Re:Ask HN: Have you ever regretted working on a product?
by mylons on Wednesday November 21, 2018 @12:49AM
(#18500436)
even if you're not working for ticketmaster, i hope everyone who does work at ticketmaster has trouble sleeping at night. you provide nothing to no one.
Re:Ask HN: Have you ever regretted working on a product?
by Carpetsmoker on Wednesday November 21, 2018 @12:53AM
(#18500456)
It wasn't TicketMaster, but it was similar. It many years ago but at the time there were a whole bunch of "TicketMaster-y" setups out there, and a whole host of resellers for them which combined data from all of them. We were one of the resellers. It looks like it still exists.
Some were even scummier than TicketMaster. For example there was one that would simply try to guess ticket/tour dates and venues and then sell massively overpriced "early bird" tickets for them. Sometimes their guesses were more-or-less reliable, other times it was wildly off.
And yeah, I agree. The entire endeavour is useless. It was my first real programming job, and since then I've been a lot more careful what kind of companies I work for.
Re:Ask HN: Have you ever regretted working on a product?
by 55555 on Wednesday November 21, 2018 @01:39AM
(#18500626)
I could be wrong, but I'm under the impression that ticketmaster's customers are the performers, who want to maximize their revenue without appearing greedy, so they give ticketmaster a cut for taking the blame.
Re:Ask HN: Have you ever regretted working on a product?
by lozenge on Wednesday November 21, 2018 @03:28AM
(#18501057)
Yes, but ticketmaster are also secretly co-operating with third-party resellers that want to tout their tickets, although they claim otherwise. So, even the listed price with fees is not the real price.
https://www.iq-mag.net/2018/09/cbc-news-details-ticketmaster...
Re:Ask HN: Have you ever regretted working on a product?
by gormenghast on Wednesday November 21, 2018 @10:04AM
(#18503168)
Another viagogo refugee?
It took me a while to realize the entire thing was just a scam and that the only reason we were getting traffic was due to advertising shenanigans.
At the time, it was one of the best sites out there on account of having the most correct (or rather, least incorrect) events. Lots of websites contained many errors, such as listing "London, UK" instead of "London, Canada". Mixing up "Ryan Adams" and "Bryan Adams" was also a common one. We corrected a lot of that. I did "big data" kind of stuff before it was cool (no machine learning though, just old-fashioned rule-based logic).