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https://www.propublica.org/article/draftkings-sports-gamblin...
I am one of the very few people in the United States who actually does still earnestly believe prediction markets do in principle serve an immense social good that can't be provided in any other way: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/prediction-market-faq
Just, in practice, Polymarket and Kalshi are (unsurprisingl)y run by people who solely care about how much revenue they could ever possibly inhale.
And everything else about them is so unethical and so destructive to the commons I would support them being metaphorically razed to the ground.
Like, just the Kalshi and Polymarket Twitter accounts alone contribute more to disinformation (disinformation, not misinformation) than Alex Jones could ever dream of. And then all the accounts affiliated with them make it 1000x worse. And then they have so many other unbelievable scandals I'd have to write a wall of text to list them all. Tons of egregiously machiavellian, intelligence agency-tier tactics and operations.
The only prediction markets that seem to be mostly upside with minimal downside are the ones that do not accept real money.
I believe this applies to any company which sells an inherently harmful, predatory, and addictive product or service
That leads us to BJ Fogg's Persuasive Design Lab at Stanford and the addictive software design.
Tobacco industry owners figured out their time's out and bought food stock and put their addiction department to design food to be addictive.
Where should we head next?
Used to work at 7-Eleven and we would have people come in and out for hours on end pouring money into scratch tickets.
State lotteries are just a regressive tax targeting the poor.
(I am not defending state lotteries, but I do think there's some distinction to be made between "we actively exploit people to maximize our profits for our own sakes" and "we regulate the passive exploitation of people to supplement taxes in a regressive manner." Or something. I dunno, maybe somebody has more elaborate thoughts on this to share.)
In the 1980s, if you wanted to gamble in my city, you went to a gambling den operated by the Civella crime family. If you got caught in a police raid, your life was ruined. If you got behind on your debts, the mob might take it out of you, literally. These were known risks, but people did it anyways.
Then, in the 1990s, there was a change in the casino gaming laws. Casinos opened with harm reduction measures in place. You can absolutely destroy your finances for life in one, but there are ways out.
These apps need regulation like in-person gambling has. Whatever they currently have, it's not enough.
Some slot machines/casino games are designed to appeal to problem gamblers. DK and co, however, do not design these games, and state regulators do already control aspects of their design. For online operators, this doesn't represent most of their revenue and, I suspect, most would be quite happy not to provide these products.
Define "drugs". Alcohol is a drug. Most users aren't addicts. So is tobacco. Most users are addicts. Cannabis? More like alcohol than tobacco in terms of addictiveness.
There may be some selection bias. Smoking tobacco is an unpleasant sensation. There's no reason to do it other than the addiction and the effects on your brain chemistry afterwards. Whereas many alcoholic drinks taste great in their own right and would be consumed even if they had no chemical effects.
I suspect gambling is like alcohol or cannabis. Engaging in it affects brain chemistry. For some people that's addictive. Most people are able to enjoy the activity without being hooked.
For alcohol that number is something like 2/3 revenue from the top 10% of drinkers, who drink an order of magnitude more than the decile below them. I doubt gambling is very different but if you have more info I'm happy to hear it.
Fully agree, that's what I mean.
I'm not entirely sure when people started to have this idea that when they walk through a company door, as if this is some magical portal into the realm of amorality, give up their human responsibilities and faculties
A company is set up and incentivised to maximize a profit function, and that in turn incentivises to promote people which are not impeded by ethical considerations. The hierarchy furthermore ensures that people which would otherwise act ethical, don't, for fear of losing their job. This structure behaves ethical as long as you put ethics in the profit function.
how can you became this naive ???? this is literally a company that get profit when you a lose
for their ethics, its inline with company mission
That frees one to think in a different way. No longer constrained by the convention of the common good, some folks, for instance, watched the movie "Wall Street", and took it not as the warning it so clearly was, but rather as in instruction manual. The wider populace believes this nonsense because it was passed on to us via Television, the Great Glowing Box of Truth that for the big chunk of the 20th century was the arbiter of reality.
Now we have people so confused by this bullshit and so in need of viewing themselves as "temporary poor" that they vote against their own interests on a regular basis.
Fortunately, the changing climate will wipe us out. :)
For comparison, there are offline casinos who use targeted adverts saying that they do not comply with regulators, and their adverts are designed in such a way as to appeal to people with gambling addiction (usually showing some kind of live play, which is banned in every regulated market afaik).
