ID at the door would suffice? As the other respondent says, you either generate a badge for the passholder, or have an approved list of guests that can use the season pass if the passholder chooses to offer it to others.
Generating badges has loopholes. (Trust me I’ve used them). And IDing every person can be a mission on itself. Pretty sure they will just start using biometrics in the next decade with or without your consent.
They already do! See Madison Square Garden [0] and The Intuit Dome [1]!
[0] https://www.npr.org/2023/01/21/1150289272/facial-recognition...
[1] https://stadiumtechreport.com/feature/intuit-dome-leaning-on...
>Generating badges has loopholes.
This seems to be an area where people will always find loopholes. Should this be a race-to-the-bottom in an attempt to make the most foolproof system possible, or do we at some point accept that maybe there's never going to be a perfect way to do this?
>And IDing every person can be a mission on itself.
I've worked the door at venues of various sizes, so it's not like I suggested this from ignorance. What we're talking about doesn't need to be "every person", just a specific set of ticketholders.
>Pretty sure they will just start using biometrics in the next decade with or without your consent.
I know I'm just me, speaking for me, and am a sample size of 1 that doesn't look like the general population in this regard, but there's no "with or without my consent" if I decide to opt out of going to games entirely. It'll be a cold day in hell before I give someone my biometrics just so I can watch someone try and hit a ball.
For sure you can ID everyone. Nightclubs, music festivals and even airports do this sort of thing all the time.
You just need good organisation, plenty of security stations, and an atmosphere that rewards people who arrive early - checking a stadium's worth of IDs over the course of 2-3 hours rather than over the course of 20 minutes.
What you can't do is charge $20 for a glass of beer then expect people to arrive 2-3 hours before the game starts.
And that will slow it down for everyone. Not to mention that HN users will then whine about the surveillance state
It could slow it down for everyone, or just the season passholders. If it does, oh well - there are worse things than taking an extra 10-15 minutes to get into a stadium.
>Not to mention that HN users will then whine about the surveillance state.
Pretty sure, given the comments in this very thread, that HN collectively understands there's more surveillance happening on your phone than with another person making sure the name on your ID matches the name on your ticket, or that your badge photo matches your face.
And HN users are not knowledgeable. When I challenge people to tell me how much surveillance can a third party app do on iOS without your permission…crickets.
They can buy their tickets at the door so they don't have to show an ID.
But you can do that the same way you do with the app. The does this by tying you ticket to your season pass, and to you. If you want to give the ticket to someone else, call the ticket office, ask them to re-register the ticket to your friend. If the ticket office notices that X number of tickets tied to that season pass has been re-registered, just refuse, or better, have the system refuse.
Fans can pick the easy option with the app, or if they really want, the expensive option where they need to go pick up the re-registered ticket if they want to give them to a friend. You can do this without the app, it's just more work, which isn't much of a hassle, as most won't pick this option and the passes are expensive enough that you can justify the extra handling cost of maybe 5% of the tickets.
They could force you to re-sell your tickets through the team MLB site, and to sell them for face value.
If the tickets come in at less than face value because of the season sale (not unreasonable), that can work OK (particularly for good seats for a team like the Dodgers). Most folks simply won't be able to sell all of the tickets. The goal isn't to make ad hoc ticket sales a necessarily profitable enterprise, the goal is to sell season seats, so you have to be somewhat accommodating. Pretty hard for anyone to go to all 81 homes games.
This can only go so far, unless you make the sold ticket not transferable.
They can also allow some margin to be just outright sold at market. I know several season ticket holders who sell the tickets to the big games (like Dodgers/Yankees) at a premium to help offset the entire season ticket package.
The last time I had a season pass to something, they printed me the equivalent of an employee id badge with my face and name printed on it. The badge was the ticket. How do you resell an individual ticket?
You literally hand them your badge. Requires a lot of trust sure, but I did this to see Real Madrid in spain via hotel concierge, their friends just handed us their badges.
It's pretty common for people who rely on networking to have season passes and hand out various games as "gifts" to whoever they want to get on the good side of.
Nothing about this requires an app. Just an ID.
Forcing the app is almost certainly for tracking purposes and justifying the decision for whatever braindead higher-up decided it was a good idea, therefore it must be made to work.
>They have some types of tickets, which can technically be handed over to others and abused. Think weekend ticket, where you hand the tickets to someone else for them to use on Sunday, or tickets that can be converted to season passes, if you do it the same day.
This is not abuse. If they sell a ticket for days worth of resources and you use two days of resources it's not abuse at all. That is a very consumer hostile attitude. If their business model relies on you not using what you paid for then they need a new business model.
The ticket is for “two days of resources that you personally can use”, not “two days of resources that can be used by any number of ticket-holders.”
It’s like the “free as in beer” explanation, I can’t pull up to my local bar running a promotion and fill up a tanker truck. Maybe they’re being hostile to me, a would-be customer, for that, but it’s simply not what’s being offered up.
Being advocate of the devil here.
Would you allow doing the same for gym memberships?
Using an example with even more shady pricing practices isn't going to help much here.
> If this guy has the money for a season pass (!) he has the money for a smartphone.
This logic justifies buying any other unrelated product as a condition of being allowed to buy baseball tickets. Does this mean that the Dodgers should be able to make "owning a car" also a condition of being allowed to buy baseball tickets? After all, if you can afford season tickets, you should be able to afford a car payment. Maybe they should only let people in who own rolexes because, hey, a season ticket holder should be able to afford a nice watch, too.
I can't think of any other case pre-smartphone, where I'd be denied the ability to buy a product simply because I didn't want to have to buy another totally unrelated product as a condition. There's probably an example that's not immediately coming to mind, but I don't think it was common or justified.
In some stadiums, the seat and the ticket are sold separately (example: Levi's Stadium [0]). You have to buy the seat and if you want to see a game, then buy a ticket to sit in the seat you own to watch that game (or rock concert).
Notes:
0 - https://levisstadium.com/tickets-suites/
Even before computers there were companies that required you to pay for a phone (call) in order to transact with a business. Or interact with a mail carrier to order something by mail order.
> I can't think of any other case pre-smartphone, where I'd be denied the ability to buy a product simply because I didn't want to have to buy another totally unrelated product as a condition.
