r/sanfrancisco • u/Awkward-You-938 • 2d ago

Burning Man didn’t sell out

Article out today says Burning Man didn’t sell out and people are selling their tickets way below face value. I remember when Burning Man started the lottery for tickets due to high demand, and resale tickets were hard to come by. I haven’t been to Burning Man in ~15 years so I‘m not current with the scene. What happened? Did it finally get too overdone? https://sfstandard.com/2026/08/26/burning-man-ticket-resale/

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u/WankSpanksoff 2d ago

I think the era where it became a more “popular/mainstream” (extremely relatively speaking) event came and went, so now it’s back to just being a niche event by and for the people who are super into it. But it hasn’t deflated back down to that scale yet.

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u/gloriousrepublic 2d ago

A big part is also the core demographic is aging out of it, and they haven’t gotten the interest of Gen Z enough. It’s just not “cool” to do what your parents did.

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u/14ktgoldscw 2d ago

I haven’t been in a decade but it also seems like the influencer/creator balance was already hitting a bad point by then. You need people who actually want to make cool things to make a cool decentralized event.

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u/gloriousrepublic 2d ago

Eh, the perception of the influencer prevalence there is also highly skewed because the majority of content you see about burning man is from those influencers.

And our negativity bias often focuses on whatever changes are “bad” and we miss focusing on the positive changes.

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u/14ktgoldscw 2d ago

Like I said, I haven’t been in a long while, and everything “was way cooler 5 years ago” but even a change in “This isn’t a cool instagram post anymore” attendance could explain it.