You can be sceptical of the motives of individuals but there are very strong corporate incentives from state regulators (in the US, particularly those with physical casinos).
No something clearly different happens in regulated markets. There's a massive difference between "This would make us more money, but we won't do that because it's unethical" and "I wish we could get away with doing this unethical thing to make more money, but sadly current regulations make this one unprofitable for now. Lets increase our lobbying spend to try to fix that."
Nobody is actually blind to the reality of the stats but this kind approach makes it both easier to dehumanise their actions as well as giving them plausible deniability when asked if they target specific demographics such as addicts.
They seem to have not gotten the memo that they're a legitimate business now.
I mean what do we expect ???? "the house" is playing fair ????
we literally have mobile game that have "gacha" which is full blown gamble and we pretend that the actual "online casino" is to play moral, ethics or fairness ??
we literally past that point ages ago
There are multiple companies that will take your money and data and say they have found a way of identifying gamblers, afaik none of these products actually or can work.
What that article showed is: someone uses a product, they do not activate any features to use the product safely, and then they it is unsafe. DK have safety features integrated with governments already in the product.
Yes, it happens to every gambler who spends a lot of money. That is how VIP tiers are defined, based on how much you spend. There is no way for them (or anyone) to understand the customer's state of mind. Should it be illegal for retailers to offer customers discounts? Compulsive shopping is significantly more common than gambling addiction, do retailers target those customers?
If you never want to gamble, you tell the state regulator you never want to gamble and you will be unable to use any site.
My data science graduate program had a class that analyzed major data science success stories. The very first one covered how Caesar's Entertainment built models and ran experiments to identify their "most valuable customers", figure out how to predict when they were getting ready to leave the casino, and intervene with incentives and perks designed to get them to stay and keep gambling. And also how all of their competitors rushed to implement their own programs in response.
Look at it from the casino's perspective: their entire business model is centered on exploiting quirks of human psychology to separate people from their money. Expecting prosocial behavior from them is like expecting a squirrel to ignore your bird feeders.
Do we treat humans as
1) having full agency, and thus full responsibility for their actions
2) having less than full agency, and then to what extent must society/governments implement control over things that humans can't control within themselves
Because generally, if you subscribe to 1, there is nothing immortal from taking money from a human that that wants to hand it over, provided that human well knows what is at stake. So as long as these websites aren't defrauding the customers with fake stats, there really is nothing wrong.
If you subscribe to 2, then thats a much riskier line to walk because that affects a lot of things, not just gambling.
You frame as if agency exists, then exploitive coercion doesn't exist.
We can respect the agency of folks to smoke or drink, while also criminalizing lying to entire populations about the known health effects of your products.
We can respect people as having agency, while also acknowledging that psy-ops like those run by Cambridge Analytica, or even normal psy-ops like mass market advertising, can influence groups of people through deceptive or manipulative ways in aggregate and cause massive harms.
We can respect personal agency while also acknowledging some folks have addiction problems, addictions problems be intentionally manufactured by products and platforms. There is a balance between allowing a poker game, and allowing the MGM Grand to plant a limo driver in a recovering addict's driveway.
We can respect agency while acknowledging those with large reach because of wealth can cause mass harm through media, influence and coercion if unregulated.
We can grant authorities to police and politicians without Qualified Immunity from consequences of their actions.
This is a moral stance that not everyone agrees with.
It's hard to respect a legal system that jails someone who wasn't hurting anyone. Repealing a law that criminalizes victimless behavior, especially when so many people already break it, paradoxically increases respect for other laws. It reinforces that the law serves a purpose: protecting people and promoting the general welfare.
The list is far longer than you've mentioned.
Here's a list of things you're allowed to profit on either as an investor or as a participant that are quite wild: Fighting with gloves (more lethal than bare-knuckle), bare-knuckle fights, kids in contact sports (even combat sports), throwing away perfectly good food in order to lower taxable income, not planting a crop specifically because it wouldn't make enough profit, gig-economy not paying living wages, a minimum wage below living wage, predatory lending, algorithmic social media that swings elections, targetted advertisement psyops, marketing to children, cosmetic surgery in general but especially for children, forced conversion 'therapy', experimental life saving treatments gate-kept by money, planned obsolescence, plastic packaging...
In combat sports, we're really not too far removed from the collisuem, just that it's "not meant to be to the death" even though it does often result in death or lifelong conditions. The fighters get paid, the organizers get paid, the arena gets paid, the advertisers get paid...All in the name of watching someone not quite kill someone.
