alt Hacker NewsSports betting has the side effect of making things surrounding sports themselves more toxic.
Betting being as pervasive as it is, and only increasing, causes more people to view and interact with sports with bets or money, and thus can react negatively toward their losing teams.
If there's a large number of angry, vocal "fans" jumping down your neck every time you lose a game or make a mistake that caused their bet to fail, there's a lot of negativity fabricated where the team or player merely played the sport as usual.
Teams are made of humans, and humans make mistakes. This is normal for any sport or activity, but when you've got a chunk of cash in the game it turns into not-normal reactions.
This also bleeds into other forms of sport, like esport, and feeds into some already-negative online communities. Games like League of Legends or DotA 2 come to mind.
I really, really dislike the way sports betting has gone and how it's corrupted everything it touches.
Couple the above with the way these companies effectively prey on betters likely to lose money, and even encourage them to bet and lose more, while at the same time stonewall those that actually know what they're doing and make money, these companies are scum and should be eradicated.
It also infects players and referees. It's harder to trust referees in a sport where you know what the big bets are, whether or not the refs are actually cheating to try to change the outcome it's hard not to feel that they might be.
Baseball alone has had some prominent sports gambling by players in its past change the record books. There's a bunch of interesting arguments for and against that maybe the records for Joe Jackson and Pete Rose should be reinstated now that sports gambling is so generally legal in so many more states than their time. There's a bunch of interesting arguments of how many of today's players might be "on the take" as much as or worse than those historic gambling scandals.
Other sports have their own histories with it. Sports are different when you are wondering if even players are betting for or against themselves.