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Sometimes the code must be received through the bank’s app. I went though this process recently to open a new account (at a bank where I already had other accounts). I didn’t think much of it at the time, but if you didn’t have or want a smartphone, this could be a major problem.

I don't think the assumption that SMS is enough is valid anymore.

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.

No, I don't really use a lot of service that require 2FA and for the ones I have to (e.g. work), there's always been a workaround.

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

It's not so hilarious, really; there's nothing like a stint in the sausage factory to put one off one's taste for sausage.

Ahem, more than one ...

I know Chrome / Chrome-adjacent googlers who swear by Firefox.

He can get a smartphone dedicated to the ticket app if it is such a huge piece of his life/hobby

> Maybe it's not about the money. Maybe he does not want the negative consequences that come along with having a smartphone.

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.

>Maybe it's not about the money. Maybe he does not want the negative consequences that come along with having a smartphone.

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.

I’m not sure how exactly this should be worded in law, but I really wish they would pass a law requiring supporting people without smartphone apps. Obviously there would be some exceptions where justified, even for things other than “the app is the whole point” and those need to be thought through, but in this case and plenty of others, there’s just no reason they can’t accommodate non app users. “It costs more to support non app users” is not a sufficient justification.

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.

At airports and drugstores, the magazine racks will usually have a "Guide to iPhone/Android" type publication with a ton of pictures that are aimed at this market. I picked one up and realized while flipping through it that there is way too much for a brand new user to be able to absorb. The gestures needed on iOS to pull up options that are otherwise invisible in the UI will be nonsensical to someone whose UI/UX frame of reference is an ATM screen or a gas pump (or self-checkout kiosk which they might not use) where every option is shown on screen without needing additional navigation. Just like the first iPhone, come to think of it.

Now have your grandparent try to teach you something you aren't interested in and don't really want to learn, and see how it goes.

No it’s often just stubbornness. My dad is 85 and he can take the time to learn anything he wants to learn. But refuses to change when he doesn’t.

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 the most frustrating thing is that UI's largely haven't improved in 10-15 years, yet we still get constant changes from people trying to justify their jobs or manufacture "impact".

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.

In a case like this, you just buy the tickets for your grandfather and print them out for him.

I'm not a fan of the "something better" phrasing myself. It's very much anti-systems-thinking.

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.

> 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 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)?

>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.

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.

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.

It's better for the company not the customer

I think you’d be hard-pressed to find a blind person / person with low vision without a smartphone these days: they’re a near-essential window into services that aren’t accessible though plain paper.

> “undue financial hardship”

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.

Visually impaired people use smartphones too. If the app isn't supporting the accessibility features of the platform, it should still be held liable under the ADA.

(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.

Smart phones have had plenty of affordances for blind people. But they didn’t say he was blind or unable to use a smart phone

For that matter, he could/should look into filing an ADA complaint all the same.

I agree. He's one of some tiny number of people that all the staff will know on sight. Even printing a ticket for him is just a formality really.

Paper also does not run out of battery or smash if you drop it.

A cheap undubsidized Android phone is $40 on Amazon

It is not required to watch a game. At least not unless you are not using it as some kind of vision aid — although even then there are likely reasonable alternatives.

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.

Nothing's perfect. Some ideas to fight against things we don't like will come up, and then we'll see the collateral and go, "Oh, maybe that's actually not the best way to do it". That's okay! That's the way life goes! It's not "incredible" or hypocritical or whatever else you're trying to imply. What you're seeing is merely folk working through things.

Are we supposed to always jump at the first "solution", consequences be damned?

I genuinely don't think people making the, "Get a smartphone or be left behind," arguments really understand the magnitude of the assertion.

I like these being submitted.

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?

Posted 9 minutes before your comment... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47662987

My vision has gotten pretty bad the past couple years (not correctable with lenses)... I'm now using a 45" display and still have to zoom in a bit. I have my phone close to maxed out on text/display size options.. and only then it becomes unusable in most apps if I move the slider to the final position...

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.

The OP video actually addressed this: He went to the physical box office, and they seem to be able to print individual tickets. Just not a season ticket, for some reason.

No, it's not. If you are physically incapable of operating a piece of technology, the ADA covers reasonable accommodations for that. If you are simply unwilling to learn how to use a piece of technology, it doesn't and shouldn't cover that.

Being a luddite is not a protected class.

For how long until paying the fine requires a smartphone? And then for how long until you go to jail for not having a smartphone ?

They can think of other payment flows, they don't want them because an app gets them data they can resell or abuse.

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]

But you still did it, didn't you?

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

And your car, license and insurance are not such a connection?

Original reporting source:

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

They sometimes give a more firm account wall and sometimes let you slide a few tweets. It isn’t deterministic.

Same here, not logged in to X and works just fine with Firefox.

Do you have uBlock Origin by any chance?

You don’t need the app itself to get the rotating tickets, the algorithm is pretty dumb and was reverse engineered back in 2024. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40906148

You probably still need a device of some kind though.

China's solution: your passport is your ticket. Not great for privacy, but persumably you also want to check that people banned from a stadium for their behaviour don't get in anyway.

Can we make things so that you don't need a smartphone? I don't think this is as trivial as you're making it out to be.

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.

We can, but why should we?

Does "get with the times" include giving up all of the privacy issues that go along with buying a stock phone?