Hell, we've even still got slavery tucked neatly away behind "Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States.", but we know that many sitting in prison are demonstrably innocent. The prison is allowed to require that every inmate works. You're allowed to run an organization that profits from these slaves. You are not legally required to pay in some states.
It's curious to me that so many progressives or soi-disant leftists are in favor of dissolving these types of moral and social traditions while being fervently anti-capitalist. It seems that they (meaning the subset who are always looking for new fenceposts to tear down) are in fact the shock troops of Capital.
Probably. We don't call it prostitution anymore it's now called, "sex work."
Btw it’s not just those two, add iGaming into the mix which is cell phone gambling glammed up in Candy Crush form. Leeches, all of them.
Proof if proof needed of the complete pointlessness of casino gambling. Some people will still do it even when they know they can't win anything.
Some brokerages are more strict, but plenty just let you check boxes.
Of course you can still lie but legally there is a line.
If you had to take and pass a test, that might filter out more people; although I'm sure the seller would help you pass the test, so maybe not.
its purpose is simple. if you lose the money of sufficiently powerful people, as a middleman, the standard exposes you one more kind of legal jeopardy.
I think that really framed the issue well to me. Imagine having an addiction problem and having to carry the problem substance around with you 24/7.
Every personality has something, it seems, that it tends to get addicted to if given the chance. Gambling has never been that to me. I get bored with most of the games and upset at losing money—even if I net win, I’m irritated about the incremental losses.
On the other hand, I have to manually keep track of how many days in a month I drink because if I don’t I’ll happily have half a bottle of wine every evening, and I think I know where that leads. (When I lose money in a casino I almost always translate that into a nice dinner. Which I will, invariably, enjoy far more than winning imaginary numbers.)
While you don't appear to be susceptible, it is notable that this mindset is not something that makes you less likely to develop a gambling problem. It's actually part of how they drive addiction. A customer who is annoyed at every loss is often a customer who will chase their losses with more/bigger bets, trying to get the winning high back.
Haven't followed all that closely for some other games, but it very much seems like the model for NBA2k is to release a new game with some minor patches each year, charge 70$, then spend the majority of that year crafting patches for the card game to keep whales interested in constantly spending on new packs(which are promptly devalued on the next release, and straight up killing the prior year's game's online service, makes them entirely worthless the next year).
I worked with a state lottery that did similar things. Their target demographic was the “every day players” that would compulsively buy at the gas station.
I quit that job because it seems to be morally wrong.
Betting apps are just this taken to the extreme, I feel for people with this addiction but it’s not going away anytime soon.
So I'm guessing this varies state by state.
The retailers still have every incentive to sell as many lottery tickets as people will buy, because that's how they make a sizable portion of their money.
And the gambling addiction hotlines are too little too late. I've known people who struggled with gambling. They never admitted they had a problem until they had bottomed out. At that point I doubt the lotteries and casinos particularly care because that well's already run dry, anyway.
If the gaming industry really wanted to put their money where their mouth is on this one, they'd figure out ways to prevent people from getting into that situation in the first place. Putting limits on how much money anyone person can lose, even if only at a single establishment, is one idea that wouldn't even be hard to implement. But of course we won't see that because, unlike gambling addiction hotlines, that runs the risk of reducing their profits.
Not equating your work for a lottery with dealing heroin, I’m just pointing out that to say you don’t want people addicted to heroin while still selling heroin isn’t sufficient, and I think the same applies to lotteries. If they acknowledge the problem stop even offering it as a product.
Acknowledging the problem doesn't make it go away: you must be a big war on drugs guy? right?
Why? This wasn't a thing that existed 10-15 years ago, this isn't some long-standing institution. We could ban online betting apps today if we wanted to.
Now those rich and powerful people exist, and they will use their wealth and power to keep it legal. It is not easy to put the genie back into the bottle.
It's pretty wild that we let it be advertised and boggles my mind that pro leagues jumped on the train.
That's wild. Wasn't the whole point of having a state lottery to put the state in a better position to be able to discourage people from becoming addicted? The very idea of a "target demographic" seems contrary to that goal; the "target" should be to have nobody buying tickets.
This was my takeaway as well. Is anyone surprised at this outcome?
Ah... Got it... The same galaxy brains that think p(foom) has a materially greater value than an epsilon minimally >0 to avoid divide by zero errors believe in lottery tickets. Got it. Explains a lot, thanks...
