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Comment by illvm | Hacker News Reader

Look, if the box office said "we're auctioning off all the tickets, there is no set price" then I would be inclined to agree with you. But that's not what happens here. Scalping with bots is someone profiting off of the work of others. It's borderline theft. Moreover, it's already illegal in many states and further widens the chasm between the rich and the poor. I don't understand why you would defend such practice.

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What cheeses me off is that the artists aren't making that money. Under an auction system more of the money would go into artists' pockets rather than scalpers - which is surely something hardcore fans would want.

That is not correct. Some artists sign deals guaranteeing them more than 100% of total face value. Others put tickets on the secondary markets themselves.

If any system does not funnel a huge amount of cash to the artists it would be changed immediately.

I'm merely saying that scalping wouldn't happen if tickets were priced closer to their actual value - aka what people are willing to pay.

Scalpers (and all the technology behind them) would not exist, or exist in very limited capacity if people were not willing to pay whatever the amount is.

> we're auctioning off all the tickets, there is no set price

That includes an insane amount of overhead, on both the part of the venue and the end user. Perhaps one of you programmers can come up with some machine learning algo to more correctly price tickets in the first place so artists get more money? Isn't that the end goal?

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