Then you must not have been around pre-smartphone? Those of us who were will remember having to buy either banknotes or checks. Later, some would accept a certain type of card that you could buy. If you weren't willing to buy any of those things there was little chance of a deal taking place. Showing up with your goat to offer in exchange would get you laughed out of the room, even though there was an even earlier time where bringing a goat would have been considered quite reasonable. Realistically, the most desperate vendors will still accept your goat as payment if that is what's on the table, but, as I am sure you can imagine, it isn't worth the effort for those who have the luxury of choice. Where technology makes a seller's life simpler, they will demand it. Why wouldn't they?
None of this is comparable lock-in. You could buy checks from hundreds of different vendors and none had any lock-in on you. You could use a different vendor each time if you wanted. By certain type of card I assume credit cards, which can also be had from thousands of different banks.
Also, credit cards are free to get and checks cost a few pennies.
Not remotely comparable to being forced to buy a phone to get to a game.
Every bank and credit union I've banked with provides free checks, a free debit card, and no fees for ATM cash withdrawals.
If my bank gave me a free smartphone, I might be OK with using it for commerce. Maybe, maybe not. I don't know if I have a strong opinion on that one.
So what you are saying is, it's ok to exclude the Amish, and others who chose not to use a cell phone for religious (or other) reasons, from buying a season ticket. That sounds like discrimination on the basis of religion ;)
It does seem pretty unreasonable to me. He’s an 81yo life long dodgers fan. You make exceptions like you’ve always done. It’s what makes human, and sets us apart from computers.
Someone at the soulless corporation fucked up, and there will be no consequences, even though there should be.
They could have done this for like 5 game minutes of what they pay Ohtani (~$500).
But it fits with the general trend of MLB being openly hostile to their fans for a while now.
what they one day will pay Ohtani. Eh, they're not not paying him this year too, never mind.
> you have to cut off previous technologies because virtually everyone's moved to something better.
It’s hard to argue that having to manage a smartphone and its ever-changing apps and UI flows for purchasing and handling tickets, is simpler than buying a paper ticket with paper money. Is it really better?
It's better for the company not the customer
This. It's just another form of hidden inflation at play.
Smartphones, appification, and self-service is usually a downgrade from immediately preceding solutions for everyone except young folks who are money-poor and time-rich, so think nothing of wasting the latter. But this state flips for most around the time they start their career, or at the latest when they start families.
I don’t think this policy would pass muster under the ADA though.
The guy might not be sufficiently disabled to qualify - but for example if you have a blind person without a smartphone, you can’t tell them they’re out of luck - because you can clearly reasonably accommodate them without causing “undue financial hardship” by giving them tickets at will-call.
I think you’d be hard-pressed to find a blind person / person with low vision without a smartphone these days: they’re a near-essential window into services that aren’t accessible though plain paper.
> “undue financial hardship”
If they have already moved away from paper tickets for everyone else, now there is financial hardship, not to mention the loss to the team's economic position from scalping. Also smartphones have supported usage by the blind for years, particularly on iOS.
In the linked video they explicitly print him a paper ticket that he purchased separately.
Visually impaired people use smartphones too. If the app isn't supporting the accessibility features of the platform, it should still be held liable under the ADA.
(Unfortunately it won't as was found when Southwest Airlines was sued over this. Congress hasn't updated the ADA to include web sites since the ADA precedes the web and so it wasn't enumerated explicitly. Also unfortunately, the GOP who have never been huge fans of the ADA have blocked any attempts at patching that hole.)
But check out the settings on your iPhone/iPad or Android device. Whole sections dedicated to accessibility, especially for the visually impaired.
Visual impairment was just my naive example - but maybe there’s a better one that still persists.
Regardless, maybe there’s a path to legislation forbidding smartphone requirements for huge monopoly businesses like national professional sports leagues. I’d hate for ownership of a consumer device to become codified as a requirement for participation in activities like this.
Yes because we really need to give the government more power to selectively go after businesses - what could possibly go wrong?
> I’d hate for ownership of a consumer device to become codified as a requirement for participation in activities like this.
What is your reasoning for that sentiment? (I don't disagree)
Smart phones have had plenty of affordances for blind people. But they didn’t say he was blind or unable to use a smart phone
For that matter, he could/should look into filing an ADA complaint all the same.
Many stadiums make it near impossible to buy paper tickets. Even then they start arguing with you to prevent you from doing that.
> If this guy has the money for a season pass (!) he has the money for a smartphone. It seems like he just likes the nostalgia of paper tickets. But that's not a reason to add a separate ticketing flow just for him any more, like they had been up till now.
If you have money for a tea or coffee, you have money to send to me. Just because someone may have the means to buy something doesn't mean they they should be excluded from participating in cultural events for not purchasing and maintaining that particular thing. (Citizens often times over subsidize the stadiums in which the team is based in)
I think it's the golden state warriors that forces you to give them your biometrics to enter the stadium.
IMO, the right thing to do is grandfather in any existing season ticket holders, if they ask. Have them go to a specific entrance where someone can check an ID and mark them off a list. Simple job for an intern or whatever.
I agree. He's one of some tiny number of people that all the staff will know on sight. Even printing a ticket for him is just a formality really.
> Honestly, this doesn't seem unreasonable to me. At some point, you have to cut off previous technologies because virtually everyone's moved to something better.
It is completely unreasonable, but for a different reason. This is not technology A (paper ticket) vs tecnhology B (phone).
It is about open vs. proprietary. Paper is paper, it does not forcefully tie the user to anything. A phone is a requirement to be forced to do business with one of only two megacorporations, for something completely unrelated. He wants to buy a game ticket, not a phone.
Imagine you want to buy a sandwich but are told you must first buy an earring, completely unrelated and not something you want.
This is a strong disagree from me. What this is implying is that the customer now has to buy into two ecosystems: the expensive, Dodgers, tickets, and stadium world; and the far more perilous, casino in your pocket, attention sucking, hell, that's smartphones. Countless articles are being written on the effect of smartphones on the elderly (and teens). But you know what? Fuck'em. Because progress.
