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 "get with modernity" 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.
>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 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.
> 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, and later some would accept a certain type of card that you could buy, else there was no chance of a deal. Showing up with my goat to offer in exchange would get me laughed out of the room, although there was an even earlier time where bringing a goat would have been considered quite reasonable. Although realistically the most desperate vendors will still accept your goat as payment, but it isn't worth the effort for those who have multiple buyers on the table. Where technology makes their life simpler and buyers are willing to go along with it, they will demand it.
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.
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'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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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 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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
>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.
> 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.
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.
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, at the very least.
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?
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.
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!
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 ?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 "get with modernity" 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
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> 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.
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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.
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>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.
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> 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.
> 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, and later some would accept a certain type of card that you could buy, else there was no chance of a deal. Showing up with my goat to offer in exchange would get me laughed out of the room, although there was an even earlier time where bringing a goat would have been considered quite reasonable. Although realistically the most desperate vendors will still accept your goat as payment, but it isn't worth the effort for those who have multiple buyers on the table. Where technology makes their life simpler and buyers are willing to go along with it, they will demand it.
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.
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'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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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> 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.
They caught organized outside groups stealing phones from people at these events: https://abc7chicago.com/post/lollapalooza-stolen-cell-phones...
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.
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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.
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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)?
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>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.
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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.
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> 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
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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.
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.
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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.
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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.
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.
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
Having to own anything beyond the money to buy something to buy something, is, in fact, unreasonable.
> 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.
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>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.
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
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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.
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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, at the very least.
>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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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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.
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Good luck with that under the current administration.
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.
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 ?
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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?
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.
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.
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.
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Same here, not logged in to X and works just fine with Firefox.
Do you have uBlock Origin by any chance?
...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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Get a smartphone then
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.
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.
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We can, but why should we?
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..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)
>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.
Does "get with the times" include giving up all of the privacy issues that go along with buying a stock phone?
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