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Comment by pimlottc | Hacker News Reader

I’m frustrated that adding and tracking public events is still so primitive. Why can’t I just click a button and follow all the local events for my favorite artist/venue/team/theater/charity? Why do I still have to manually create events and copy and paste details? Why are there so few “add to calendar” and why do they often fail?

Part of it is down to the failure of micro formats and the semantic web, but it would seem like with today’s technology it wouldn’t be to hard for a browser extension to recognize an event and automatically extract the correct details (title, place, date, time).

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> Why can’t I just click a button and follow all the local events for my favorite artist/venue/team/theater/charity? Why do I still have to manually create events and copy and paste details? Why are there so few “add to calendar” and why do they often fail?

It's because of advertising.

Artists, venues, teams, theaters, charities and other performers may themselves not care - they make money on you being there. But everyone else between you and the event, they make money on your attention. They explicitly don't want you to streamline or automate event discovery and attendance scheduling. They want you to visit their pages, and be exposed to ads (whether it's regular ads where they get paid per click, or ads for different events with which they make money on you deciding to attend).

The "attention economy" is, by definition, built on making everything inefficient and full of hassle. To monetize attention, you have to make the users pay it first.

This may be an tired point, but I feel it bears repeating. The problem isn't one of technology - the tech for what you want exists, and actually worked much better in the past. The problem is businesses: they actively don't want you to use the Internet in this way.

I agree there are market forces fighting this. That’s why I’d like to see better event detection and handling built into user tools. It’d be great if I could, say, right click on a date and “add to calendar”, with details auto-populated via ML or site-specific algorithms. Or maybe I could paste a URL directly into my calendar app and it would scrape the details for me. Seems like it could be doable.

I run a free hand-curated concert calendar in NYC[0] with a friend. It's all operated manually and we still end up with 15-20 great shows every night. If this were automated or scraped, you'd have 250 events on your calendar per day.

Sure it might work if you just pick one venue, or a handful of artists. But it's not particularly helpful since you'll either be overwhelmed by spam (venue shows you're not interested in) or you'll inevitably be missing out on a lot of great events (since you're filtering on very specific parameters).

On our app, you can swipe on any show to add it to your phone's calendar instantly. 60 seconds daily or a few minutes each week and you can build your own subset calendar from our already curated calendar. It's honestly very efficient and low-tech.

I do subscribe to some remote calendars like my favorite sports team (NBA provides per-team calendar URLs). If you're in a smaller town with just a few venues, I bet you could do that too. For the privacy-conscious among us, you can always route them through Cloudflare Workers pretty easily.

[0] https://tappedin.live

Although I am nowhere New York, I want you to know that I think your hobby project of curating a concert calendar is bitchin'.

When viewing the website on my desktop computer(mac OS, Firefox), the "add to calendar" functionality that you mention being in the phone app is not, so far as I can tell, available. Perhaps I missed the button?

Live music is a ripe market for a new social network!

There's a few music apps, but they focus only on the audio. I wish there were a combined app for managing everything together.

Listening to music (Spotify, YouTube, iTunes), keeping track of what music I've listened to (Last.FM, iTunes play counts), making playlists (Spotify, YouTube, iTunes), organising playlists into folders (iTunes), syncing music to devices offline (iTunes).

I hear about bands I like being on tour (Facebook, band websites, posters), I buy tickets (Ticketmaster, LiveNation, trains), go to events (iCal), take photos (iPhoto), and keep track of the bands I saw live (Excel).

At those events, I buy physical T-shirts, hoodies, posters, and CDs, and get them signed by the band when possible (NFT, Wise, bank cards, cash). I meet other fans while waiting in the queue, and exchange contact details (Contacts, Facebook, WhatsApp, WeChat, LINE, KakaoTalk, iMessage). I then see the other bands that friend likes (Facebook) and check out their music (Spotify, YouTube, iTunes) and the cycle starts again.

When I listen to a song, my mind still makes connections to the memories of that time I crowdsurfed while the band played it on Warped Tour '08 in LA during my exchange programme to California. Having software that could help me create the links to organise all those memories would be wonderful. It doesn't exist yet though, from what I can tell - so I hope someone will write it!

Third party services are totally capable of this. Google Calendar has a "subscribe to calendar" feature that puts every event in somebody else's calendar into yours. I know of several clubs and fandoms that use this feature to track public events, and at least one music venue near me uses it as well.

Agreed! and they do this for holidays, sport games, all sorts of stuff.

Add Calendar > Browse Calendars of Interest.

The gym I go to also publishes their calendar as a google calendar I can subscribe to. So maybe it's more of the adoption concern that the GP is highlighting.

That’s true, there are actually tons of calendars publicly shared via Google Calendar but discoverability is terrible.

On the other hand you can click a link on a web page and have your calendar filled with spammy fake calendar events advertising who knows what.

It's not a failure of the semantic web, but more a failure of no one creating a shared calendar like that. (And Facebook not giving API access to calendar events).

Didn’t Facebook used to provide a personal calendar feed at some point? I used to recall it working for me in the (distant) past.