Your $1 lottery coupon has extremely low chances of winning a million dollars, but they aren't zero. No one will sell you any stocks for $1, but even if they did what is a chance of a random $1 stock increasing in value one million times?
You have been able to buy mutual funds in dollar increments for like forever, with the significant caveat that there's often a minimum purchase amount, but once you hold that you can add in single dollars if you want +/- they only deal in a certain number of decimals.
Fractional share trading of stocks and ETFs happens at a lot of brokers for the past several years, too. Do they really want you to buy $1 of BRK.A? probably not, but you probably can.
Also, there's like penny stocks. :P
But yeah, there's no mechanism for that $1 to turn into millions of dollars within a few days. It can happen with a very well timed purchase, many decades, and some inflation, but that's not very exciting.
Just like AI p(Doom) in the next decade is approximately zero, but we all have to pretend to it's between 1 and 10% so American frontier labs can implement regulatory capture.
So if what you're saying is you are willing to bet $1 if I give you a 1 in 1 billion chance of winning $1M, I will take that bet. And I will take that bet as many times as you'd like.
But your best chance of winning $1M? Start with $10M.
I also get loads Polymarket and Kalshi ads. Polymarket seems to have invested tons into featuring mega celebs like LeBron in one of their ads. Other ads feature influencers showing off how to trade and such. More obnoxious part is that these companies pay influencers to talk about trading and winning live on streams- without disclosing they're paying those influencers.
Polymarket even set up fake website where influencers showed they were winning hundreds of thousands of dollars. You wouldn't find those bets on the real Polymarket website.
Marijuana is not zero harm, but guess what: Making it illegal is ALSO not zero harm. The drug war is an abject failure, US consumers have driven Mexico into a failed state with roving gangs of narcos who murder crowds of people with impunity.
"Studies say..." OK. Actually study weed then. Actually do clinical trials and apply science and tell us the actual results. Actually doing that has been prevented because it is a scheduled drug federally. So all we have is folk wisdom and half-baked one-off studies. "Linked to" has no scientific value, it is a term the news uses to scare people.
I think people should be informed and be allowed to make their own choices, as opposed to creating a huge and tyrannical law enforcement agency that will ruin a kids life for carrying a plant around.
Always funny how conservatives are the party of freedom, unless it's something they don't like.
Except when it comes to protesting certain things.
https://prospect.org/2026/07/07/economic-hit-men-for-gamblin...
Money Stuff did a great bit on this a few days ago. There's 2 functions inside DraftKings:
- Fin the most lucrative customers, to keep engaging them.
- Finds addicted gamblers, to get them help to quit gambling.
These are the same people.
Sure, yeah, there's a nice little story about gambling within your means, blah blah. But if you're optimizing your gambling app, you're going to find and create problematic gambling as the core objective.
AI, ML, whatever. It's a gambling company. It targets gamblers. It probably shouldn't exist.
What amazed me was that Chris Christie (then governor of NJ) used state money to fund SIX consecutive lawsuits trying to get online gambling legalized in New Jersey.
We need a better way of responding to journalism evidencing what was previously suspected and accepted.
You actually login or god forbid pay for a subscription, all of your matches are disabled bot accounts. I actually have a theory that daiting apps are responsible for a significant portion if not most of those bots.
I’m actually more willing to work on a gambling or prediction product vs a dating app.
At least everyone knows gambling is a scam.
DraftKings: Hi we're going to give you extra incentives! User: Hmm, sounds like I might like that. How do I get them? DraftKings: You have to lose constantly! And then when you start winning, we take them away! You like that, don't you? User: No.
Dark Pattern. No new rules needed. "Just" enforcement.
And by that I mean almost no one in charge will be held responsible.
Casinos are a for profit business. If we don’t want them pursuing the path of least resistance we need regulation and enforcement.
You will find a lot of people who will tell you they win at these things. They don't. How do I know this? Because if you win consistently, they kick you off. You're bad for business because the pigeons need to win occasionally to keep playing (and losing).
Gambling (and I include Kalshi and Polymarket here) shouldn't be this accessible. Back when you had to go to a casino, it was still bad but that barrier prevented a lot of harm. Being able to gamble away your future and your family's future from the comfort of your phone simply shouldn't be allowed.
People with personality disorders, depression, anxiety, etc. all algorithmically being plied for attention. It's disgusting and nobody is doing anything about it, which will eventually erode buy-in in the system until someone is willing to let it all go without an adversary even firing a shot.
Anybody seen those billboards? It’s disgusting.