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'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.

> 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.

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.

Someone at the soulless corporation fucked up, and there will be no consequences, even though there should be.

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 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.

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 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.

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?

Accessibility benefits everyone.

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

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

There are also phones with buttons again, the unihertz titan 2 elite looks good btw. Or Clicks addon keyboards.

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.

There you go!

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.

(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)

EDIT: I know complaining about downvotes is a downvotable offense itself, but I'm genuinely curious as to what is objectionable about this comment.

I'd think that having a 2nd factor like presenting ID that matches the ticket would be sufficient there though.

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.

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?

Any phone that can receive SMS, not a smartphone. You could purchase a burner flip phone for this purpose.

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.

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]

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.

Congrats, you're an essential part of the problem.

Then why is 'I don't wanna' sufficient justification to force non-critical services to support your preferences forever?

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.

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.

Notes:

0 - https://levisstadium.com/tickets-suites/

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.

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.

Being a luddite is not a protected class.

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.

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.

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.

But it fits with the general trend of MLB being openly hostile to their fans for a while now.

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.

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.

I've never seen digital tickets which aren't printable.

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)?

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?

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.

https://www.nbclosangeles.com/news/local/dodgers-fan-printed...

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.

You probably still need a device of some kind though.

He's a known individual, a season ticket holder. He's not some random dude showing up with a paper ticket.

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.

Swipe down from the top. No, the other top.

Click share, now click "find in page". Wait, that doesn't share at all?

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.

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.

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?

Also that is not what luddite means, like come on even in the bastardization of the term, he is not precisely smashing the ticketing machines, he is just an old guy don't be such a redditor with this senior.

If 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.

Here you go; now you have: https://help.ticketmaster.com/hc/en-us/articles/265843090383...

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.

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.

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.

Are Amish and Mennonites religiously protected luddites?

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.

Such abuse is an insult to everyone who needs it, everyone who engages with it in good faith, everyone who spends gobs of money to make events and services accessible to those with genuine need.

I don’t rule the world but if I did abusers of protective rules would be summarily executed. (Don’t vote for me. I’ve got a short but significant list of similar policies. Scammers those guys would have targets on their heads, kidnap for ransom criminals those guys too)

I 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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)

But this might not really have been a 2FA case - I mean, I was physically sitting in the bank.

[1]: https://www.zuora.com/products/zephr/

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.

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.

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.

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.

Would you allow doing the same for gym memberships?

The "poor people don't belong in society?!?" trope is completely different (and kind of boring).

But there is not a general accommodation provided.

The "problem" they were trying to "solve" is letting people sell some of their tickets to third parties, but not all of them. That is understandably how they arrived at a mobile application as a solution

But the problem of admitting the original ticket holder is simple as shit. Just .... check his ID?

And there is precedent on the pricing. For example, FAA is not allowed to charge any more for any service than it costs to deliver said service, which is why if i lose my pilot's license, a replacement is $3.

What is your reasoning for that sentiment? (I don't disagree)

Plenty of people can't even get bank accounts.

It's absolutely comparable lock-in.

But if you don't want to, then you shouldn't be expecting other people to accomodate you.

In this case nobody is forcing them to buy a dodgers ticket. It’s a completely optional and absurdly expensive luxury good that is purely for leisure. They can simply not but a ticket if they don't want to accept conditions of sale.

And 80-year old person is just as smart as a 20-year old. He's perfectly capable of learning how to use a $50 smartphone to access his $5-200k/yr season tickets, he just doesn't want to. It sounds like he was told years and years ago they were moving this direction, and they've been printing him tickets as an exception, and they've decided to stop the exception. He's had 20 years to get a smart phone and learn how to use it. The fact that he now has to choose is a prison of his own making.

And yes. People need to get on with the times.

In the same way people "need" a power connection in their house. And water plumbing. And used to need a phone line to "participate in society"

They aren't as isolated these days as they used to be. If you go to Costco, you see them with 3 carts loaded 3 feet high of all the same crap everyone else is buying. A lot of times, they don't even transport it back via buggy but call the "Amish taxi service" which is people who drive them around town in large passenger vans. Even from a work source perspective, a lot have moved on from farm work and work in construction, roofing and other trades. If you go to a gas station in the morning, you'll see work trucks roll up and only Amish rollout to go buy soda and lunches or whatever.

