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- Hacker News
- Probably because the grift never stops.by freitasm
- Same playbook used by BNPL and neobanks…by jnyst1985
- Yet another article where the media is sanewashing the subject at hand
> Then there's the potential for insider trading, something that has dogged the prediction market industry, …
From a 2025 article [1]
> Coplan said, “Nobody is under the impression that nobody knows the answer, right? Like, of course, there’s people who are working on it that know when it’s going to come. And I think what’s cool about Polymarket is that it creates this financial incentive for people to go and divulge the information to the market and the market to change, and all of a sudden it’s trading at 95 cents.”
I didn’t know you could be described as being dogged by an issue that you actively courted and espoused. Additionally I remembered that quote but it took effort to find as it appears Kalshi and Polymarket decided the heat on those views was a little too much and have done a PR wave since January of this year to claim that they totally don’t support insider trading despite that being a core of their business concept.
I guess we’ve always been at war with East Asia again, I’ll update my firmware to be a good little drone if even media organizations like npr and apnews are just going to be this blatant with reframing history
[1] https://casinobeats.com/2025/11/20/polymarket-founder-shayne...
by lovich - What are you talking about?
Kalshi and Polymarket having to do a wave of publicity to try to take off the heat over insider trading shows that the issue of insider trading is in fact dogging the industry.
The NPR article's level of discussion of insider trading is entirely appropriate for an article that is not about insider trading.
by tzs - > “Yet another article where the media is sanewashing the subject at hand.”
I agree this level of public gambling is crazy. Though I’m dismayed with the criticism of mainstream media not taking a stronger stance, which I take is your criticism. Isn’t that a page from the likes of Fox News? Bringing punditry into news? Moral outrage regarding what otherwise appears to be a legal business (online betting)? Even the link you provide used the word “hints” to describe insider trading: “Polymarket Founder Shayne Coplan Hints That Insider Trading is Cool & Sportsbooks are a Scam”
I get that you’re angry, but I don’t understand why NPR is the villain.
by xtiansimon - The experience we have of sports betting shows that even extraordinarily well compensated sportspeople will cheat to influence events due to greed. That's not such a big problem for something that fundamentally does not matter (sports outcomes). As you apply it to things that do matter, like political appointments, actions in warzones, and even weather measurements, people will and have changed these outcomes to make money.by rozab
- There's big money in it, so of course there's going to be a huge PR push to cast it as a great moral and societal good.
The thing that gets me is that the rationalists who were such outspoken proponents of prediction markets (look up "futarchy" and the many positive articles about it) failed to predict the astonishing amounts of corruption that have come along for the ride with them.
by mwigdahl - It seems entirely fair to me that you can't wager against something that you directly had a hand in the outcome of, even accepting the bunk premise that these wagers are legal in the first place.
So much outrage nowadays is driven by a belief that people are entitled to profit off of every possible thing in life, how dreadful.
by totallygeeky - And to note, the law in question is from the 1800s -- hardly something novel Wisconsin is doing.by mwigdahl
- Like building more jails? Could there be a better way?by cwmoore
- The ability to bet on the outcome of any event is a guarantee of corruption in any event. We've seen the president's teleprompter operator bet on his speeches, we've seen journalists threatened in an attempt to get them to reword an article in order to resolve a bet differently, we've seen several sports betting scandals. What we haven't seen is any indication that this will get better without regulation, and now we're seeing betting markets fight like hell to introduce their rot into the institutions at the bedrock of our society. It needs to stop.
- Doesn't the insurance market have the same moral hazard? If you are paying for fire insurance it promises you a bundle of cash if your business burns down. At that point if the finances of your company go into the red, your only chance of becoming whole financially might involve a fire, and then you start calling folks like Tony Soprano to find an arsonistby Whoppertime
- The complete transformation and legitimization of betting culture in the United States has been surreal to watch. From you had to know a guy to baseball TV announcers giving odds on a home run this inning in less than a decade.
I know this is hard to conceive of, but there was a time when there were no gambling ads on TV! The crazy part? The other half of the ads you see on TV (pharmaceuticals) weren't there either!
- > The other half of the ads you see on TV (pharmaceuticals) weren't there either!
Not really true in the US. (I take what you are saying to mean there weren't any/many pharmaceutical commercials a decade ago)
Here's one from the 2000s that ended up maming about 10,000 people. [1]
by cogman10 - > The complete transformation and legitimization of betting culture in the United States has been surreal to watch.
Heinlein's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress implicitly predicted this (albeit for Luna, which was obviously modeled on the U.S.).
(Heinlein was right about so many things ....)
by dctoedt - I'm not completely anti-gambling, but I'm of the mind that if you're going to gamble away your life savings you should at least be required to put on pants and go to a sketchy betting parlor. Online gambling platforms make it too easy.by bigbuppo
- I am hard-line on this. Sports betting and prediction markets should be banned. Casinos should be banned. Scratch offs should be banned. Its feeding into the worst tendencies of people and hurts the most disadvantaged families. People playing a poker game with their friends, or buying a super bowl square at their bar isn't great but at least it was off to the side and hidden. We have a large chesterson's fence level experiment in society where all of these good ideas the progressives have had to keep society civil and healthy in the late 1800s and early 1900s, have slowly been removed, to terrible results.by ecshafer
- For a while, we had tons of alcohol and cigarette ads. At some point they were both deemed catastrophically harmful to society. Maybe prediction markets end up there?by imglorp
- It's not just the USA, it's happening in most of the EU too. Sports betting is especially rampant.
- Gambling legalization historically happens in waves following economic downturns because society’s tolerance for exploitation increases. It’s fundamentally a regressive tax that healthy societies won’t tolerate.
- Some time around 2015 I remember seeing Powell station in SF completely plastered with DraftKings ads and thinking "wait, I thought that was illegal". It seems to have only snowballed since then. In 2020 I was in downtown Philadelphia before the election and saw a massive screen with a Polymarket ad, and at that time Polymarket wasn't even legal in the US.
From nicotine to gambling harmful habits that our society had managed to marginalize have gotten a fresh coat of tech slapped on them and seemingly escaped all constraints.
by tdeck