81yo Dodgers fan can no longer get tickets because he doesn't have a smartphone
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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...
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.
In 50 years, everyone's going to have an advertisement-injecting brain implant, and stores are going to require you to have one in order to purchase anything, and they'll lock you out of commerce as a filthy Luddite if you don't get one. And, 50 years from now, commenters on HN will defend those businesses because the implant is "modern" and supporting those ancient smartphones and credit cards is hard to do.
When I run into this (most recently at a hospital), I tell them "The court doesn't allow me to have a smart phone because I'm a hazard to national security.†"
When they argue (very rarely), I tell them "Take it up with judge Kelso in the 225th District Court. He's in the phone book." That's usually enough for them to break out the backup non-smartphone plan. In my experience, there's always another way, but they're just too lazy to do it.
† Absolutely a lie, but I really don't GAF.
I’ve been here and I’ll say I’d rather lose in logical argument, then win through lies. It’s so corrosive and people who know you either know this about you or will learn it. Turn back now while there’s still a chance.
Do the Dodgers have the right to exclude non-smartphone owners from participating in commerce with them? I suppose they have the legal right to, but we have a visceral reaction to it because it is morally questionable, and even smartphone owners can easily come up with examples where they'd be harmed by similar discrimination: The Dodgers also have the right to exclude non-smokers. They could say tomorrow that you can only buy a season ticket if you're a smoker, and I think that would be considered equally unacceptable to most of us.
It’s vague enough about what a disability is, that something like “my hand tremor and farsightedness preclude using a touchscreen, I request a reasonable accommodation” is a valid request. If they deny admission and accommodation to somebody incapable of using a smartphone, there is a whole army of lawyers that will gladly take the case on contingency.
As you note, the app is not inherent to seeing a game, or preventing resale. There’s no reason an id and confirmation number can’t be used to get him in.
Such abuse is an insult to everyone who needs it, everyone who engages with it in good faith, everyone who spends gobs of money to make events and services accessible to those with genuine need.
I don’t rule the world but if I did abusers of protective rules would be summarily executed. (Don’t vote for me. I’ve got a short but significant list of similar policies. Scammers those guys would have targets on their heads, kidnap for ransom criminals those guys too)
For sure. If that was true the answer would be "charge the non-app users a nominal fee to cover the cost".
Invasive tracking is the point, not the cost. It's anti-consumer.
>Invasive tracking is the point, not the cost. It's anti-consumer.
The last (and likely the last) time I went to an MLB game (not the Dodgers), perhaps six years ago or so, I was required to install a smartphone app when I purchased my tickets, keep that app on my smartphone for before and during the actual game. In the several months after buying a ticket and seeing the game, I received no less that 100 spam email messages (I was required to provide an email address as well) from the team's "partners."
What's more, not only was there no option for a paper ticket, if I left my seat during the game to get food/drink, I was required to have my smartphone and present my "ticket" via their app to security personnel when I returned to my seat. Every time.
As I said, even though I was (and am) a life-long fan, I will never go back to the stadium to see a game. It was far too invasive and inconvenient.
Edit: I'd add that I couldn't even block emails (which I routinely do at the server for other emails) from those "partners" because there were emails that were required to obtain my tickets. That isn't me not wanting to "learn" something, that's me not wanting to receive multiple spam emails every day from the same source.
Then why is 'I don't wanna' sufficient justification to force non-critical services to support your preferences forever?
- people should have more rights and protections than corporations
- people should be able to have a normal, full life in society without being constantly surveilled and manipulated
- people should be given reasonable accommodations to live in said society
No policy or law shall be enacted that directly or indirectly requires a use of a computing device where any other alternative at all is possible. Where offering other alternatives presents a cost, that cost (and only that cost, with no markup) may be passed on to the consumer.
I could see someone arguing you need a specially trained staff member or supervisor to verify your ID for anti-scalping, which they don't need to do for other e-tickets. Say only one person uses this option all season, they could be asked to pay for an entire employee's salary/benefits.
It's a bit hyperbolic, but supporting non-standard workflows is organizationally expensive with many non-quantifable costs.
Also will you need a $xx/month cell phone subscription plan? With a credit check and everything?
I have a friend who is legally blind. He has the font size turned up several notches on his phone so he can just about see it with a huge magnifier on his remaining eye. A majority of the apps on his phone are absolutely not designed for increased font size and are a nightmare to navigate.
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.
