YHK - yet another hacker news clone

In regular gambling, the house is in control. In sports gambling, the players and refs can have their own agenda.

There is a long, long, long history of gambling houses that are based on gambling on specific outcomes being unable to resist dipping into the revenue stream they can get from fixing the outcomes. Once the outcomes are fixed (even only probabilistically), they can tilt the house take in their favor.

It is true that, abstractly, this is a bad idea in the long run for many reasons. However, it's a good idea in the short term. It's a really good idea in the short term, at least from a superficial analysis. And we can expect that someone is going to do that superficial analysis. It only takes one in the entire industry.

A simple glance at history in this space says that the odds that someone is going to do this are for all practical purposes 1. The only question is whether it is already happening, and with high likelihood the correct question is how much it is already happening. It always starts small and they get bolder and bolder. None of this is subtle. None of this requires some sort of careful read of history carefully parsing out a tiny hint here and a whiff of a suggestion there. It's the completely obvious and repeatable strange attractor for gambling at this scale. As is the fact this will eventually blow up in some sort of scandal, after which it will end up heavily regulated again, until another generation or two goes by and forgets why gambling was fenced off.

Most of the cycle has happened once already within my personal lifetime. Major League Baseball had a pretty bad blowup in the late 1980s. Although as with some other vices, the fact that it is sitting there, in your pocket all the time, hooked up to Skinner-box mechanics in real time, is a new twist.

For bonus points society can also get to rediscover why simply banning it has never been all that successful either. Fencing it off seems to be the stable outcome that minimizes damage.

In the meantime the name of the game is to stay clear of the blast radius, and if you are a pro-social type, to try to figure out how to help the people who will get badly, badly hurt in the meantime until society puts the pieces together again.

For now.

I feel that won't really stop the people who have serious problems with this shit, who actually ruin their lives

I definitely think that the same restrictions we put on tobacco advertising need to be applied to gambling apps.

I don't think the equivalent of waiting periods make sense.

If anything they should just ban advertising. Simple, worked for smoking for the most part, and we have precedent as it's harmful. Why does every sporting event have so many ads and sponsorships by these betting companies.

The worst thing about these sites is that they're necessarily net negative. If you win regularly, you'll be kicked off these platforms. They only want dumb money. True prediction markets are different since they're don't market makers and just enforce the contracts and there are people on each side. But the whole draft-kings type gambling markets are just awful

I would add: ban all advertising of sports betting.

you know how, some bars, you can go on the porch and smoke a cigarette? others allow weed and it is illegal? and some ban smoking entirely (either, both) on the state or local level? sports betting was not SO bad when it was AC, Vegas and OTB... and maybe some shady weird dude whose name you got from some ghetto hustler that maybe had a few dozen clients. What is going on now is just disgusting. The sports is bad enough. People looking at odds for them doing or not something? seriously?

It should also not be possible to advertise it, and profits from it should be taxed above and beyond the level of what corporations that don't contribute to social malaise have to pay.

I agree with banning online betting.

If you want to add friction, just make sports betting IRL.

Also ban any gambling advertising.

They also do due to alcohol, substance abuse and other addictions.

I mean, I agree, but whenever it comes up there's always someone who refuses to call a spade a spade... I'm curious how the pro-prediction market set would argue this is ok (other than to shrug and say "it's just one more thing to predict, why would we try to decide what can and can't be predicted?").