alt Hacker NewsPolymarket has flooded social media with deceptive videos by paid creators
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The WSJ ran an earlier article stating that unless you have access to a lot of data, computing power, and statisticians, you're going to lose on those bets.
Also, kids get scammed daily on YouTube on Pokemon card pulls with "loaded" packs and otherwise fake pulls for views.
> He compared the videos to fast-food commercials, where food can appear more appealing than it does in real life.
> “We’re depicting what actually happens,” he said.
The cope is real. They all know they are destroying lives by promoting gambling to young people and eventually some of them are going to overspend and get addicted. But yeah, it's just like an ad for a burger
the fact that apps like Polymarket seem to be legal is absolutely crazy to me.
The alternative would be to ask both sides of the bets to record a video, and tell them to only post winning bids, but to pay out to both sides. Is that really better? Classic tactic by the bet picking gambler gurus and is impossible to confirm.
I guess Polymarket too will learn to be more subtle now.
All these gambling apps need regulation. And I fear they are buying politicians precisely so that doesn't happen.
If I were to have my way, I'd put a law in place that limits bets to $5 max and monthly bets to $150 per month. Letting them go higher encourages some of the worst aspects of society.
We will see crazy things like athletes being injured or murdered in order to win bets. We are already seeing crazy things like white house insiders placing bets on when wars will start.
One of the few ways to really solve this problem is reducing the possible amount of award so the individuals placing these bets don't feel like they have to take matters into their own hands to win.
I remember in 2006 when online sports gambling was banned, and witnessed first hand some sleaze bags flee to Costa Rica where many of the actual operations were located. What I witnessed regarding addiction and exploitation put me off sports for a long time. Now here we are, with the tech industry and political capital behind it, this time engineered to engulf the entire population. It's repulsive.
Bait from polymarket to get new users, They should get sued.
Seems to be a popular means for marketing gambling. There was a scandal of a bunch of twitch streamers doing the same thing for skin gambling websites.
a complete surprise to nobody
Good luck - polymarket sponsored trumps White House UFC Extravaganza
God I cant believe I wrote that
They are transparently marketing using outrage and bullshit. Pretty good tactic for the market.
I made an article a day back how Polymarket is not exactly fair when it comes to market resolution (https://omarabid.com/polymarket-bet/) They actually don’t decide on market outcomes, they outsource that to UMA which is as opaque as it can get.
Consider the probabilities in polymarket as the prob. of the polymarket market itself outcomes rather than reality.
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Every ad is staged like this. The whole point is to make as good of an ad for the product as possible.
Do you think in a food commercial the people eating the product are showing their genuine emotion? It's all acting.
I have news for you. That burger is the McDonald's commercial? It's most likely made out of plastic. That happy lottery winner? Probably a stock photo from one of the major visuals providers. And I am ready to bet my bankers don't have this hollywood white teeth looking of banks commercials. Since when is advertising real?
I blanket consider any post by these "influencers" as paid for.
But my biggest fear is for my kids. I'm doing my best to teach them about the duplicity that exists in this world, and that's precisely why I'm against blanket social media bans for under-16s.
By the time kids turn 17, they've hit the rebel stage. And that's exactly when the freedom to access social media arrives. At that point, they won't listen to parents. They are going to get soo badly burnt.
This is why I advocate for controlled, early access to social media for children. As a parent, I can monitor what they follow and teach them to distinguish right from wrong.
But with these blanket bans, that's taken out of my hands entirely. They grow up sheltered in a picture-perfect world...and then, boom.
I finally gave in to my curiosity and downloaded Kalshi last week to place a few bets on the World Cup.
I was blown away how easy it was. I placed a bet with real money within 5 minutes of downloading the app.
They allow instant deposits with credit card, and ID verification was real time.
I can’t imagine that the extreme accessibility and the typical dark patterns deployed by every popular app won’t eventually end badly.
(I was also shocked that when looking at my credit card bill online, next to the Kalshi deposit line item it showed a promo “would you like to split this payment over 12 month?” and seemingly was only available for that one transaction. So I could have deposited $1000 via CC into Kalshi and paid it back $83/mo over 12 months.)
This industry is wild.