5 ms·

America's betting craze has spread to its news networks

69 points by FinnLobsien 10mo ago

runtimepanic 10mo ago
As sports betting became mainstream in the US, it was only a matter of time before major news networks joined the orbit. The problem is that betting partnerships pull journalism away from public-interest reporting and toward a monetized probability show. When information is framed as odds rather than insight, trust erodes. It’s one more step in turning newsrooms into promotional surfaces instead of watchdogs
- techterrier 10mo ago
  Obligatory xkcd: https://xkcd.com/904/ https://xkcd.com/904/
  - hansonkd 10mo ago
    the hidden text about financial markets is doubly so. Hate every time i open the news and its "$COMPANY stock falls after $EVENT happens" when often the event probably had no bearing on the stock price of multi-trillion dollar companies at all. It just happened at the same time and the news networks want to construct a narrative.
    - deleted 10mo ago
      [deleted]
- sbuttgereit 10mo ago
  This is a new issue for sure, but what trust is left to erode in the first place? We already are regularly asked to accept mere emotionally motivated opinion as information. Of course its relayed as "fact-based reporting", wrapped in mostly tidy narratives which wear the makeup of a journalistic endeavor. But look at which facts are amplified, suppressed, or omitted; or the adjectives used around the facts or which facts are only ever spoken by the journalists and which facts are allowed to be conveyed directly by the participants. Even the choice of which stories are newsworthy and which aren't plays a role. Modern journalism is already largely a call to action for adopting a particular worldview rather than an effort to ensure that you have the best information in formulating opinions. The press, the government, and activists already have taken the stand that you are a fool that is better manipulated into "correct thinking" by your betters than left to your own devices. Given all that, I would contend that most reporting is not there to inform you in the first place: its there to manipulate your emotions on a subject while convincing you that somehow you are now "informed". I would say under those circumstances that any trust that still exists in the media is already misplaced. The betting question is just another avenue exacerbating an already unreliable journalistic landscape.
rconti 10mo ago
We had a deal. The US has to deal with awful prescription drug ads, and the UK has to deal with awful sports gambling adverts. Legalized sports betting has broken the deal! Now we get the worst of both worlds.
- actionfromafar 10mo ago
  Next up - legalized drugs in sports.
  - mghackerlady 10mo ago
    I wouldn't be that opposed to an 'everything goes' style sports division. Not only would it be fun to watch, but it would partially solve the issue of trans people in sports (which as a trans person I'm passionate about)
    - actionfromafar 10mo ago
      I see where you are coming from. Some of that stuff is known to be very harmful, though. Plus from a practical point of view, you'd have to basically repeal a lot of substance laws, not just change sports rules.
- xvedejas 10mo ago
  In how much of the US is sports betting legal so far anyway? I'm pretty sure it's not legal here in California yet.
  - FeteCommuniste 10mo ago
    Thirty-nine states have legalized sports gambling. California has not: https://rg.org/guides/regulations https://rg.org/guides/regulations
    - rconti 10mo ago
      Aha. I'm also in California. This explains why the ads stand out more to me when watching the (baseball) World Series and listening to podcasts -- because generally, gambling sites don't waste their time and money advertising to me.
iJohnDoe 10mo ago
An associate recently racked up $300k in losses from sports betting. They are obviously struggling greatly now. Has anyone else heard horror stories since sports betting became legal?
- RajT88 10mo ago
  I'd read somewhere that there is a measurable increase in foreclosures and divorces correlated with the legalization of online sports betting.
- smileson2 10mo ago
  I've seen one personally, recovering gambling addict who constantly falls off the wagon I don't dig into the details and obviously everyone is diffrent but I imagine not being able to avoid the constant bombardment when trying to quit isn't a good thing
- jennyholzer 10mo ago
  [dead]
- mschuster91 10mo ago
  > Has anyone else heard horror stories since sports betting became legal? I worked in the industry over a decade ago and it was nasty already. Know a few people who managed to gamble away entire inheritances. When (not if) stuff like Polymarket gets legal in Germany, it will get even worse.