[Source: I live in Lancaster and have for many years.]

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.

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.

It's almost always to send the content somewhere, whether it's a platform, an app, the clipboard, etc.

Not always always, but almost always.

It's definitely not only social sharing.

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.

That's the price of one meal at a restaurant...

/sarc

If I can get along with the rest of my life on a flip phone, it seems pretty unreasonable to buy a device just to buy sports tickets.

Asserting that individual 'get smart' doesn't actually solve for the actual harms and if it were just simple, we would not be seeing the upward trends in fraud that we are seeing within the elderly.

[1] https://www.aarp.org/money/scams-fraud/older-adults-ftc-frau...

edit: fixed the years

In particular, it's very reasonable to be 80 and decide "I don't want to deal with learning how to use a smartphone and getting one".

Do they also need to have an age-verified Facebook account?

Plus an attested age-verified operating system on that phone?

Are they allowed to use GrapheneOS or do they need to use only the vendor's stock ROM image?

Is it OK if they turn off surveillance on the device or is that required too to "participate in society"?

But the problem isn't that this guy didn't want to use a smartphone, it's that he literally has never bothered to learn.

Why should society cater to those that literally don't care to learn the essentials?

One group I am aware of will only use a payphone in the nearest town. They actually filed to force AT&T to keep a payphone there because the relevant tariff required AT&T to do so, and were the only people who ever bothered to make AT&T do this. So there is one payphone in that town that they go to and drop their quarters in to make phone calls.

There are no "secret" cell phones there.

In past eras they used holograms and watermarks and special papers in an attempt to prevent forgery but these methods keep getting challenged by an ever more sophisticated criminal element. Moving into cryptographically secure methods is the last barrier here.

They could also rely on the state to match identities to tickets, but this approach does not scale and is frankly undesirable for the majority of people anyway.

But that's not the reason the guy in the video isn't using a smartphone. It's because he literally never bothered to learn or keep up.

[0] https://www.npr.org/2023/01/21/1150289272/facial-recognition...

[1] https://stadiumtechreport.com/feature/intuit-dome-leaning-on...

- Give the other app a temporary/transient copy of a document or a file

- Give the other app the actual file (R/W)

- Give the other app the actual file but some other way (there's at least two in Android now, I believe?)

- Give the other app some weird-ass read-only lens into the actual file

- Re-encode the thing into something else and somehow stream it to the other app

- Re-encode the thing into something else and give it that (that's a lossy variant of transient copy case - example, contact info being encoded into textual "[Name] Blah\n[Mobile] +55 555 555 555" text/plain message).

- Upload it to cloud, give the other app a link

- Upload it to cloud, download it back, and give the other app a transient downloaded copy (?! pretty sure Microsoft apps do that, or at least that's what it feels when I try to "Share" stuff from that; totally WTF)

- Probably something else I'm missing.

You never really know which of these mechanisms will be used by a given app, until you try to "Share" something from it for the first time.

Now, I'm not saying the UI needs to expose the exact details of the process involved. But what it should do is to distinguish between:

1. Giving the other app access to the resource

2. Giving the other app an independent copy of the resource (and spell out if it's exact or mangled copy)

3. Giving the other app a pointer to the resource

In desktop terminology, this is the difference between Save As, Export and copying the file path/URL.

Also, desktop software usually gives you all three options. Mobile apps usually implement only one of them as "Share", so when you need one of the not chosen options, you're SOL.

My Android phone says "SMS" under the "bubble", next to the time, when I send my wife's aunt a message. If I attempt to attach a photo to a message to her (which I've always thought was "MMS") she never receives the photo or any text I send with the photo. Nothing.

re: the identify verification

We had the bank send the message to my wife's phone. She received a message with a link to a website in the native text messaging app on her iPhone. My wife absolutely doesn't have the bank's "app" installed. The website linked in the message used her camera to photograph her aunt's ID and face. I don't know what color the "bubble" was on my wife's iPhone, which I know has some ability to differentiate SMS vs iMessage.

My aunt can receive text messages. She couldn't receive this message. That's what I know.

