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CAPTCHAs are over (in ticketing)

(behind.pretix.eu)
204 points pabs3 | 4 comments | 25 May 25 00:37 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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frabcus ◴[25 May 25 01:51 UTC] No.44084957[source]▶
The option that strikes me as missing, is making users pay a cost before they are randomly entered in a lottery for the ticket.

So, for example, everyone pays $0.01 on their credit card, or does a holding charge on their credit card, or registers their identity. All in a 5 minute (or 1 day!) window. And then after the window, tickets are randomly distributed amongst every card which so registered.

You could check multiple things - phone and card and Government ID if necessary (lowering the privacy).

This also feels fairer and less stressful - instead of a lottery based on your internet access, or ability to run lots of browsers at once.

This feels harder for scalpers to do to me, as they need more fake identities, but I'd be curious about the actual ratios when trying it. What goes wrong?

Another one I predict is that you can't buy digitally. For examples, the Lewes fireworks display you have to buy tickets in person in a bookshop in Lewes. Doesn't help if you make a digital ticketing system though!

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1. EGreg ◴[26 May 25 00:50 UTC] No.44092809[source]▶
I asked why are school vouchers bad since it’s a single payer system.

The “progressives” told me it would starve public schools of funds and students since private schools would admit only the best and brightest

So I said — don’t let the schools choose. Let the people choose. If the school is filled then you use a lottery for who can actually get in, M of N people. Simple.

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2. Brybry ◴[26 May 25 02:36 UTC] No.44093437[source]▶
Decades ago a local popular public magnet high school near me had a lottery system like that.

Students would apply for the school and M of N applicants would be picked randomly.

It turns out the administrators running the lottery would run the randomization program until it gave them the student distribution they wanted (read: the best and brightest, and since it's the south... somehow whiter than expected).

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3. xorcist ◴[26 May 25 07:41 UTC] No.44094985[source]▶
That has been tried before. What happens is that people choose the school where there is easiest to get good grades. Fast forward a generation or two and there is a race to the bottom, schools take their mission to prepare for standardized testing seriously at the expense of learning. Over time, our outcome will depend on what you measure.

School systems are also special because you don't really want to overprovision school seats, so if there at the end of the day are as many seats as there are pupils in the system as a whole, there can only be selection and never competition in the economic sense.

4. EGreg ◴[26 May 25 11:55 UTC] No.44096537[source]▶
So maybe the lottery shouldn’t be run by the school :)