They're built on adtech, which people don't understand.

You have many adtech online dossiers that are basically a virtual you, that can be poked, prodded and studied for interests and behaviors.

for a very minimal look, maybe check out amazon "about you":

https://www.amazon.com/slc/hub?useAiMode=1

Our representatives both dem and republican (but slightly more Republican) have decided that the mountain of data that for profit companies have on is a benefit overall to the economy and we’re the guinea pigs for psychological experiments - the “American consumer” is the #1 commodity the US mines.

  The real problem is how we've let these companies infiltrate so much of our society so fast

All the hard work of the people who suffered and fought to achieve this wisdom only for it to be abandoned.

Generations making the same mistakes over and over even with boundless knowledge at our fingertips. Really showcases how important education and especially reverence for education is.

We are unethical for letting it get to the state it has. The voters define the phrase "money talks".

Is any form of entertainment or art a social good?

People can get "addicted" to practically any type of entertainment in that they spend a massive chunk of their time on it to the point it stifles their development.

Is sports gambling worse than f2p games? Are f2p games worse than regular video games? Is someone addicted to video games worse than someone addicted to reading fantasy novels? What about smutty novels?

I'm not sure is disagree with you but I think it is hard to start drawing these lines without saying you are now the arbiter of good art and bad art and you can ban some forms of art if you don't like them and have decided they are bad.

Now are you just banning things you don't like because you point to the societal harms as a fig leaf defense that could be applied to the art you do like as well?

Is it the % of people who show addictive tendencies to a piece of art/entertainment how we define if it is good or bad?

Is the morality of a form of entertainment defined by how many users show problematic consumption habits, such that in some populations an entertainment product is a moral good and in others it isn't? Is morality that flexible?

Prediction markets seemed like a possible exception to the rule that anything to do with betting is always a scourge on the commons, but those companies quickly realized sports gambling is the best way to rake in cash, so they all converge on it.

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.

This falls under the umbrella of "there's no ethical consumption under capitalism". Everything you do supports somebody who's doing something bad. There's really no way to avoid it. Heck, it was even a plot point on The Good Place.

The issue is that our economic system is coercive. You need a job. Now this doesn't excuse you from doing any job but you also need to live.

Take the big tech companies. They're essentially military contractors now. Google, Amazon, Microsoft, etc are functionally no different to RTX, Boeing or Lockheed Martin.

But should you treat someone who works on Android the same as someone who works out on AI systems for military targeting? Probably not. Also, Palantir is fundamentally more evil than any of these tech companies. So it's tricky.

I do agree that online gambling as a whole is deeply unethical. There is no positive byproduct of this. Your salary is paid by people losing money, probably through addiction. And yes, you can say people have free will but you're still preying on and growing addiction.

Many people enjoy gambling, and relatively few have a "problem", so "negative public good" is doing a lot of work there. DraftKings may indeed by unethical, but that doesn't mean that all or even most others are.

I feel like a much larger fraction of the economy is predatory than is made out to be in these gambling discourses. Examples:

* FSA plans are designed to get you to gamble on how much medical expenses you will have; if you overestimate, you either lose the money or spend it on shit you otherwise wouldn't buy; if you underestimate, you pay taxes on stuff you shouldn't be paying taxes on. The healthy alternative would be: Cut the FSA, let people just tax deduct medical expenses at tax time, even small ones.

* Extended warranty plans are baiting you to pay for something you are statistically unlikely to need. The healthy alternative would be: Just service things past warranty and charge a much more reasoanable price for it.

* Insurances but co-insurances, deductibles, clauses: "We'll bait you into paying because you think we'll pay but we'll not actually pay because it says in the fine print"

* Trip protection: Asking you to gamble on the probability of a mishap, instead of just covering mishaps out of the box

Yes. Gambling goes a long way. I just recommended Natasha Dow Schüll and Addiction by Design.

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?

Hope you're including all the state governments and their lotteries in this assessment.

Meta, ByteDance, ...

The problem is, some humans seem to be consistently drawn towards products or services that fit that description.

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.

It isn't inherently addictive. Gambling addiction is significantly less common than alcohol addiction, and has no properties that make it inherently addictive to someone who is not predisposed towards that addiction (unlike drugs, for example, which are inherently addictive to all humans).

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.