Facebook still provides a personal calendar feed, not a feed to events on some Page/Group. So you have to actually visit Facebook (watch ads) and add events to your facebook calendar, which can then appear in your calendar app.

All of these platforms end up more closed as they get bigger. Why let someone view events in their calendar for free when you could get them on your app and looking at adverts.

> Why can’t I just click a button and follow all the local events for my favorite artist/venue/team/theater/charity?

Because it costs time and money to collect and maintain those data. And you need a proper technical solution to let other use those data in a meaningful way. Usually it busts at the second part, because either the people have not enough time or expertise to offer exportable data; or it's not in their interesst, as they earn money from presenting them to the users.

The whole self-managment-space sucks because everything is so one sided. Other people must do something and offer something to make it work, and we as the users have little to no way to make things work from our side with little to no effort/expertise.

The real joke is, there are all kind of specialized solutions and ugly hacks from users to make things work. But all of them are isolated solutions. What we might need is a gamechanger to empower the users, simplifying automation of those things from our side. Home Automation has it's vibrant community with home assistant, node-red, etc. Why does something like that does not exist for work automation? IFTTT&Co. is the best we got so far, and those are commercial solutions running in the cloud, not in our homes/desktops.

Our local MLS team had a feature to add the game schedule to your calendar. I was excited, but it turned out that for Google Calendar you had to grant a third party app read and write access to all of the data connected to your Google account, including your emails. Surprisingly, Google did a good job of explaining the possible consequences of that, including all your data being irretrievably deleted.

So I added all the games by hand, and a few weeks later, the entire second half of the season was rejiggered.

You should be able to do this with a third party service such as https://fixtur.es/en/team/philadelphia-union

I route my remote calendars through Cloudflare workers for a modicum of privacy. It's as simple as running a basic open source relay and prepending the worker URL: https://github.com/Zibri/cloudflare-cors-anywhere

Yes, unfortunately even when there is a calendar integration offered, it’s often through a “heavyweight” oauth-style API that requires all sorts of crazy permissions…

> Why are there so few “add to calendar” and why do they often fail?

In my experience (using iOS + macOS) they're pretty common and always work. What kinds of failures do you see?

Sometimes they try to be clever and detect my calendar provider and do it wrong. Sometimes they request oauth-style API permission to my calendar. Sometimes they link to a .ics file that isn’t handled.

Same here. If you use google calendar or Apple cal it often works fine.

It sounds like you have 2 issues here: 1. You need a user based event recommendation service 2. You need a personalized calendar subscription from that service (These don't have to be connected services)

I think a lot of this comes down to walled gardens kicking out formats from being developed. If we had a standard for event announcements, I think we would have had a chance.

I don’t mind doing my own leg work finding events, it’s just having to manually enter them all into my calendar that is tedious.

Personally i have a better experience, with most places sending me an email that says“ Do you want to add this event?” And i click yes and it gets added to my calendar with location or Zoom link, etc.

I also had a shared calendar with all of the events for my lab synchronized.

I don’t think this is open calendar because it was Google, but it made events pretty seamless.

Gmail does a pretty good job with this, but there are some scenarios that don’t work properly; if I recall right, one is when you get a forwarded invite, you get the “add event” dialog on desktop but not on mobile.

Given the (commercially-driven) failure of the semantic web, I'm in favour of diversity (even if at the expense of convenience). Sooner or later network effects means this sort of service will likely still end up as a monopoly in the hands of some F**G organisation (probably G) but in the meantime we can live in hope.

Technically, there is lots that should be possible to do here.

I used to run an events tech listing site and we had an export/share box with various feeds, filtered or otherwise. We heard anecdotally that many people just imported whole feeds, in ical or rss formats. One company used to pick events into their company calendar and we had a "add" button that worked just fine for them.

There is a comment about commercial interests - that can be one problem. I said "anecdotally" because it's pretty impossible to get accurate usage figures with a lot of this stuff. I decided that counted as a minor inconvenience for my use case and did it anyway as I thought it was the right thing to do. But I can see in some companies that would be a hard sell. I suspect that's why some people end up with "Give us write access to your google account!" solutions. (I always say no.)

> Why can’t I just click a button and follow all the local events for my favorite artist/venue/team/theater/charity?

Having moved on from the tech listing site, I've now got a side project that is trying to do just this. It's at https://www.theoccasionoctopus.net/ I don't know whether to sell it as like Twitter for events? Basically you follow accounts that interest you, these accounts promote events they thing are interesting, any you also think are interesting you can copy to your own account/calendar. I'm working on it slowly but it's already useful for me, so that's fine and I'll just carry on.

But the real problem here is getting people to publish any kind of structured data on event listings.

There was one event organiser I used to follow; they had events with schema.org markup on their site. It wasn't to hard for me to write a small Python scraper bot that got the events and added them to an account/calendar in my app via it's API. But then they redesigned the site and lost the schema.org markup! I actually know the dev team on this site so I kept asking them to put the schema.org markup back but they never did. It went on their backlog and I guess just never became important enough.

There are some other event apps working on the same kinda thing as me and I support any of them that have open data feeds - anything to show people there is value to providing open data feeds is good.