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- Hacker News
- All these gambling apps need regulation. And I fear they are buying politicians precisely so that doesn't happen.
If I were to have my way, I'd put a law in place that limits bets to $5 max and monthly bets to $150 per month. Letting them go higher encourages some of the worst aspects of society.
We will see crazy things like athletes being injured or murdered in order to win bets. We are already seeing crazy things like white house insiders placing bets on when wars will start.
One of the few ways to really solve this problem is reducing the possible amount of award so the individuals placing these bets don't feel like they have to take matters into their own hands to win.
by cogman10 - This would just push everyone to unlicensed casinos/bookmakers . Means no tax revenue + even worse player protection.
- That will make things worse unless you reign in crypto. If you regulate Kalshi, people will use the unregulated polymarket which is already illegal in the united states.by csomar
- Have to remember that regulated gambling also has lobbyist so unless regulated gambling is invested in these apps they are likely trying to get them banned or also regulated
- The regulation has gone the opposite direction, recently.
It was regulated.
by DANmode - I'd say this goes for more than gambling. Since digitalization, we've removed a lot of friction from depraved behavior, and regulation hasn't caught up to it yet.by xpct
- >gambling sites
I think I’d probably go farther. Next time you’re in a corner store or gas station, pay attention to who is wasting their money on scratchers or other lotto tickets.
You shouldn’t be allowed to gamble unless you can prove it’s disposable income.
by what - for a while i was using the sports gambling apps to make lots of little bets.
it was fun to put $0.50 on a game I normally wouldn't watch and tune in with a real rooting interest. i never bet more that $1 on a game because I knew that I would really dislike losing 'real money'.
the fact was that the stakes were completely irrelevant to me. the value came from definitively and publicly taking a side. if you're the fan of a team, you do this in every game. but with these little bets it's a way to sign-on for a little slice of being a fan in every game.
and that got me thinking that there's potentially a different type of gambling app that ignores the money and is more of a social/prediction-making platform. people love chasing worthless internet points (reddit upvotes, HN karma, etc), so why not build a platform that gives you points for betting?
you could let a chunk of the population scratch the itch they get to gamble without creating financial risk. they can still brag about their wins.
by parpfish - We should just make gambling illegal online again, things were fine back when you couldn’t gamble online then, at least in the USA, the fucking supreme corpo guzzlers (formerly the Supreme Court) interpreted the laws according to their owners will and now we have gambling online.by ok_dad
- I made an article a day back how Polymarket is not exactly fair when it comes to market resolution (https://omarabid.com/polymarket-bet/) They actually don’t decide on market outcomes, they outsource that to UMA which is as opaque as it can get.
Consider the probabilities in polymarket as the prob. of the polymarket market itself outcomes rather than reality.
by csomar - Wow, this is so much worse than i thought.by KeplerBoy
- Also UMA holders who get to judge do participate in markets.by Saline9515
- Yes, an recent example here: https://www.reddit.com/r/Polymarket/comments/1ubxixr/am_i_in...
- > He compared the videos to fast-food commercials, where food can appear more appealing than it does in real life.
> “We’re depicting what actually happens,” he said.
The cope is real. They all know they are destroying lives by promoting gambling to young people and eventually some of them are going to overspend and get addicted. But yeah, it's just like an ad for a burger
- The burger ad is also getting people addicted and destroying lives. But with burgers most people blame the victims. In my opinion it's all the same. Gambling, junk food, drugs, guns... Lots of money to be made, lots of lives destroyed.by jjcob
- It is time to admit that the Chinese were right when they built their great firewall.
You either protect yourself from America or your civilization is lost to the void.
by expedition32 - I remember in 2006 when online sports gambling was banned, and witnessed first hand some sleaze bags flee to Costa Rica where many of the actual operations were located. What I witnessed regarding addiction and exploitation put me off sports for a long time. Now here we are, with the tech industry and political capital behind it, this time engineered to engulf the entire population. It's repulsive.by Mobius01
- Nobody is forcing anyone to place bets they can't back, isn't this a personal responsibility issue?
edit: to be clear, if companies are committing fraud in their marketing, that should be prosecuted or if regulations around misleading marketing are weak, that should be legislated of course.
by sooheon - The alternative would be to ask both sides of the bets to record a video, and tell them to only post winning bids, but to pay out to both sides. Is that really better? Classic tactic by the bet picking gambler gurus and is impossible to confirm.
I guess Polymarket too will learn to be more subtle now.
- There's no "both sides" of the bets in this case. All the bets researched by the WSJ were fake, none of those bets was ever placed.by tecleandor
- the fact that apps like Polymarket seem to be legal is absolutely crazy to me.by mastermage
- Thank donald trump jr
- I was baffled to see gambling completely take over advertising in CSGO years ago with no one batting an eye, Valve also had its share of responsibility with loot cases but they have such a great reputation it's difficult to call them out on that.by Zealotux
- This is a well-trodden path.
A few years ago crypto gambling really took off. The big fish here is Stake. Back when Twitch still allowed slots, there was a flood of slots streamers. Ultimately this led to Twitch banning gambling. This was such an issue that Stake created their own live streaming platform (ie Kick). That should tell you how lucrative it was.
But what came out was that there was different contracts the streamers had. Some were paid a hefty fee and they got to keep any winnings. Why anyone would choose this is beyond me because over time your expected return is negative. The other option was that you could "gamble" with fake money. None of it was real. And none of it was disclosed.
I never understood why people would atch someone play slots all day but some people did. I think psychologically it's a bit like mukbang where people live vicariously through someone else's gluttony. With gambling, the psychological hook is so strong that it can be triggered by watching someone else gamble. But that's just a guess. Luckily, I've never been bitten by the gambling bug. It's one of the worst addictions.
I think fake gambling in particular should be illegal or, in the very least, disclosed publicly.
by jmyeet - Also, kids get scammed daily on YouTube on Pokemon card pulls with "loaded" packs and otherwise fake pulls for views.by tty456
- It is disturbing what has happened to pokemon cards in recent years. I remember as a kid no one wanted those packs because it as basically acknowledged by everyone the shit odds of getting something cool like a charizard vs a bunch of stupid cards. If you wanted a charizard, you'd just go to a card show with a dealer who has dozens of charizards and pay them like $20. You would never pull countless packs in effort to get one, everyone thought that was extremely stupid.by asdff
- The live scammers targeting kids are pretty vile: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NYTPI57GLac
Seems like it's just a game of whack-a-mole, nothing is really being done to stop scammers from making new accounts and continuing their scams.
by jmcgough - by impish9208
- Seems the gift has already run its course - for me, still getting paywalled. Are such links rate-limited?by Baljhin
- So too has nearly everyone else who is peddling someone's interests. Social media currently exists to bend you to someone else's will. This was always true in some sense: newspapers, television, radio, etc, but I'd point out a few things:
- This is precisely what made television such a bad experience. You could really feel the hand reaching through the screen to shake you. Demanding that you feel one way or another. Particularly with commercials, but of course with everything else as well.
- The mediums of television and radio were heavily gate-kept (even with the advent of cable) compared to the internet and social media. You didn't have the insanity of Twitter accounts from east Asia spamming BBC (not the news channel) propaganda, or Russia, Iran, and others attempting to inflame racial hatred, etc.
It's not a wholly brand new thing, but the reach, scale, and variety are so much greater that it might as well be brand new.
by everdrive