It's 2026, we've seen that free speech absoluters don't actually care about protecting all speech.
We've seen 'small government' and 'no government power over your life' supporters suddenly just fine with it when women's right to choose is taken away by the government. Or when the government wants to decide/legally enforce gender their gender definition.
We've seen the 'less government' people do nothing as the Feds trample local laws, illegally seize voter roles (voting is a states issue), attempts to inject federal requirements into elections and attach what is a large cost for some people to the right to vote.
So we're going to need more nuance than a disengenuous 1980 platitude on the topic.
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.
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.
Swipe down from the top. No, the other top.
Click share, now click "find in page". Wait, that doesn't share at all?
The failure of the well-intentioned but insufficient currents solutions is well underlined by this case. Sure, you could get this guy an android phone with a custom launcher, or an iPhone on Assistive Access, and he might be able to place a call. But good luck setting him up on Ticketmaster, or the Dodgers website, or wherever they expect him to go to redeem and utilize his tickets.
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 that's natural and reasonable. I'm certainly less tolerant of drains on my time as I get older. I can imagine that, at 85, I would be making a lot of calculations about ROI on my time.
Edit: For those seeing an argument in my statement above re: forcing people to use technology or forcing business to make an accommodation for people who don't want to use technology: I am not making a statement either way. I'm simply saying it seems logical and reasonable, natural even, to value your time more when you have less of it.
But if you don't want to, then you shouldn't be expecting other people to accomodate you.
1. enter your language
2. enter your region
3. enter your wifi and password
4. select your wifi (why 3 didn't do this I have no effing idea)
5. create a MII, you can't skip this step though you can pick a pre-created one
6. link your MII to an account - you can skip this but the device is useless without an account if you didn't buy games on physica media
7. Setting up an account shows a QR code so now you have to get our your phone
8. Enter your email and get send a verification email
9. switch to your email app and find the code
10. switch back to your browser and enter the code
11. Fill out your name/address/phone etc....
12. Now you want to download an app so you can use your switch so, pick e-store
13. Get QR code and scan
14. Get told you were sent another email verification
14. Go to email app and get code
15. Switch back to browser and enter code
16. Type in your CC Card info
17. Now pick a game to purchase
18. The purchase button is off screen after a bunch of legalize before it and no indication you need to scroll down
19. Choose purchase
20. Get told you need to verify again (in a tiny box you can check "remember me")
there were more steps. The whole process took about an hour, maybe longer
Even with all of that, there just a ton of stuff about a Switch that's taken for granted or poorly designed. As an example, he wanted to play Switch Sports Golf. The Switch home screen assumes you're using both controllers. At some point Switch Sports Golf switches to using just one controller. That's not clear at all. Another example, you pick Golf. It displays a screen showing you to hold the controller down and press the top button (X), but also on that screen is a generic, "press (A)" to continue this dialog. It's a very poorly designed screen giving to conflicting directions.
I get it, he's not the target market.
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.
Same with the DVD player.
Now, at 94, he’s on Netflix, no problem.
He has a flip phone.
As for resale: The attendee name is tied to the ticket in these cases, and ID is checked at the door. I guess an app could be more effective for preventing this than normal digital/paper tickets.
You can swipe up from the bottom, just as you described. That brings up the app switcher.
Or you swipe along the bottom in a straight line (no arc, no corner) to go directly between apps rather than choosing which one. Good for rapid switching.
I’m 90% sure it’s the exact same for Android. I switch every year or two and the most recent was in August I think.
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.
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.
Even as a person who does have a smartphone, I feel like phone tickets are anti-convenience because they rely on terrible apps like TicketMaster. It's only a positive trade-off for venues or whoever. If they texted or emailed me a QR code, that would be a positive tradeoff (and a texted QR code would probably work for this guy's flip phone too)
Case in point: I traveled from St. Louis to Houston for a concert a few years ago. Before I left home to catch my flight, I installed the Ticketmaster app on a phone and verified that I could bring up the tickets. When I tried it again in my hotel an hour before the conference, it no longer worked because the fraud detection in their app was apparently confused as to why I was now in Houston.
Fixing this took 45 minutes on hold to get a support agent and a frantic call to my wife so she could check the disused email address I used to sign up for Ticketmaster 20 years earlier and get the verification code they sent.
There are a lot of reasons to dislike digital tickets, but this is one of them. I used to go to dozens of concerts every year. Now it's such a hassle that I don't bother unless it's small venue that doesn't play these games.