Another comment suggested grandfathering in customers like this. Sure, that's one idea. But generally, don't punish the masses because of the crimes of the few.
I'm certain VIPs don't scan their phones when they come to the game. This man is nothing short of a VIP.
How old are you? Some day you are going to get old and you won’t like that train of thinking.
This is probably the most heartless thing I have read all day. I worry about the future of the world if this is the norm
> Honestly, this doesn't seem unreasonable to me. At some point, you have to cut off previous technologies because virtually everyone's moved to something better. You also can't buy tickets any more by snail mail with an enclosed check.
As long as the technologies you move to are equally freedom- and privacy-respecting. If I have to use a non-free spyware app to buy your tickets I'm not buying. Now, if you let me pay for and download a PKPASS that I can use on my fully-libre GrapheneOS smartphone then sure.
> At some point, you have to cut off previous technologies because virtually everyone's moved to something better.
Perhaps. But in this case, they've moved to something worse. Digital tickets have their benefits, but paper tickets are still superior because they don't tie you into big tech relationships and don't require supporting infrastructure to work.
Paper also does not run out of battery or smash if you drop it.
It does, however, easily get lost or left behind.
Phones, on the other hand, can be charged. And if they're smashed, you can just log into your account on a friend's phone if you haven't replaced yours yet. If you can't even do that, you can go to the ticket window and they can look up your account information and verify your ticket.
In New York the commuter trains use etickets and if you smash your phone you can just log into your account on a friends phone, but they track how many times you do that any only allow 3 switches. They don't say 3 switches in a certain period, it just says you can only log in 3 times and then the account is locked. After that you have to call them -- and who knows what....
Paper doesn't spy on you.
If you don't give the app any permissions, it doesn't spy on you either.
It doesn't have any more information than the info you give it to buy the tickets in the first place.
> It doesn't have any more information than the info you give it to buy the tickets in the first place.
Many apps ask for permission to use your GPS position and other sensor data, even though they don't need it. Most non-technical people don't understand what that means and will just allow it.
I have absolutely never in 15+ years of having an iPhone had an app ask for GPS or sensor data when it clearly wasn’t necessary for functionality like a maps app or Uber.
It does when the ticket app demands Location access "to protect your security"
You can set location to only while you're using the app. And when you open it to scan the ticket, they already know where you are. You're at the entrance to the stadium where they scan your tickets.
And that's when you find out the app considers this usage pattern as a signal of fraud, so then you can't get into the event and have no recourse. Their app, their rules, your loss.
>If you don't give the app any permissions, it doesn't spy on you either.
We're talking about an 81 year-old who has never had a smartphone before and you're starting the sentence with "if"? And that's just that app, not the phone itself or anything else that someone brand new to, and ignorant towards, this ecosystem is going to encounter and not know what to do with.
> If you don't give the app any permissions, it doesn't spy on you either.
What about the other apps? What about the phone itself?
The guy already has a phone. Flip phones still track your location.
If you don't want other apps, don't install other apps.
>The guy already has a phone. Flip phones still track your location.
Locations from flip phones have to be triangulated. Smartphones track more precise locations and a lot more than just location data.
Great. If you're that paranoid, only turn your phone on to buy the tickets and when you're at the stadium. And don't use it for anything else.
This dude has previously paid hundreds of dollars per year because he wanted custom-printed tickets. He can pay a hundred for a cheapo Android to use exclusively for tickets and not give up any privacy at all, if he's more paranoid about tracking than the other 99+% of the population who uses smartphones just fine.
Well, depends where you drop it, paper is very fragile medium. Ever dropped an important paper into a puddle, or spilled a coffee on it?
Having to own anything beyond the money to buy something to buy something, is, in fact, unreasonable.
> At some point, you have to cut off previous technologies because virtually everyone's moved to something better.
No, this has not changed for the entire time physical tickets haxe existed. What has changed is the level of greed practiced by that industry.
Soooo money is worthless now? … because tech?
> If this guy has the money for a season pass (!) he has the money for a smartphone.
Right, but he is wanting to choose the season pass over the smartphone. If he buys a smartphone then he won't have the money for a season pass anymore. It turns out you only get to spend x units of currency once.
A cheap undubsidized Android phone is $40 on Amazon
Amazon also only sells digitally. So now he has to buy a smartphone in order to get a smartphone from Amazon in order to get tickets? The guy doesn't even want one smartphone let alone two.
Okay or Walmart are you now suggesting that the world should never move on from anything analog?
>Honestly, this doesn't seem unreasonable to me. At some point, you have to cut off previous technologies because virtually everyone's moved to something better.
I've gone entire years at work where no one ever mentions baseball or MLB. It is a dead sport. The NBA? Sure. NFL? It's practically an official US holiday. So if they want to chase off an octogenarian fan who will buy their season tickets because they demand he get a smart phone that he doesn't want to learn to use and wouldn't use anyway... why not? They've signed their own death certificate with that. This is firmly in "Please drink a verification can" territory, and I have no idea why anyone would be apologizing for them.
I agree, this is a good way to stop scalping and reduce costs by not having to print physical tickets. It's interesting to see the negative sentiment here given other threads about scalping overwhelmingly suggest we need government regulation to stop it. Well, here's a private solution to that problem but apparently that's also bad and requires threats of government action via the ADA... incredible.
Nothing's perfect. Some ideas to fight against things we don't like will come up, and then we'll see the collateral and go, "Oh, maybe that's actually not the best way to do it". That's okay! That's the way life goes! It's not "incredible" or hypocritical or whatever else you're trying to imply. What you're seeing is merely folk working through things.
Are we supposed to always jump at the first "solution", consequences be damned?
> If this guy has the money for a season pass (!) he has the money for a smartphone.
This misses the point.
The question is: why would a smartphone be required, to watch a local game?
It is not required to watch a game. At least not unless you are not using it as some kind of vision aid — although even then there are likely reasonable alternatives.
It is required to satisfy the desires of a vendor wanting to sell something. They make a smartphone a part of satisfying their desires because it makes their life a whole lot simpler. Same reason they won't give you season tickets in exchange for 12,000 bushels of wheat. They could, but why would they? If you don't want to play ball, so to speak, they are happy to sell their product to someone else who will.