People who post here in general have no idea what life is like for people without the upbringing or cognitive skills to deal with the complexity of the modern world and technology.

Even if we could make them truly unforgeable, people generally want electronically transferrable tickets. How do you propose to do this?

>Not to mention that HN users will then whine about the surveillance state.

Pretty sure, given the comments in this very thread, that HN collectively understands there's more surveillance happening on your phone than with another person making sure the name on your ID matches the name on your ticket, or that your badge photo matches your face.

This seems to be an area where people will always find loopholes. Should this be a race-to-the-bottom in an attempt to make the most foolproof system possible, or do we at some point accept that maybe there's never going to be a perfect way to do this?

>And IDing every person can be a mission on itself.

I've worked the door at venues of various sizes, so it's not like I suggested this from ignorance. What we're talking about doesn't need to be "every person", just a specific set of ticketholders.

>Pretty sure they will just start using biometrics in the next decade with or without your consent.

I know I'm just me, speaking for me, and am a sample size of 1 that doesn't look like the general population in this regard, but there's no "with or without my consent" if I decide to opt out of going to games entirely. It'll be a cold day in hell before I give someone my biometrics just so I can watch someone try and hit a ball.

We attended a once-in-a-lifetime show last fall (a performer who is aging and likely won't tour again) a two hour drive away. I wouldn't install the Ticketmaster app and played an old man "character" with the box office to get them to print my tickets and hold them at will call. I played the "we are driving in from out of town" card, etc, and they accommodated me.

I tried that with a closer venue a couple of months ago and got told, in no uncertain terms, "no app no admittance". I knuckled-under and loaded the app on my wife's iPhone (which she insists on keeping because Stockholm syndrome, I assume). I feel bad that I gave in (because it makes me part of the problem). I really wanted to see the show and I wasn't willing to forego it on principle. (Kinda embarrassing, actually.)

Don't do that. Create a new account with the email address you have access to.

Apps require you to sign in again all the time, and send a verification code to your e-mail to do so. Changing locations is, yes, a reason to require sign in.

Sorry, but that one's on you.

I would agree. It also seems unreasonable to expect the organization to make an exception to a completely legitimate anti-scalping measure for one person.

Of course it is. Maybe if we didn't normalize people refusing to learn things for no other reason than "I don't wanna" they'd have better neuroplasticity.

> it's very reasonable to be 80 and decide "I don't want to deal with learning how to use a smartphone and getting one".

I agree with you 100% on this but it doesn't logically follow from that that you get to make the Will Call clerk for the Dodgers print your ticket for every game even though you've been told for multiple years that season tickets are going paperless as an anti-scalping measure.

They could even do something like give him a little RFID token that can be used once. Tap it, gates open, go in, done.

Not to justify it, but we've been fighting this kind of crap for a long time with credit cards and their bonehead "anti-fraud" checks. I'm often on the phone with my credit card issuers every time I travel somewhere because their moronic systems think "different country = fraud" and lock me out until I call them and perform their pointless rituals for them over the phone. Even if you tell them in advance that you're traveling (which I object to because my vacation plans are none of their business), they still often get it wrong and flag you.

Don't bother your season ticket holders about getting their own person admitted! I am standing in front of you, bearing identification, and you are whining about a mobile app?

You just need good organisation, plenty of security stations, and an atmosphere that rewards people who arrive early - checking a stadium's worth of IDs over the course of 2-3 hours rather than over the course of 20 minutes.

What you can't do is charge $20 for a glass of beer then expect people to arrive 2-3 hours before the game starts.

An example: Presbyopia came on hard for me in the last couple of years Now I really appreciate low-vision affordances that, as a younger person, I couldn't have cared less about and would have seen as an unnecessary cost.

The former makes sense. The latter doesn't. I don't get to park in handicapped spaces that are closer to the store just because I'd like to.

When OP is 85, I hope some whippersnapper 20 year old says to him, "Come on, grandpa. You need to get that neural advertisement brain implant like the rest of us, or you can't buy anything. Why should businesses need to support your lame smartphone? Step into the 22nd century, pops!"

Until I spent some time in a country whose predominate language (and signage) was not english.

Maybe those pictorial signs are a good idea after all.