It was indeed Apple's "Sign In with Apple" deadline that prompted us to make the change (for those who don't know, apps that offer sign in via a third party auth mechanism will also need to offer sign in with Apple), but it's something we've considered on and off for many years.
Two big reasons. The first is that when we work with pro sports teams, fans of that team are able to sign in to their team accounts using SeatGeek. Having Facebook, and potentially Apple, also in the mix there felt like it would lead to a lot of confusion. The second is that while we've seen that sign in with Facebook leads to more sign ups in the first place, we've also seen that it causes confusion for users who are later unsure how they initially signed in, and that confusion can hit just as they're trying to pull up their tickets outside of an event.
Interesting how the title of the FAQ item says "Why can't I sign in with Facebook anymore?", but to get the actual answer to that question, one has to go to HN....
Makes a ton of sense. I’ve experienced and dealt with a lot of customer confusion with Facebook, Google etc sign in where they lose access to that account & then it’s just a cascading failure of whack a mole trying to have them get their account setup etc.
I can imagine how awful it feels to be at the stadium gates (I’ve ran into this on TicketMaster’s lovely app where it can’t pull up the ticket) and you can’t figure out the login while you/your kid/friends wait on you awkwardly. Customer support has to love this decision.
Thanks for the insight on this. As another anecdote, I used Google Sign-In to sign up for a certain popular coding exercise site. I just clicked "Sign In with Google", approved whatever email address access it needed, and done! However, when I later decided to delete my account, the account deletion UI required me to enter my current password twice to delete the account. Because I signed up with Google, I never made a password for this service. I imagine things like this lead to massive confusion for users. I still haven't figured out how to delete the account.
As a designer/developer, I'm psyched to drop dependencies. If I see that FB login is just 10% of sign-ins, I'll likely drop it. If I see it is just 20% of sign-ins, I might drop it.
I can imagine a lot of apps shifting to just two login options: direct with email, and Sign in with Apple. (All new products I work on already doing this.)
I'm psyched to drop dependencies too. Apple would be very high on that list if a history of power moves like this hadn't prevented me from accepting an Apple dependency in the first place.
I know a few apps I manage had this conversation. Had another part of the business not added it to their side (and dealt with all the complications, customer service, and policy stuff Apple has introduced), pulling out FB sign-in would have been our best option. We didn't have the resources to comply with their product rollout.
Where I work, we almost pulled Facebook sign in for the same reason. I'm currently heading the Sign In with Apple integration project, and it was a godsend to get that deadline extended
While the question in the link is "Why can't I sign in with Facebook anymore?", it doesn't actually explain the rationale behind the change. Has the rationale been explained elsewhere?
By doing this, SeatGeek seem to be going against the trend of recent years. Why have some forums not only provided Facebook sign-up, but even insisted on it or hid deep in the UI the ability to sign in with a username and password?
Was it just to discourage spammers from signing up, because Facebook has taken measures to ensure that there is a real person behind each Facebook account? Or by logging on through Facebook, did you reveal details about yourself to the forum’s proprietors that could be used for targeted advertising?
Reducing friction in a signup flow is key and that’s what FB login did. It made signing up easy as people already had an account. You could pull some data attributes depending on what you were looking for but overall, it made signup flows significantly easier.
Now FB doesn’t carry the same brand trust it used to and folks prefer their own signup flow.
I suspect it was mostly to avoid having to deal with password resets / forgotten emails. Concerns (whether accurate or not) about GDPR compliance accelerated the trend. Forums are mostly run by overworked volunteers who don't particularly care about the tech side of things and just want to get on with whatever the forum is actually for discussing.
I tried to surf on over to SeatGeek's site to see what they do or sell or whatever but they won't even let you connect if you're using Tor Browser. Ah well, never heard of them before anyway, I'm sure I won't be missing out on much.
Although a block on just browsing seems harsh, the ticketing industry is a constant target of fraudsters and blocking buying or selling via Tor wouldn't surprise or upset me.
Absolute speculation here - SeatGeek, and every other company in the secondary event ticketing marketplace, makes all of their money from advertising spend. Google pay per click, facebook ads, etc. I would not be surprised given cash flow issues if they were suspended by facebook across the board for not paying their bills. My former company in the same vertical was in utter panic about all possible spend when live events in the US effectively went to zero in March.
Sure, there is probably a ton of inbound revenue from marketing campaigns (Facebook, Instagram, Email marketing, SEM) but that also kinda drives brand recognition and hopefully loyalty, so the ideal state is that folks that buy tickets via any of the above eventually come back to buy more tickets because they had a good experience in the first place. Partnerships, third-party integrations, and revenue from their marketplace should also be a significant portion of the revenue, as would SEO.
I'd imagine that many of those channels dried up, but it's super unlikely that a reasonably managed company wouldn't either have VC funding or be close enough to profitability that they wouldn't have enough money to weather Covid after "strategic" layoffs and decreases in salary (no idea if either of these happened). Heck, I wouldn't be shocked if they raised an internal round[1]. I really doubt SeatGeek would go delinquent on advertising budgets, as those sorts of things _should_ be forecasted out a year or more, with existing cash to actually run the business. I can't imagine that not paying your bills would go well if you expect to do business after the pandemic is over...
Source: I used to work there, in the pre-covid times.
[1] If VCs can give 120 million to a company that makes juicing machines, why wouldn't they give anything to prop up a company that actually makes money and will likely do fine once the pandemic is over? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juicero
I doubt it. Facebook would suspend their ads, not their Facebook Connect account.
If anything, I'd guess either SeatGeek believed Facebook was using data to steal their with Facebook Marketplace, or Facebook was concerned with SeatGeek fraud?
It was indeed Apple's "Sign In with Apple" deadline that prompted us to make the change (for those who don't know, apps that offer sign in via a third party auth mechanism will also need to offer sign in with Apple), but it's something we've considered on and off for many years.
Two big reasons. The first is that when we work with pro sports teams, fans of that team are able to sign in to their team accounts using SeatGeek. Having Facebook, and potentially Apple, also in the mix there felt like it would lead to a lot of confusion. The second is that while we've seen that sign in with Facebook leads to more sign ups in the first place, we've also seen that it causes confusion for users who are later unsure how they initially signed in, and that confusion can hit just as they're trying to pull up their tickets outside of an event.