> Honestly, this doesn't seem unreasonable to me. At some point, you have to cut off previous technologies because virtually everyone's moved to something better. You also can't buy tickets any more by snail mail with an enclosed check.
The problem is, in the end it leads to a society where you NEED a smartphone to enjoy basic human existence - and yes, access to cultural and sports events is a fundamental part of being a human.
That in turn almost always means: your smartphone must be either Apple or a blessed Google device. And that in turn means: no rooting (because most apps employ anti-root SDKs these days), no cheap AOSP phones, no AOSP forks like Graphene OS. And that is, frankly, dystopian when your existence as a human being depends on one of two far too rich American mega corporations. Oh and it needs to be a recent model too, because app developers just love to go the easy route and only support recent devices on recent OS versions.
And that's before we get into account bans (which particularly Google is infamous for), international sanctions like the one against the ICC justices, or pervasive 24/7 surveillance by advertising SDKs or operating systems themselves.
I genuinely don't think people making the, "Get a smartphone or be left behind," arguments really understand the magnitude of the assertion.
My wife and I had an appointment last week to apply for a line of credit. We talked it all through with the clerk and decided to go for it, so he started the whole process on his computer.
His jaw dropped half-way through when he asked for my wife's and my phone number, and I had to tell him that I don't own a smart phone.
Turns out you must have a smart phone because the system sends you some kind of code to verify your identity. Let that sink in: I am sitting in front of the clerk, but in order to identify me, he needs me to give him some phone number.
The only way we could finalize the application is by me asking my mother whether I could use her phone number briefly to get this over with. She forwared the code to my wife's phone. That worked in the end -- but so much for "identifying me".
> in order to identify me
We should stop accepting this ridiculous excuse. Our phone numbers are not identifiers. How does me telling a bank "My phone number is 123-456-7890" give them any assurance whatsoever that I am the person whose name will be printed on a loan document?
Well, my case is the best proof of that: the phone number I ended up using was my mom's.
It's most definitely baloney because I also had to provide ID. So, certainly there is no way I could identify myself "even more" by giving them a phone number than by giving them a government issued ID.
> Our phone numbers are not identifiers.
I think you missed the point. The process creates an identifier, by strongly associating you with the phone number.
This association allows the bank to quickly establish your identity later when you call up or use online services.
As the sibling commenter pointed out, in their case, it totally failed to create a meaningful identifier, because he used some other person's phone to get past the ridiculous gate.
It's not necessarily just for the 2FA snakeoil. The worst places snap on a glove and proctologize your network identity metadata (spilled by all the underlying carriers, IIUC), and sometimes even billing records with your name and address (more vulnerable if you're still on a postpaid). The US desperately needs a port of the EU's GDPR, for starters.
>Turns out you must have a smart phone
Any phone that can receive SMS, not a smartphone. You could purchase a burner flip phone for this purpose.
I don't think the assumption that SMS is enough is valid anymore.
My wife's elderly aunt has a flip phone that can receive SMS but not MMS. We just went thru an "identity verification" procedure with a major bank last week that sends MMS, not SMS, and could not reach her flip phone.
The whole ordeal was a huge pain in the ass and if my wife and I weren't there to help her it would have been completely impenetrable to her.
I could also buy a smartphone. The point is that I shouldn't have to.
Sometimes the code must be received through the bank’s app. I went though this process recently to open a new account (at a bank where I already had other accounts). I didn’t think much of it at the time, but if you didn’t have or want a smartphone, this could be a major problem.
The uncomfortable truth is that they most probably need your phone to check the online accounts you have. I believe most bank applications do it automatically as part of fraud prevention. May I ask, what is the country?
2-factor authentication codes via SMS are pretty common and don't require a smart phone. You haven't run into this before?
No, I don't really use a lot of service that require 2FA and for the ones I have to (e.g. work), there's always been a workaround.
But this might not really have been a 2FA case - I mean, I was physically sitting in the bank.
Had a similar process when helping my parents settle in after relocating to Spain recently. I ended up having to ask an acquaintance to put down their phone so I could get some verification codes or information about an appointment in order to sign them up for... a Home internet + mobile phone lines bundle.
Cherry on top of this dystopian situation was that the number needed to be a Spanish phone number. Couldn't be from a different country code.
I understand what you mean, however it's still quite hilarious that there is an user on checks notes hacker news, who does not have a phone.
This reminds me of the Japanese cybersecurity minister who did not use a computer.
Bonus points if you work at Apple, or Google and work on iOS or Android. Would explain a lot why they are the way they are.
It's not so hilarious, really; there's nothing like a stint in the sausage factory to put one off one's taste for sausage.
Many security/privacy nerds don't own end consumer gadgets etc...
Some folks go vegan after seeing how the sausage gets made.
I know Chrome / Chrome-adjacent googlers who swear by Firefox.
What are their reasons? I can imagine a few and I use Firefox myself, but I'd be interested in anything non-obvious.
I know I'm in the minority but I value privacy higher than convenience. I'm aware that not having a smart phone does not automatically equal total privacy, but I just cannot get myself to have a personal tracking device on me 24/7.
Ahem, more than one ...
Imagine being on hacker news and having an iPhone instead of a Pinephone /jk.
I'm always annoyed when some real-world good or service is only available to people with a smartphone, especially when it wasn't always so. Blue Bikes (rentable bicycles) were in the past usable with a membership card, but it got phased out in favour of an app.
My 75-year-old, retired construction worker dad’s fingers are nearly useless on capacitive screens; half a century of handling cement apparently has that effect. His deep East Texas accent was still only semi comprehensible to Siri the last time I had him try with my phone.
He recently missed several notifications from his truck’s dealership that the part they ordered was in and ready for installation, because they sent text messages that he didn’t read, instead of ever calling and leaving a message when no one responded to the texts. I’m terrified that there’s going to be a doctor’s office sometime that does the same, with more serious consequences.
He’s fine flying as long as one of us can buy the ticket for him and he just needs his ID at the airport; I dread the day airlines start requiring their stupid apps.