I think we should be able to expect a company to have ethics, just like we should be able to expect them to follow the laws, but we should also regulate them to ensure that they do and punish them meaningfully when they fail to.

You can't have rules in a society, that are against the moral feeling of sizable chunk of the population. That's just going to be a source for conflict. At some point you do need a population with a moral compass or you get nowhere as a ruler, especially in participatory ruling systems like a democracy.

So, you want government to decide what is good and bad behavior?

companies are a fiction made out of people, they don't have anything, and regardless what the rules are I expect those people to behave ethically at any given time.

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

This happens at every gambling company in regulated markets like the US or Europe.

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).

What usually happens is they talk about statistics rather than demographics. Eg “when doing x we’ve seen a 5% rise in engagement but a 50% rise in spend from those engaged”

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.

> The best thing would be to ban these sites.

I think we could legislate some easy-to-understand, easy-to-enforce rules. Like, "you can't have more than N bets open at a time." (1?) Or, "you can't have more than $1,000 worth of bets open at a time."

True, addicts could skirt these rules by having different bets on different sites. But at least it would add a little friction, and it would be easy to monitor compliance.

Meaning that, should they get the memo, they’d change their behaviour to that of a legitimate business? Not being combative here, just not sure I follow what you’re saying.

Not just mobile games. Roblox is basically an online child casino, powered by child laborers being compensated in Robux scrip. Fortnite isn't much better. We'd do a lot of good by regulating these games better too. The gambling addicts who got hooked with these games will move on to DraftKings when they're older. DraftKings knows this is their pipeline and has been investing in esports and video games like Call of Duty and establishing partnerships with Riot Games and Activision Blizzard.

“Let the passed be past” is ironically sage.

Everything starts out permitted. Making things illegal requires action, and enforcing laws requires the application of nonconsensual violence - a direct action.

This goes back to the trolley problem. I'm part of society, and I'm not to blame in any way for this; I had nothing to do with it.

If there's no way to distinguish, why was the author "made a VIP"? Or does that happen to every gambler

At least with a car you know exactly what you're getting, you might not value it but many people out there are absolutely getting their money's worth back from a 100k car, be it ego or aesthetics or whatever, a gambling addict is just getting exploited and abused, there's no positive to it.

That's a matter of opinion. There are those of us that believe that it is a gross violation of one's human rights to dictate how they're allowed to spend the money that they earned.

It's a side effect of liberty that people can choose to put themselves into deep suffering. I know people who do the same by blowing all of their money on designer clothes or expensive cars. Nobody is talking about regulating poor people wasting money on those things.

If you earn the money, you're entitled to piss it away. Them's the breaks.

Advertising needs to be more targeted if anything. I don't want to see a bunch of irrelevant junk - I want to see high quality products that are useful to my life.

We clearly subscribe to option 2 in the United States. We don't allow access to medication based on your own volition. We don't allow access to medical procedures based on your own volition.

> So as long as these websites aren't defrauding the customers with fake stats, there really is nothing wrong.

This is a moral stance that not everyone agrees with.

This framing is nonsense. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_dilemma

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.

Do you know what an addiction is?

What about fallible, gullible, with full agency?

Do you honestly trust these companies to not mislead their customers

At least where I live it is explicitly permitted as long as you get government authorization: https://igb.illinois.gov/sports-wagering/sports-authorized-o...

I think legalizing cannabis was more about not jailing people for consuming a plant.

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.

You know prositution is already legal in certain counties in Nevada, and it's been that way since '71?

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.

Sorry but Sunday blue laws are religious discrimination. It’s just a day and businesses shouldn’t be restricted by a single religious sect. Gambling and substance abuse are actual public health issues.

Capital constantly needs new frontiers to exploit, and therefore must remove moral and social obstacles that stand in its way. Pseudo-prostitution has already been made widespread via platforms like OnlyFans, it's only a matter of time before in-the-flesh prostitution follows, as you said.

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.

Are you several hundred years old?

The idea that putting substances into one's own body is somehow immoral is itself an inducement to the violation of the rights of others.

Your morals have nothing to do with what others do with their own body.

> I predict this trend will continue all the way to prostitution

Probably. We don't call it prostitution anymore it's now called, "sex work."

