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Discussion (70 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
https://www.forbes.com/sites/danalexander/2025/09/09/preside...
Many of these things are not really democratized either, they're centralized systems with a "we empower you" sales-pitch. The opaque and unaccountable central authority has an incentive to pick-and-choose what's possible, and to put their thumb on the metaphorical scales to get certain outcomes.
Kind of like ride-share apps: Any pretense of "democratizing" jobs faded, instead they enabled new flavors of monopolistic exploitation.
Leela: "You mean we can all together vote on the best plan?"
Farnsworth: "Hmm? Oh yes, as long as you do it all alone."
Those are contradictory words
The comparison to stock tickers is apt. Bloomberg terminals started as specialized tools for bond traders. Once financial data appeared on every TV screen, it changed how the public understood markets. Prediction markets are following the same path, just compressed into months instead of decades.
The tension is that news organizations now have a financial incentive to cover events that move prediction markets. This creates a feedback loop: dramatic events move markets, market movements become news, news coverage moves markets further. We saw this with the Hormuz situation this month, where prediction market odds were cited in coverage of the shipping blockade, which then moved the odds.
Whether this is good or bad depends on whether you think the signal (real-time probability estimates) outweighs the noise (gamification of serious events). The Forbes incident with the mass shooting market suggests we have not figured out where the line is yet.
I HIGHLY recommend going onto a sports subreddit match thread during a match and seeing what people say, versus the post match thread, a few hours after the match. The difference in tone is striking. While some people are probably just passionate, I'm pretty sure the depths of vitriol (that border on things like death threats) are a consequence of gambling.
I'm a firm believer in 'there's nothing new under the sun'.
> There's already been tales of journalists being harassed to change stories in order for over-leveraged betters to win polymarket bets.
So the only thing that has changed is who is doing the harassing.
> I'm pretty sure the depths of vitriol (that border on things like death threats) are a consequence of gambling.
People who are "passionate" about sports have always been the most aggressive and vulgar. I grew up around them, this does not surprise me at all.
Sure but I can't help but wonder if many of them have money riding on the games which makes their anger much more understandable. Perhaps those you grew up around were also having a bit of a flutter.
Can you guarantee a fair trial when anyone can bet on the outcome, including the judge and the defense?
It has changed the outcome of some sports matches. It could change the outcome of far more important events.
I'd like to emphasize that this incentive doesn't have to be an accidental find by the insider either: The "market" can end up facilitating anonymous crowd-sourced bribery by enemies or competitors, who create the potential for profit knowing that eventually an insider will take the other end of the implied deal.
Every time I see someone dismissing these kinds of issues--especially someone whose salary depends on not-understanding it [0] --I imagine how their tune would change if the shoe was on the other foot. For example, if someone created a "prediction market" where people could anonymously bet on unusual deaths or serious injuries of... prediction-market executives.
[0] https://quoteinvestigator.com/2017/11/30/salary/
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/TvWbOKJvZmk
https://youtu.be/RmUQptXfiWs?t=485
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_Lebanon_electronic_device...
Today, any bloody dictator, tyrant, or autocrat continues to kill people en masse simply because society lacks a sufficiently effective tool to guarantee the reliable transfer of funds to one of their henchmen should the issue with him be effectively resolved
Which makes me wonder if it is actually just money laundering.
We shouldn't conflate permitting lotteries which give a lot of people precious hope, with enabling the disease of gambling addiction. Gambling addiction transforms its victims into desperate degenerate messes, who will do anything in order to reverse the outcome of their losses. By popularising gambling on reality (instead of a sandbox like sport) we're creating a future where such people will harass journalists, which further threatens our increasingly precarious relationship with truth.
The system is already very much like that, we should try to go in the other direction, not make it even more attractive for corrupt individuals.
When someone in charge only cares about personal profit, it is only them that will benefit (and a couple of megacorps), to the detriment of millions, and humanity itself (look no further than the current events).
if I bet $50K that arowthway won't die suddenly then I am sure that probably won't happen, right?
I hope they stay as open and generous as they are now with programmatic access
Make a prediction for it: When will Gamma/Data/CLOB require subscription: 2026, 2027, etc.
https://youtu.be/ZN4njIQcSR4?t=1815
Almost like the offenders get their inside info straight from the chief purveyor of markets up and down chaos