This happens to everyone's fingers to some extent because the fingertips dry out as you age. It's a huge source of frustration for elderly folks since it adds to the confusion around using touch interfaces. My family members have had some success moistening their fingers with a wet paper towel periodically as they use their devices, though of course that is impractical on the go.
Do iphones not have "increase touch sensitivity" as a setting? Thats all I had to do for my dad for him to be able to easily use it again, on a samsung though.
There are also phones with buttons again, the unihertz titan 2 elite looks good btw. Or Clicks addon keyboards.
I wish people would stop posting twitter links, they're a coin toss if they're even viewable
There are various extensions you can get to automatically redirect Twitter links to xcancel or something, very much recommended.
I don't like that these get submitted either, but unfortunately people do post worthwhile stuff there and only there, and I don't want to just categorically forbid those posts.
I like these being submitted.
Twitter still does have quite a lot of unique content that either appears there first or isnt accessible anywhere else at all, unlike paid article websites, previews without logging in actually work for the most part, and xcancel as you said is a thing. Which extension are you using for redirects?
This one is viewable
Posted 9 minutes before your comment... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47662987
My late mom couldn't receive the verification SMS from her bank. After investigation, it appeared it was actually an MMS that required a smartphone.
She could still go to her bank counter but service there degraded considerably for everyday things, and she was always told to do things online.
In the end the bank rep was kind enough to give her an old smartphone. But, for her, it sucked because it was much more complicated, had to be charged constantly and so on...
As a technologist, it is eye opening to do the tech support of loved ones...
We need to extend the ADA to protect people who are not technologically-abled.
Or who don't want to sell their soul to Google or Apple.
Accessibility benefits everyone.
Other people covered under ADA who might agree: partially sighted/blind people (yes there's screen readers and such but a piece of paper is often simpler to handle), people with reduced mobility or tremors in their hands, and probably more.
My vision has gotten pretty bad the past couple years (not correctable with lenses)... I'm now using a 45" display and still have to zoom in a bit. I have my phone close to maxed out on text/display size options.. and only then it becomes unusable in most apps if I move the slider to the final position...
While I can use my phone for a lot of things, some UX with the larger text/display settings is absolutely unusable... so many modal dialogs where the buttons are off-screen and cannot be pressed, for example.
I can understand a small group/org not going through the effort in a lot of places... but for multi-billion dollar organizations, corporations and large govt entities, there's really no excuse.
This is a really good point. I'm surprised the box office cannot print it for him for a fee at Will Call, which might be the solution here.
The OP video actually addressed this: He went to the physical box office, and they seem to be able to print individual tickets. Just not a season ticket, for some reason.
No, it's not. If you are physically incapable of operating a piece of technology, the ADA covers reasonable accommodations for that. If you are simply unwilling to learn how to use a piece of technology, it doesn't and shouldn't cover that.
Being a luddite is not a protected class.
Look at how conveniently you chose to ignore the fan's age, attributing his behaviour to unwilling or luddite! Or do you really have absolutely no idea, what it means to be 81 years old? Still, I would bet you have met at least some people of such an age.
That’s the age of my Microsoft office, three computer having multiple printer using mother…
I love technology but having to give money to google and apple should not be a reason with stop people from doing things that CLEARLY don't need technology.
Also that is not what luddite means, like come on even in the bastardization of the term, he is not precisely smashing the ticketing machines, he is just an old guy don't be such a redditor with this senior.
If your ticket was in the form of a piece of music that you had to perform on your violin to gain entry, would you feel the same way? Keep in mind, it’s only in the last 15 years that playing the violin in this world became commonplace and only in the past 5 that these performances became required to access common goods and services. Violins also still cost hundreds or thousands of dollars.
The problem with this argument is that forcing people to use technology, without proper training and against their will, introduces them to risks as well. Anyone with older parents/family can tell you the harms that come with phishing and other fraud scenarios that cost more than just accommodating people not using technology, both at the micro and macro level. Insulting people and bullying them into technology adoption when there are relatively simple fixes to the problem seem better than increasing risk exposure for no reason other than 'I believe that people who don't use technology are somehow lesser'.
The worst thing about this entire discourse is the root of the entire "just print this one guy his tickets on-demand" argument is that it assumes, at its base, that once you hit a certain age you immediately become a moron incapable of learning anything new or adjusting your day-to-day life at all.
And 80-year old person is just as smart as a 20-year old. He's perfectly capable of learning how to use a $50 smartphone to access his $5-200k/yr season tickets, he just doesn't want to. It sounds like he was told years and years ago they were moving this direction, and they've been printing him tickets as an exception, and they've decided to stop the exception. He's had 20 years to get a smart phone and learn how to use it. The fact that he now has to choose is a prison of his own making.
I don't think the discourse is about just this one guy, it's about an entire class of people for whom swiping around a smartphone is a bewildering experience they managed to live their whole life so far without. If you're not adept at it, it makes you feel stupid, maybe you haven't had that experience but there's more to being a luddite than stubbornness.
If I can get along with the rest of my life on a flip phone, it seems pretty unreasonable to buy a device just to buy sports tickets.
> If I can get along with the rest of my life on a flip phone, it seems pretty unreasonable to buy a device just to buy sports tickets.
I would agree. It also seems unreasonable to expect the organization to make an exception to a completely legitimate anti-scalping measure for one person.
Do you know how many old people get scammed per year in the United States because they are using technology that they are trained on, but assume that they have to use the technology in order to function each year with minimal practical gain relative to the costs? Its around 12.5 billion dollars in 2024, up from 10 billion in 2023 [1]. Why is introducing someone to that risk worth it to watch a baseball game?
Asserting that individual 'get smart' doesn't actually solve for the actual harms and if it were just simple, we would not be seeing the upward trends in fraud that we are seeing within the elderly.
[1] https://www.aarp.org/money/scams-fraud/older-adults-ftc-frau...
edit: fixed the years
The numbers you mention are total fraud losses. Most of fraud has nothing to do with phones, it is fraudulent money transfers and card charges.
80 year old people do not have the same neuroplasticity as 20 year olds. It is not reasonable to expect them to quickly learn new things that are constantly changing.
In particular, it's very reasonable to be 80 and decide "I don't want to deal with learning how to use a smartphone and getting one".
