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  • Hacker News
  • Years ago the US government allegedly proposed prediction markets, in part to encourage the exact kinds of behavior that the US Special Forces soldier exhibited. Of course they wanted it from adversaries, not from allies.

    By creating prediction markets with points rather than dollars, Meta probably avoids a lot of the legal issues current prediction markets are facing. But it also loses the one real value of prediction markets: when people put their own real money at stake, their decisions should be based more on actual knowledge and estimation than wishful thinking.

    So what use is a prediction market of points for anyone?

    by zugi
  • Meta has the one thing every prediction market has lacked, which is enough warm bodies to make the order books deep. Whether that helps depends on what they list, and an engagement feed is going to surface 'will this celebrity break up' long before anything a decision hangs on.
    by Ghost_0
  • People forget that Meta already did this years ago, before prediction markets became the next big consumer trend for them to chase.

    The app was called Forecast, and launched in June 2020. (Around the same time that Kalshi and Polymarket launched, actually!) It was framed as a way to make the comments and activity on Facebook actually productive rather than toxic, and build expert reputation signaling mechanisms.

    I think they sunset it after about a year.

    by ddp26
  • They even call it "Arena". The place where gladiators kill each other, lions eat christans , criminals are exectuted brutally and animals are hunted. What an apt name chosen by the most moral company of our times.
    by seydor
  • > lions eat christans

    Could you explain this bit ?

    by leosanchez
  • Zuck simply cannot come to terms with the fact that his legacy is having built the world greatest ad platform.
    by mmayberry
  • Second greatest.
    by titzer
  • considering his casual disregard for the feelings of fellow Harvard students back in the day, I doubt he cares what his legacy is. Just being rich and famous is plenty reward.
    by damnesian
  • Maybe he should start a launch company with the stated goal of sending humans to Uranus or wherever it is he's from.
    by morkalork
  • Facebook is the 21st century version of the tabloid newspaper and daytime Jerry Springer. Highly lucrative, but bottom of the barrel stuff.

    Launching a prediction market is exactly the type of thing I would expect from them.

    by nmfisher
  • Hopefully it's the same geniuses that implemented his metaverse thingy.
    by throwa356262
  • Hope so (ex-Meta, and hold a couple of million dollars of their stock, but quite dislike the company).
    by tmule
  • Polymarket: "Trade on anything."

    Kalshi: "Trade the Future."

    Meta Arena: "They 'trust me.' Dumb f^^ks."

    by ElProlactin
  • He wants to collect and profit from insider info by joining in on the newest unregulated gambling scheme. I'm sure plenty of cheaters and suckers will be happy to make him more money.
    by autoexec
  • Smartphone

    Dating

    Cryptocurrency

    AR/VR

    AI

    Gambling <— Zuck is here

    This man struck gold exactly once with social media and, rather than being content with his billions, will forever chase that high pursuing the latest fad and drag his company through failure over and over again.

    by paxys
  • I can‘t help but wonder what goes on inside of the upper management of these big companies, and why nobody ever stops for a moment to think about whether what they are up to does any good for the end users beyond making more money.

    But then again, this is very on brand for Meta/Zuck, so I‘m not surprised.

    by NikxDa
  • Zuck has not accountability and total veto powers at the board level. If this was some other CEO making so many mistakes starting with the brain dead Metaverse, they would have been either fired or investigated for fraud. At Meta only the low level engineers are held accountable.
    by innagadadavida
  • > why nobody ever stops for a moment

    What, you want to get fired?

    by orsenthil
  • Cliché cynic's comment: the end users they are concerned about are the companies they sell ads to. If you're not that, tough luck.
    by JsonDemWitOster
  • Corey Doctorow addressed this in a way I hadn't thought of before. Meta is a "mature" company, masquerading as a "growth" company by expanding into new markets without any real product, all so they can pretend they haven't fully saturated their market.

    https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/06/how-to-burst-the-ai-...

    by idontwantthis
  • 51% shareholding he’s free to make all the mistakes he wants
    by rusk
  • Zuckerberg could’ve made a YouTube competitor or a Netflix competitor given that he already has a platform for video sharing and an ads infrastructure. But I guess the guys at the top are so smart that they don’t bother themselves when copying ideas to actually copy something that makes sense.
    by darth_avocado
  • Smartphone

    Dating

    Cryptocurrency

    AR/VR

    AI

    Gambling <— Zuck is here

    This man struck gold exactly once with social media and, rather than being content with his billions, will forever chase that high pursuing the latest fad and drag his company through failure over and over again.

    by paxys
  • > rather than being content with his billions, will forever chase that high pursuing the latest fad

    He is content with his billions. That is why he can piss it away on stupid ideas now.

    by win311fwg
  • all he needs to do is put a competent CEO
    by winfredJa
  • The fact that someone has billions of dollars and still chooses to spend 40-60 hours/week going to the office to work on Facebook seems psychotic. He can do practically anything he wants, and he chooses to work on Facebook. It’s mind bending.
    by 4lx87
  • He's a bit of a wuss though. Not betting it all, just slowly iterating on the next miss, can never be fired. Pretty damn funny actually. Sad if you work there though.
    by swader999
  • The guy has zero imagination, I guess. Even Facebook was a stolen and mostly unoriginal idea, it was just executed well for that era. I can only feel sad for him, all the money in the world yet not a single creative or interesting idea to allocate it on. And the unoriginal things it is allocated on end up being pretty bad most of the time.
    by codemog
  • But wait, there’s more! Mark is also a big Dana White fan so now you also have Meta AI UFC Fighter Rankings

    https://www.mmamania.com/ufc-mma-rankings/452601/ufc-finally...

    by tren_hard
  • He has already finished the game and just explores the side quests. He is more than content, he’s way more content than the rest of us.
    by wiseowise