Have you ever heard of gacha? This is the entire shtick as I understand it

"In the United States, to be considered an accredited investor, a natural person must have a net worth of at least $1,000,000, excluding the value of one's primary residence, or have income at least $200,000 each year for the last two years (or $300,000 combined income if married) and have the expectation to make the same amount this year, or must otherwise be a holder of a specific license in good standing."

Of course you can still lie but legally there is a line.

The accredited investor standard is higher then a basic test.

> and upset at losing money—even if I net win, I’m irritated about the incremental losses.

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.

I don't think there is nearly enough attention on the pipeline that has been created for children to grow into good little gamblers. All major sports games have absolute borderline gambling within their game in the form of those fantasy style Card games. Pair that with watching any live broadcast of a major sport and the gross ads for all these major sports better companies, with the ad reads during the game.

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).

It’s really disturbing to me because sports are one category of entertainment that is supposed to be family friendly and accessible to kids. They look up to pro athletes as heroes and all the gambling ads are directly being shown to children. It shouldn’t be legal to advertise age restricted products and services to kids, even if they’re not the “intended” target. They’re still being groomed to accept gambling as cool and normal. Gambling, alcohol, all those ads should be subject to the same safe harbor restrictions as sexual content. Ban the ads from stadiums and jerseys too.

I don't watch sports much, but the last times I did they filled the screen with ads for gambling in the middle of the games while they were being played

beyond that, every sports podcast actively encourages gambling. hosts lightheartedly joke about their bad beats like its a pratfall. while entertaining as a non-gambling outsider, i think its a colloquial rationalization of life-ruining behavior

I worked with a heroin distributor as well. They had very clear training for the dealers they worked with to identify and stop problem heroin use. There was space reserved in every text and on every dealer’s coffee table for stop heroin assistance.

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.

It's hard for me to view that as anything other than mostly for show.

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.

Imagine having a "stop gambling assistance" section of your fking AD to promote gambling to people

When widespread sports gambling was illegal before, there were not rich and powerful people whose ability to maintain and grow their wealth and power was tied to keeping sports gambling legal.

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.

Sports gambling definitely existed 10-15 years ago. And it's hard to ban things on the internet with cryptocurrency being a thing.

It's pretty wild that we let it be advertised and boggles my mind that pro leagues jumped on the train.

One of the arguments was to make gambling legal, less harmful, and regulated to protect players from cheating. In my state the state lottery company puts out TV ads. Stores have scratch off vending machines with strobe lights on top. So much for harm reduction and making gambling something that you have to actively seek out.

"poor tax" framed by the state to help fund things education.

Well, aren't they though, technically?

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?

After all, a deck of cards is The Devil's Picture Book[0][1].

0. https://beaconlights.org/sermons/a-deck-of-cards

1. https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/68367

They actually don't. That's the problem.

https://prospect.org/2026/07/07/economic-hit-men-for-gamblin...

How do you frame that to rein in Meta and Google? That would be a good start.

Why only online?

https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/ftc_gov/pdf/P214800%20Dark%...

"Coined in 2010 by user design specialist Harry Brignull, the term 'dark patterns' has been used to describe design practices that trick or manipulate users into making choices they would not otherwise have made and that may cause harm."

Not sure if this reference to a definition is the same thing as saying it's the legal definition, but this is at least in a document as /a/ definition on the Federal Trade Commission's website.

Are you asking me to see how this mechanism applies to this definition?

you absolutely can get banned for making hundreds in profits! Has happened to several people I know (maybe the flag for them was having a v obvious pattern).

What I've learned in life is how much people lie. They may not intentionally lie. They may just be wrong.

As an example, if anybody tells you their commute to work is 25 minutes, it's more likely 45 minutes. "It takes me 10 minutes to get to X" really means 20. I don't know what it is but people just don't get this right.

It's way worse when it comes to money. "My income is $X" literally means "My income is 0.3X to 0.7X". I need to see employment contracts and W2s before I believe you what you say about your salary. People will even lie anonymously (eg on surveys). It's like they need to believe it themselves.

So when you say you have friends who net win hundreds of dollars, unless you've seen P&Ls, I don't believe them. And I'm sure these sites don't make it easy to figure out your total P&L because then you might stop. People will remember and boast about their wins and downplay or just plain forget their losses. They'll minimize losses and exaggerate wins. It's just human nature.

Ever notice how no gambler says they consistently lose? Everyone is somehow a winner? Isn't that sus?