> It is not reasonable to expect them to quickly learn new things that are constantly changing.
Of course it is. Maybe if we didn't normalize people refusing to learn things for no other reason than "I don't wanna" they'd have better neuroplasticity.
> it's very reasonable to be 80 and decide "I don't want to deal with learning how to use a smartphone and getting one".
I agree with you 100% on this but it doesn't logically follow from that that you get to make the Will Call clerk for the Dodgers print your ticket for every game even though you've been told for multiple years that season tickets are going paperless as an anti-scalping measure.
Im going to be harsh, sorry.
In this case nobody is forcing them to buy a dodgers ticket. It’s a completely optional and absurdly expensive luxury good that is purely for leisure. They can simply not but a ticket if they don't want to accept conditions of sale.
Yeah... I mean, who says I should have to put in wheelchair ramps for my ballpark that seats tens of thousands? I mean, so few people use/need them, I should just be able to refuse service to those people. Right?
/sarc
I don't want to blow your mind but choosing not to have a smartphone and being in a wheelchair are not remotely comparable.
So, you want to force people to give money to specific, monopolistic, corporations? Why would I want a smart phone if I'm blind... how am I expected to use a smart phone when I am blind, exactly?
Because quality of life doesn't have a value in of itself. Especially for the elderly, they should be excluded from enjoying the end of their life simply because no wants to think of a solution to the problem that doesn't require them to introduce massive amounts of risk into their life which, also, negatively impacts their quality of life.
I agree with your assertion, but it made me think of a question.
Are Amish and Mennonites religiously protected luddites?
Most Amish under 30 have secret cell phones. It would only be the oldest generations without them. There are even lots of wink & nod arrangements where they may even have electricity in some outbuilding but they unplug it when elder comes to visit. It also depends on the Order as some are more strict than others. They generally aren't allowed to have electricity in "the house" but batteries and other workarounds exist.
They aren't as isolated these days as they used to be. If you go to Costco, you see them with 3 carts loaded 3 feet high of all the same crap everyone else is buying. A lot of times, they don't even transport it back via buggy but call the "Amish taxi service" which is people who drive them around town in large passenger vans. Even from a work source perspective, a lot have moved on from farm work and work in construction, roofing and other trades. If you go to a gas station in the morning, you'll see work trucks roll up and only Amish rollout to go buy soda and lunches or whatever.
[Source: I live in Lancaster and have for many years.]
There are large populations of Amish who don't use cell phones, landline phones, or anything. The closest they'd get to a phone call is asking a neighbour to call 911 in an emergency (assuming they're even willing to do that).
One group I am aware of will only use a payphone in the nearest town. They actually filed to force AT&T to keep a payphone there because the relevant tariff required AT&T to do so, and were the only people who ever bothered to make AT&T do this. So there is one payphone in that town that they go to and drop their quarters in to make phone calls.
There are no "secret" cell phones there.
Really interesting!
They don't really receive special accommodation for not using technology outside of being allowed to submit some required tax forms on paper instead of e-filing them, the logic being that the government requires them to do so under pain of punishment, so the government has to find a way to let them do it without violating their religious beliefs.
But there is not a general accommodation provided.
For sure, but I don't know how much of their luddite-ness (ludditude?) is simply a byproduct of their faith or vice versa :)
So, everyone needs to have $500 to be able to purchase a smartphone, otherwise they can’t participate in society?
I was referring specifically to the idea that the Americans with Disabilities Act should cover people who simply choose not to utilize or learn a particular piece of technology which has been around for the better part of two decades.
The "poor people don't belong in society?!?" trope is completely different (and kind of boring).
There are 50$ smart phones that could do that …
There's more "cost" to an 81 y/o person picking up their first smartphone than just the money they'll be spending.
Well context is important and this was in directly response to the (spurious strawman) claim that if you can't spend $500 on a phone then you are excluded from society.
Yea I'd argue even less. You can get a used android phone w/ shipping for $15 on ebay. A new android phone for $30!
That's the price of one meal at a restaurant...
lol not everyone wants/needs an iPhone
And yes. People need to get on with the times.
In the same way people "need" a power connection in their house. And water plumbing. And used to need a phone line to "participate in society"
So what's next?
Do they also need to have an age-verified Facebook account?
Plus an attested age-verified operating system on that phone?
Are they allowed to use GrapheneOS or do they need to use only the vendor's stock ROM image?
Is it OK if they turn off surveillance on the device or is that required too to "participate in society"?
I know you're joking but the future will be: No. Yes. No, stock only. No, surveillance required.
I don't think he's joking, some people are just like that
Is your argument, "Give up your privacy or be left behind"?
Good luck with that under the current administration.
Parking in my town can now only be paid via smartphone. Yes, almost everyone has one, but: there are still people who do not.
I love it how they can't think of any other way to pay for parking than via smartphone, but if you just park there without paying, they'll offer you many ways to pay the fine.
For how long until paying the fine requires a smartphone? And then for how long until you go to jail for not having a smartphone ?
They can think of other payment flows, they don't want them because an app gets them data they can resell or abuse.
I was (pleasantly?) surprised when my office parking lot implemented paid parking because it's doable via SMS and webpage (not an installed app). [thankfully my employer is picking up the tab, so I didn't have to do anything beyond providing my license plate numbers]
And sometimes, it seems like there's no fallback if you have no [working] smartphone. I knew someone who had a working smartphone, but a broken camera for few months. Couldn't scan any qrcodes to use these services till the phone was replaced.
on a roadtrip i stopped in a small town for lunch with street parking paid by app.
super frustrating that i needed to sit in my car and download an app and set up an account just to park for an hour in a town i'm never going back to
But you still did it, didn't you?
Congrats, you're an essential part of the problem.
don't you understand that this means a data trail to your location and government ID ? connecting to your ability to pay a legal fine? You are consenting to that ?
And your car, license and insurance are not such a connection?
The Dodgers could have so easily turned this into a huge win. After 50 years they could have just awarded him a paper lifetime pass. Scan this and get in for any game! It would have been so easy.
Or if they really wanted him to go digital, just buy him a smart phone and install the app for him!
No smartphone. A cheap wifi-only Android tablet without a lock screen and their stupid app on the home screen.