I've never seen digital tickets which aren't printable.
Here you go; now you have: https://help.ticketmaster.com/hc/en-us/articles/265843090383...
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.
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)?
Why do you need a smartphone to do this when a white list checked against ID at the door would suffice? As the other respondent says, you either generate a badge for the passholder, or have an approved list of guests that can use the season pass if the passholder chooses to offer it to others.
Fans can pick the easy option with the app, or if they really want, the expensive option where they need to go pick up the re-registered ticket if they want to give them to a friend. You can do this without the app, it's just more work, which isn't much of a hassle, as most won't pick this option and the passes are expensive enough that you can justify the extra handling cost of maybe 5% of the tickets.
If the tickets come in at less than face value because of the season sale (not unreasonable), that can work OK (particularly for good seats for a team like the Dodgers). Most folks simply won't be able to sell all of the tickets. The goal isn't to make ad hoc ticket sales a necessarily profitable enterprise, the goal is to sell season seats, so you have to be somewhat accommodating. Pretty hard for anyone to go to all 81 homes games.
This can only go so far, unless you make the sold ticket not transferable.
They can also allow some margin to be just outright sold at market. I know several season ticket holders who sell the tickets to the big games (like Dodgers/Yankees) at a premium to help offset the entire season ticket package.
Very common.
Band X is playing at Stadium Y. Promoter Z buys 10,000 commercials on the local radio station, paid in part with cash and in part with tickets that are given to radio station sales department, which gives them to the clients; and the station's promotions department, which gives them to contest winners.
If you'd prefer additional amenities, we'd be happy to discuss the leasing of one of our suites with great views, perfect for corporate hospitality.
Forcing the app is almost certainly for tracking purposes and justifying the decision for whatever braindead higher-up decided it was a good idea, therefore it must be made to work.
Disney World had this trouble with their "Florida Residents Pass" - which was a lower cost annual pass just for Florida Residents. So they introduced face scanning technology to stop that. Other people would swap multi=park and multi-day passes to friends. So they introduced fingerprint scanning to stop that.
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’s like the “free as in beer” explanation, I can’t pull up to my local bar running a promotion and fill up a tanker truck. Maybe they’re being hostile to me, a would-be customer, for that, but it’s simply not what’s being offered up.
Would you allow doing the same for gym memberships?
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.
Notes:
Then you must not have been around pre-smartphone? Those of us who were will remember having to buy either banknotes or checks. Later, some would accept a certain type of card that you could buy. If you weren't willing to buy any of those things there was little chance of a deal taking place. Showing up with your goat to offer in exchange would get you laughed out of the room, even though there was an even earlier time where bringing a goat would have been considered quite reasonable. Realistically, the most desperate vendors will still accept your goat as payment if that is what's on the table, but, as I am sure you can imagine, it isn't worth the effort for those who have the luxury of choice. Where technology makes a seller's life simpler, they will demand it. Why wouldn't they?
Also, credit cards are free to get and checks cost a few pennies.
Not remotely comparable to being forced to buy a phone to get to a game.
Likewise, last time I was at the mall there were dozens of smartphone vendors in that one place alone.
> Also, credit cards are free to get and checks cost a few pennies.
There are plenty of zero-down smartphones available too. Nothing is free, of course.
> Not remotely comparable to being forced to buy a phone to get to a game.
Nobody was talking about comparisons, but if you really find it necessary to take us off-topic, Ferrari has long required you to first buy lower-end Ferraris if you want to buy higher-end Ferraris. That predates smartphones as well. Rolex, Hermès, etc. have all done similar things. Needing to buy things in order to buy other things is nothing usual in the world of luxury items.
If my bank gave me a free smartphone, I might be OK with using it for commerce. Maybe, maybe not. I don't know if I have a strong opinion on that one.
Plenty of people can't even get bank accounts.
It's absolutely comparable lock-in.
Someone at the soulless corporation fucked up, and there will be no consequences, even though there should be.
But it fits with the general trend of MLB being openly hostile to their fans for a while now.
Perhaps. But in this case, they've moved to something worse. Digital tickets have their benefits, but paper tickets are still superior because they don't tie you into big tech relationships and don't require supporting infrastructure to work.
Phones, on the other hand, can be charged. And if they're smashed, you can just log into your account on a friend's phone if you haven't replaced yours yet. If you can't even do that, you can go to the ticket window and they can look up your account information and verify your ticket.
