81yo Dodgers fan can no longer get tickets because he doesn't have a smartphone • Hacker News Board

Re: 81yo Dodgers fan can no longer get tickets because he doesn't have a smartphone

#121

Post by jjulius » Mon, Apr 06, 2026, 5:25 PM UTC

crazygringo wrote: post #90

mrweasel wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's an amusement park we like to go to. We get season passes, which normally means renewing the small plastic card we got the first year. They've switched to app only this year, with the option of getting a card, if for some reason you cannot or will not use the app. I believe there's a small fee for issuing the card. I believe their reasoning is much the same. They have some types of tickets, which can technical…

> Blaming scalping doesn't seem entirely plausible to me, because there was always the option of making the tickets and season passes non-transferable. That's not desirable either. You often can't make it to all the games, so they want you to be able to give some tickets to friends, etc. They're trying to prevent people who purchase the season pass to almost exclusively resell tickets to individual games. So you real…

>They're trying to prevent people who purchase the season pass to almost exclusively resell tickets to individual games.

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.

Re: 81yo Dodgers fan can no longer get tickets because he doesn't have a smartphone

#122

Post by isatty » Mon, Apr 06, 2026, 5:26 PM UTC

crazygringo wrote: post #52

From my quick research online, it seems they've gone digital-only for season tickets because they don't want people just reselling them to turn a profit. They want actual season-long fans, so now if you transfer too many games they can track it and ban you. This is essentially anti-scalping. There's a legit justification. You can still buy paper tickets at the stadium for a single game. But not for season passes anym…

It does seem pretty unreasonable to me. He’s an 81yo life long dodgers fan. You make exceptions like you’ve always done. It’s what makes human, and sets us apart from computers.

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

Re: 81yo Dodgers fan can no longer get tickets because he doesn't have a smartphone

#123

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Apr 06, 2026, 5:26 PM UTC

moondance wrote: post #67

crazygringo wrote: post #52

From my quick research online, it seems they've gone digital-only for season tickets because they don't want people just reselling them to turn a profit. They want actual season-long fans, so now if you transfer too many games they can track it and ban you. This is essentially anti-scalping. There's a legit justification. You can still buy paper tickets at the stadium for a single game. But not for season passes anym…

Have you had the pleasure of coaching a technologically illiterate grandparent through the process of learning how to use a smartphone? It’s a never-ending job and disheartening for all parties involved. Modern mobile UX is not designed with accessibility for the elderly in mind, and it is constantly changing in a way that demands constant re-learning. Not to mention the disabilities and neurological conditions often…

[deleted]

Re: 81yo Dodgers fan can no longer get tickets because he doesn't have a smartphone

#124

Post by SoftTalker » Mon, Apr 06, 2026, 5:27 PM UTC

crazygringo wrote: post #112

jjulius wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Paper doesn't spy on you.

If you don't give the app any permissions, it doesn't spy on you either. It doesn't have any more information than the info you give it to buy the tickets in the first place.

It does when the ticket app demands Location access "to protect your security"

Re: 81yo Dodgers fan can no longer get tickets because he doesn't have a smartphone

#125

Post by jjulius » Mon, Apr 06, 2026, 5:27 PM UTC

crazygringo wrote: post #112

jjulius wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Paper doesn't spy on you.

If you don't give the app any permissions, it doesn't spy on you either. It doesn't have any more information than the info you give it to buy the tickets in the first place.

>If you don't give the app any permissions, it doesn't spy on you either.

We're talking about an 81 year-old who has never had a smartphone before and you're starting the sentence with "if"? And that's just that app, not the phone itself or anything else that someone brand new to, and ignorant towards, this ecosystem is going to encounter and not know what to do with.

Re: 81yo Dodgers fan can no longer get tickets because he doesn't have a smartphone

#126

Post by suzzer99 » Mon, Apr 06, 2026, 5:28 PM UTC

moondance wrote: post #67

crazygringo wrote: post #52

From my quick research online, it seems they've gone digital-only for season tickets because they don't want people just reselling them to turn a profit. They want actual season-long fans, so now if you transfer too many games they can track it and ban you. This is essentially anti-scalping. There's a legit justification. You can still buy paper tickets at the stadium for a single game. But not for season passes anym…

Have you had the pleasure of coaching a technologically illiterate grandparent through the process of learning how to use a smartphone? It’s a never-ending job and disheartening for all parties involved. Modern mobile UX is not designed with accessibility for the elderly in mind, and it is constantly changing in a way that demands constant re-learning. Not to mention the disabilities and neurological conditions often…

My Dad and I have had about 7 sessions just on copy-and-paste on the computer. He kind of got it for a minute there, but didn't use it enough, so now it's gone and he's back to just re-typing everything.

Re: 81yo Dodgers fan can no longer get tickets because he doesn't have a smartphone

#127

Post by jedberg » Mon, Apr 06, 2026, 5:28 PM UTC

The Dodgers could have so easily turned this into a huge win. After 50 years they could have just awarded him a paper lifetime pass. Scan this and get in for any game! It would have been so easy.

Or if they really wanted him to go digital, just buy him a smart phone and install the app for him!

Re: 81yo Dodgers fan can no longer get tickets because he doesn't have a smartphone

#128

Post by moondance » Mon, Apr 06, 2026, 5:28 PM UTC

mrweasel wrote: post #85

moondance wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you had the pleasure of coaching a technologically illiterate grandparent through the process of learning how to use a smartphone? It’s a never-ending job and disheartening for all parties involved. Modern mobile UX is not designed with accessibility for the elderly in mind, and it is constantly changing in a way that demands constant re-learning. Not to mention the disabilities and neurological conditions often…

I'm in my 40s, there is a shit ton of modern UX I struggle with. Basically anything gesture based for example, but really a lot of apps are just shit and have no sensible UX design behind them, so you need to try to click everything and hope you don't mess something up. To me it's easy to see how someone over 70 might simply refuse to use an app. Especially if it doesn't support scaling the UI to well.

I don’t think people understand the scale of the issue. Each decade that goes by we welcome a new class of elderly, and each decade that goes by, we continue to write off those elderly users.

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.

Re: 81yo Dodgers fan can no longer get tickets because he doesn't have a smartphone

#129

Post by jimt1234 » Mon, Apr 06, 2026, 5:28 PM UTC

My concern here is not that a simple transaction like purchasing a ticket to a baseball game requires a smartphone, but that the purchase now binds the customer to a personal and irreversible relationship to multiple entities (MLB, the Dodgers, the ticket agency, etc.) that (1) is not necessary, and (2) adds no benefit to the customer.

Re: 81yo Dodgers fan can no longer get tickets because he doesn't have a smartphone

#130

Post by suzzer99 » Mon, Apr 06, 2026, 5:29 PM UTC

isatty wrote: post #122

crazygringo wrote: post #52

From my quick research online, it seems they've gone digital-only for season tickets because they don't want people just reselling them to turn a profit. They want actual season-long fans, so now if you transfer too many games they can track it and ban you. This is essentially anti-scalping. There's a legit justification. You can still buy paper tickets at the stadium for a single game. But not for season passes anym…

It does seem pretty unreasonable to me. He’s an 81yo life long dodgers fan. You make exceptions like you’ve always done. It’s what makes human, and sets us apart from computers. Someone at the soulless corporation fucked up, and there will be no consequences, even though there should be.

They could have done this for like 5 game minutes of what they pay Ohtani (~$500).

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