In Brazil you already can't access some government services without a smartphone, such as paying for municipal parking in various cities. So if you own a car but not a smartphone, you get a fine. Sadly the least of the country's problems.
There should be more noise about this here, but to whoever you talk about that issue they don't seem to grasp the situation, or simply don't care, and call you crazy/paranoid. I have been told you also need the GOV app for certain things related to companies.
Can't read the twit because I don't have an account.
https://xcancel.com/Suzierizzo1/status/2040864617467924865
There you go!
Original reporting source:
https://www.nbclosangeles.com/news/local/dodgers-fan-printed...
Up next: "Sorry, you need to have an active X account in order to redeem your season passes."
That's strange, because it opens and plays fine without an account for me.
They sometimes give a more firm account wall and sometimes let you slide a few tweets. It isn’t deterministic.
I don't think I've ever seen this firm account wall for single tweets outside of those marked as sensitive.
Inconsistent paywalls are a product now. The Times (the original) has shoe-horned in some kind of AI paywall [1] which claims to maximise conversions by varying how much you get to see and for how long. It pissed me off because I was logged-in to my subscription but it was blocking me anyway.
[1]: https://www.zuora.com/products/zephr/
Same here, not logged in to X and works just fine with Firefox.
Do you have uBlock Origin by any chance?
Any business that won't accept cash payments is too dumb to patronize.
I daily drive a Light Phone III, haven't had a smartphone in years and would rather never use one again. Our local concert venue requires an app for tickets, so I have just given up on the idea of going to major concerts or seeing our local hockey team play.
I was looking at the light phone 2 a while ago but don’t remember why I decided not to. Maybe they were out of stock.
I’ll check it out again… I would love to divorce my smartphone and only use it at certain times.
I’ve been using the Brick and Screen Time more often now.
The Light III is a great improvement over the II. If you are trying to use your phone less the II will encourage that just because the epaper is pretty janky and annoying. I gave my Light II to my son, which I hope gives him a generally negative first impression of phones.
A business fails when it ostracizes their customers.
I'm sure someone somewhere though this was expected friction and wouldn't be a problem.
For reference, this is the application: https://reports.exodus-privacy.eu.org/en/reports/com.bamnetw...
8 trackers, 49 permissions. Whatever reason they gave for requiring the application, evidently they couldn't resist selling out their users in the end. Disgusting.
Of course this is the actual reason they are forcing you to use the app. They dont give a crap about scalping.
...and I took this one personally.
I was in LA for the week recently and went to see a Dodgers/Angels exhibition game at Dodger Stadium. $27 for the nosebleeds at the best stadium to sit high up at; easiest $27 ever spent!
Except it wasn't that easy. Though the tickets were purchased through mlb.com, I ran into trouble logging in once I got to the stadium. Couldn't for the life of me get a verification code. Doing the walk of shame to concessions crossed my mind, but this wouldn't have helped none since there was already a couple at the window who were getting help from the person working the booth...on how to get the tickets through the app.
Fortunately I got the verification code and was able to get my tickets shortly thereafter.
Queue my frustration when I ran into the EXACT SAME FUCKING THING when I went to see a show in Chicago some time later. Only way to enter was by downloading some ridiculous-ass app to get my tickets. Couldn't even get them by email. Couldn't even get them by website!
I wasn't expecting to yell at clouds this close to my 40s, but I really guess it do be like that.
Can't imagine Boston or New York doing this. In Boston the'd end up giving the fan lifetime Dunkin Donuts or something on TV and just let him walk into the park since all of the ushers probably know him already. Dodgers are really missing the point here.
I noticed the barcodes on the reporter's printed tickets in that video. I hope a nefarious actor doesn't freeze-frame it and reprint them.
The ones that the reporter says were for yesterday's game? I guess if the nefarious actor also has a time machine, that'd be a pretty big risk.
This is another reason why etickets are used, they regenerate the barcodes
Alternate link or source instead of rando Twitter user:
https://www.nbclosangeles.com/video/news/local/why-longtime-...
https://www.instagram.com/arozier/reel/DWsHAvDjxeL/
If you think this is bad you should see the absolute cluster that is Intuit Dome's system.
People like to say "vote with your wallet, your privacy is your problem" with regard to smartphones, but like going to a baseball game has for a couple years now required you to have an Android or iOS device, same with many concerts and shows.
It's simply not reasonable to have to give up baseball and concerts to avoid your phone spying on you. And when accessing your bank or your local sports teams or your favorite band is tied up on your choice of phone, voting with your wallet becomes impossible -- I'm to give up patronizing my favorite artist because the venues use digital tickets? It obviously changes the balance of the equation such that nobody would ever choose their privacy over access to the world, and the vendors know this.
> It's simply not reasonable
> voting with your wallet becomes impossible
> nobody would ever choose their privacy
Drawing the line at skipping music concerts is a choice, which to you is impossible, but to others is trivial... There have always been these lines. It gets slightly harder every year to choose privacy because of people with your mindset about their specific thing they aren't willing to give up, but this ticketing change is just another brick in the wall, not anything substantially different. People who thought it was simply unreasonable and impossible to vote with their wallet about <every previous thing> have created the environment where this ticketing change happens. And your comment here goes on to create the environment where something even more important is smartphonified later.
My concern here is not that a simple transaction like purchasing a ticket to a baseball game requires a smartphone, but that the purchase now binds the customer to a personal and irreversible relationship to multiple entities (MLB, the Dodgers, the ticket agency, etc.) that (1) is not necessary, and (2) adds no benefit to the customer.
It's like having a chip implanted. That is, the addiction to requiring a smartphone.
Next step is to re-use the body parts, just as in Soylent Green.
This reminds me of a story my grandfather told me about how they needed to have a bunch of infrastructure and employees devoted to telegraph based notifications in 1970s India, because some bureaucrats refused to move everything over to telephone, and didn't want to be inconvenienced by having to use new technology.
Stuff like this should always have an analog failsafe like a printable ticket. I can’t be the only one who has a phone actually die out and about. Especially as this device gets a little old, battery drops maybe 1% every 2 min of screen on use. Even worse in crowded cell service situations like baseball games.