> If you can't even do that, you can go to the ticket window and they can look up your account information and verify your ticket.
Queues and not long to catch a train, stations with no staff present... The latter has happened to be on the Tube and I had a problem exiting (with a conventional ticket!).
So, the app isn't necessary then?
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?
Smartphones, appification, and self-service is usually a downgrade from immediately preceding solutions for everyone except young folks who are money-poor and time-rich, so think nothing of wasting the latter. But this state flips for most around the time they start their career, or at the latest when they start families.
I ended up installing Big Launcher[1] as an alternative android launcher and configured it so it has buttons to ring three people. That's it. Even then, then confirmation yes/no dialogue when she presses "End Call" gave her a lot of anxiety initially.
I recently had to setup access to a local streaming service on my step-dad's TV recently. The amount of hoops necessary, including installing their stupid app on a phone, and entering passwords for several different accounts, several times, was absolutely ridiculous. Being technologically adept I found it an absolute PITA. It was a complete non-starter for him.
My point is that your, "If he can afford a season pass, he can afford a smartphone," comment comes across almost as callow as the attitude of the Dodger Stadium management towards the very real issues of getting old in a world that is moving faster and faster technologically.
[1] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=name.kunes.and...
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.
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.
(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.
Regardless, maybe there’s a path to legislation forbidding smartphone requirements for huge monopoly businesses like national professional sports leagues. I’d hate for ownership of a consumer device to become codified as a requirement for participation in activities like this.
Maybe I'm just out of touch, but it feels like every day I look at hackernews, there's another articulate response patiently explaining why it's ok for companies to sell you things you don't own, and dictate how to use the things you think you own.
I just fundamentally don't accept it, and find it exhausting to engage in the constant overton window shifting.
> 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.
What if I do own a smartphone, but it runs neither Android nor iOS, it runs GNU/Linux? Do you consider that a previous technology, too? I'm pretty sure they provide no app for me.
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.
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.
He's 81 and that's your first thought? This dude was in his twenties before long distance telephone calling via phone numbers was commonplace. That was the new technology he learned as a young adult man.
No, this has not changed for the entire time physical tickets haxe existed. What has changed is the level of greed practiced by that industry.
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.
I doubt VIPs go through the same entrance, lines and checks as regular folks.
Yes that older dude should have been treated as VIP.
It is completely unreasonable, but for a different reason. This is not technology A (paper ticket) vs tecnhology B (phone).
It is about open vs. proprietary. Paper is paper, it does not forcefully tie the user to anything. A phone is a requirement to be forced to do business with one of only two megacorporations, for something completely unrelated. He wants to buy a game ticket, not a phone.
Imagine you want to buy a sandwich but are told you must first buy an earring, completely unrelated and not something you want.
this is a common clause in season-ticket memberships, but it doesn't actually work all that well. for instance, resale on the ticket marketplace is tracked and counts, but in general transfers alone are not penalized. so people do transactions outside of the official platforms, sell / trade in fb groups, etc.
Not a difficult process, blocks scalping, and is unwelcoming enough that it'll probably only attract the people who can't or don't want to use smart phones.
They already had a ticketing flow they invested money into altering it. They could've put in the absolute minimal effort to keep some kind of flow for non-smartphone users.
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.
instead they just cut the guy off.
Better? In what way? And for whom? Certainly not for this man.
What happens when the Google or Apple system hiccups and locks you out? Now what? What happens when your battery dies? What happens when you drop your phone and bust it? What happens if someone hijacks your number? etc.
And, I don't for one second believe this is anti-scalping. They can identify scalpers from a million miles away at this point. If they wanted to shut them down, they'd be gone tomorrow.
This is about tracking and upselling. These people are "whales" and they want to badger them to spend more money.
How is this better?
This misses the point.
The question is: why would a smartphone be required, to watch a local game?
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.
It's not. You can still buy physical tickets in person to watch a local game.
This is a requirement specifically for a season pass. If you don't want a season pass, you can still buy individual tickets.
this is a slippery slope.
For every "must use a phone" there is also a dysfunctional "turn the tables on our customers" which some businesses will take to creepy snooping levels, or even drive "personalized" pricing or other nonsense.
This doesn't track to me. I can send someone else my QR code to use without actually transferring the tickets to them unless they're checking ID, and if they're checking ID then it doesn't matter whether the tickets are paper or digital.
I can't really see a way that digital tickets prevent something paper ones don't.
> 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.
That happens way less often than you'd think. I can still ride a horse on the road, I can still heat/cook with wood, I can still call customer support on a landline, I can still use email over landline. There are tons of things that were superseded decades ago that we still support.
It's certainly their choice to make (unless someone can make an ADA complaint or some kind of age discrimination case) but it seems like a shitty thing to do. If he can't use a computer or cellphone, they're clearly willing to _sell_ him tickets non-digitally like at a ticketing counter. Throw a cheap printer behind that counter and have the employee print them off. With the amount this guy is spending for tickets he'd probably buy the printer for them.
No you can't. They constantly change to match the current time, precisely to prevent what you're suggesting.
> There are tons of things that were superseded decades ago that we still support.
And tons of things were don't. You're obviously cherry-picking things.
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.
Are we supposed to always jump at the first "solution", consequences be damned?
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.
There are also phones with buttons again, the unihertz titan 2 elite looks good btw. Or Clicks addon keyboards.
they can send scheduling info, appt reminders, etc via SMS but (1) they must allow opt out, and (2) they cannot send medical info this way — that's where HIPAA requires encrypted "patient portal" messaging because SMS can be intercepted or accessed by others.
He probably doesn't want it, because he probably just doesn't want to interface with the phone ... Which is fine, I'm just pointing out that the quoted issue has an easy solution.
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?
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.
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.
Any phone that can receive SMS, not a smartphone. You could purchase a burner flip phone for this purpose.
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.
Doubt it, model number?
>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.
Double doubt it, verification services do not use MMS. It would be against NIST standards and not a single verification software sends MMSs. I work in this space. MMS is being deprecated across the globe, multiple telcos have already entirely disabled MMS at the network level.
You're likely confusing getting a verification number in the banking app, not SMS/MMS.
But this might not really have been a 2FA case - I mean, I was physically sitting in the bank.
Etc. etc.
Genuinely no idea why you’re not considering this.
Cherry on top of this dystopian situation was that the number needed to be a Spanish phone number. Couldn't be from a different country code.
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.
Some folks go vegan after seeing how the sausage gets made.
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.
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?
Accessibility benefits everyone.
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.
Being a luddite is not a protected class.
Also that is not what luddite means, like come on even in the bastardization of the term, he is not precisely smashing the ticketing machines, he is just an old guy don't be such a redditor with this senior.
Are Amish and Mennonites religiously protected luddites?
Maybe you are so familiar with computing that you take computing skills for granted.... but things like Solitaire were included in Windows explicitly to train people how to use a mouse. These skills are second nature to us but they aren't something we are born with.
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...
Or if they really wanted him to go digital, just buy him a smart phone and install the app for him!
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]
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
Congrats, you're an essential part of the problem.
The dude was hungry, what was he to do? We can't expect consumers to fix everything with dollar votes. They have lives, families, hobbies, things to do!
https://www.nbclosangeles.com/video/news/local/why-longtime-...
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.
> 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.
Now, baseball games require a smartphone.
My life has demonstrably gotten worse because of how other people voted with their wallets. I had no agency and no influence over any of this decision making -- i voted with my wallet, and i lost the election.
So now i give up my favorite pastimes I've happily enjoyed without a smartphone since i was a baby, or i sacrifice my privacy.
And maybe if it were just baseball, it'd be easy, but it's not and you know this. It's venues of all shapes and sizes. It's activities of all stripes.
The only agency left to me is to give up my privacy or give up access to the world. Voting with my wallet achieved nothing and gave me no agency.
https://www.nbclosangeles.com/news/local/dodgers-fan-printed...
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.
They can't resist squeezing every bit out
I'd think that having a 2nd factor like presenting ID that matches the ticket would be sufficient there though.
You probably still need a device of some kind though.
EDIT: I know complaining about downvotes is a downvotable offense itself, but I'm genuinely curious as to what is objectionable about this comment.
The first time we traveled domestically in China I kept thinking that my wife had to be mistaken, there has to be some kind of confirmation we need to show in order to board. But nope, it literally is just show up with your ID.
He's a known individual, a season ticket holder. He's not some random dude showing up with a paper ticket.
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.
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.
Next step is to re-use the body parts, just as in Soylent Green.
The audacity of the guy, depriving all those scammers the opportunity to dupe him into gift card scams.
(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)
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.