Also a good fallback if your phone screen cracked 2 hours before. But I can imagine part of the challenge they are facing here are scalpers. TicketMaster app 'rotates' the actual ticket every 30 seconds. Can't rotate paper.
I'd think that having a 2nd factor like presenting ID that matches the ticket would be sufficient there though.
You don’t need the app itself to get the rotating tickets, the algorithm is pretty dumb and was reverse engineered back in 2024. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40906148
You probably still need a device of some kind though.
Ticket counterfeiting is the core problem that they are trying to prevent. If there's a fallback method then that fallback method can be abused to forge tickets.
EDIT: I know complaining about downvotes is a downvotable offense itself, but I'm genuinely curious as to what is objectionable about this comment.
Forgery isn't relevant.
He's a known individual, a season ticket holder. He's not some random dude showing up with a paper ticket.
China's solution: your passport is your ticket. Not great for privacy, but persumably you also want to check that people banned from a stadium for their behaviour don't get in anyway.
It's very elegant.
The first time we traveled domestically in China I kept thinking that my wife had to be mistaken, there has to be some kind of confirmation we need to show in order to board. But nope, it literally is just show up with your ID.
Get a smartphone then
sad, but thats life.
The point is it doesn't have to be life. We can make things so that you don't need a smartphone, but we choose not to. That's a choice, not some immutable reality of the universe.
Can we make things so that you don't need a smartphone? I don't think this is as trivial as you're making it out to be.
Having a non-exfiltratable bearer token is really really hard. In order to present a zero-knowledge proof of the possession of a token you need to have some sort of challenge-response protocol. The simplest one, and the one in most common use (such as this) is a time-based method, where the shared knowledge of the current time represents the challenge.
The other method is to use civil identity as the challenge, and use government-issued IDs as the bearer token that the ticket is tied to. This doesn't scale well to larger events, and presents real challenges involved centralization of ticket exchange.
You can argue whether or not forgery is a significant enough problem to be worth this trouble, but that's a business decision, and as live events like this get more expensive forgery and resale become more and more of a problem, which end up locking out people like this who have legally and legitimately bought tickets but can't gain access to events because someone has stolen and resold their ticket.
Yet, somehow Major League had been selling tickets just fine for more than a century without smartphones.
It's a moving target. Forging tickets has gotten easier and easier, and as tickets get more expensive it becomes more and more lucrative. Law enforcement is generally not helpful for this sort of petty larceny so they are looking for structural ways to prevent it.
In past eras they used holograms and watermarks and special papers in an attempt to prevent forgery but these methods keep getting challenged by an ever more sophisticated criminal element. Moving into cryptographically secure methods is the last barrier here.
They could also rely on the state to match identities to tickets, but this approach does not scale and is frankly undesirable for the majority of people anyway.
Forgery is a non-issue -- this guy is a season ticket holder. Literally all they need is his government ID checked against a list.
The "problem" they were trying to "solve" is letting people sell some of their tickets to third parties, but not all of them. That is understandably how they arrived at a mobile application as a solution
But the problem of admitting the original ticket holder is simple as shit. Just .... check his ID?
What? We sold tickets for literally decades upon decades before smartphones came out. Of course you can do it, it's already been done!
Decades upon decades of holograms and watermarks on tickets to make them unforgeable. But it keeps getting easier to forge them. Meanwhile ticket prices keep increasing (venue space is one of the last things that's truly scarce) and the incentives for forgery keep increasing.
Even if we could make them truly unforgeable, people generally want electronically transferrable tickets. How do you propose to do this?
Go ahead and require a special gadget to get an "electronically transferrable ticket," no skin off my back. That is a feature I will never use.
Don't bother your season ticket holders about getting their own person admitted! I am standing in front of you, bearing identification, and you are whining about a mobile app?
If ticket prices keep increasing, it would seem the capability to print harder-to-forge tickets could be done with the extra revenue.
They could even do something like give him a little RFID token that can be used once. Tap it, gates open, go in, done.
We can, but why should we?
If you scroll up, there's a link to an example of why at the very top of this page.
If you work in an industry that is solely based off of customer delight, stories like these are what you are looking avoid due to brand damage. It is going to cost more time/energy to deal with the backlash than just coming up with a simple solution in the first place.
Why should we be beholden to the two mega-corporations who control the smartphone market?
You can certainly get a smartphone from another company and run AOSP.
But the problem isn't that this guy didn't want to use a smartphone, it's that he literally has never bothered to learn.
Why should society cater to those that literally don't care to learn the essentials?
If your imagination is that anemic then the process is compete.
Right? This is no country for old men.
privacy for one.
Because the future will be very dystopian if we place two tech companies as gatekeepers of everything in life. If Google locks your account and won't help you (which happens!), you don't want that to also take away your ability to bank, go to baseball games, etc.
If that is your threat model (it isn't for 99.999% of people), you can set up your own email domain for few bucks a year and it takes 20 minutes. Now no one can debank you and take away your ability to go to baseball games simply by killing your email.
But that's not the reason the guy in the video isn't using a smartphone. It's because he literally never bothered to learn or keep up.
..because we very recently decided to make it that way
Well he has no responsibilities. His entire calendar is free, for the past two decades. They came out 17 years ago. He can go get one and learn how to use it.
Kind of you to volunteer his time.
I have absolutely no sympathy for people who choose not to get with the times. We all took our time to learn how to use a smartphone. He could have too but chose not to. Probably refused to learn to use tap to pay, ATMs, etc as well. You chose to opt out of society. You are no longer part of it.
(I’m not happy that you need an app to buy tickets, but that’s a different thing — he didn’t choose not to own a smartphone out of principle)
Does "get with the times" include giving up all of the privacy issues that go along with buying a stock phone?
Read the last paragraph of my message.
>We all took our time to learn how to use a smartphone
Were you 65 years old when smartphones came around? My grandparents had 8 years of formal education, they never figured out how to use computers when they were alive, not because they didn't want to but because it was too complicated.
In a society where human dignity and respect matter you don't ignore people who can't keep up, you don't treat the elderly like obsolete machines you discard, a lesson you ironically probably learned from how you treat your phone.