- throw-qqqqq 10mo ago
  “How a Psychiatrist Lost $400,000 on Gambling Apps” https://www.wsj.com/podcasts/the-journal/how-a-psychiatrist-lost-400000-on-gambling-apps/c91168e8-8add-48bc-8f5f-324fe4680df6 https://www.wsj.com/podcasts/the-journal/how-a-psychiatrist-... Most was lost at DraftKings’ casino apps though, not their sports betting.
- is_true 10mo ago
  I live near a school and a teacher told me a lot teenagers gamble during the recess. At least one boy that tried to commit suicide after his family discovered he had lost a lot of their money.
owlninja 10mo ago
>"Last month, Mansour, the C.E.O. of Kalshi, said that the “long-term vision” for the company “is to financialize everything and create a tradable asset out of any difference in opinion.” Sounds wonderful...
- RajT88 10mo ago
  This was a plot playing out in the background of the film Rat Race. I seem to recall a scene where foreign businessmen were wagering on how long maids could dangle from curtain rods or something.
- zzgo 10mo ago
  So, how could one manipulate differences of opinion in order to turn a profit on a site like Kalshi?
forgotpwagain 10mo ago
Unpaywalled: https://archive.is/dmp0m https://archive.is/dmp0m
zug_zug 10mo ago
I'd pass a law that you can only lose in a year .1% of your current retirement savings (at which point you're cut off from gambling for the year). It may sound crazy to spend even a 10th of a % of your retirement on gambling, but that means if you have 1mm saved you can gamble $1k a year.
- kelseyfrog 10mo ago
  Tax losses. It's an easy solution but it's easier to get a kid to eat vegetables than get gamblers to accept that gambling is actually bad.
raincole 10mo ago
I didn't realize how bad it is until the Emmanuel Clase case. People are betting on niche stuff like "first pitch is ball or strike" and the volume is enough to make bribery profitable?
- afavour 10mo ago
  I can't find the link now but I read an interesting article recently interviewing athletes. They get so much abuse in their Instagram direct messages ("you messed up my parlay! I'm coming for you!")... I don't mean to sound hysterical but there's going to be some horrible high profile crime one of these days.
- btown 10mo ago
  The November federal indictment, for those unfamiliar or curious: https://www.justice.gov/usao-edny/media/1417041/dl https://www.justice.gov/usao-edny/media/1417041/dl Allegedly, per the indictment: > Overall, between 2023 and 2025, the Bettors won at least $400,000 from the Betting Platforms on pitches thrown by the defendant EMMANUEL CLASE DE LA CRUZ.
Ritewut 10mo ago
Gambling is one of the worst things and the unfettered spread of gambling is a attempt to further squeeze the middle class. A16z and YC should be shamed for investing in them but line goes up so who cares.
- munificent 10mo ago
  > a attempt to further squeeze the middle class. I think it's both a cause of and a symptom of the middle class disappearing. Part of the compulsion towards gambling and lotteries is this sense that there's no other viable path upwards from where you are. If you can't even imagine a reasonable chance of success from starting a small business, finding a better job, going back to school, or some other healthy path towards security and prosperity, then literally rolling the dice starts to seem like the most tangible (if unlikely) path towards wealth. People gamble when they believe they don't have any better opportunities to spend their meager amount of discretionary income on. (Of course, there is a separate compulsion towards gambling that is more a direct mental illness like alcoholism. But if you see a large-scale rise in gambling, I think you need to look for societal causes.)
  - chung8123 10mo ago
    To me this is more about our reduced attention span than no upward mobility. People want instant returns now and cannot imagine building their wealth slowly. The middle class is at the top of this since they have the money to invest.
    - kkukshtel 10mo ago
      This is the most boomer response. The idea of a long horizon to build your wealth against implies some faith in the future, which a lot of younger people no longer (righfully) believe in. But for a lot of the working public it seems a lot like they will not get to benefit from a future promised to them, and so have no stock in trying to work with the system to believe in it. https://reallifemag.com/play-to-lose/ https://reallifemag.com/play-to-lose/
- 10mo ago
afavour 10mo ago
Broadly speaking I'm a "whatever goes" kind of person. Don't regulate too much, let people do what they want. But this recent rise in gambling is making me feel like a censorious pastor or something. It's so obviously damaging. I don't even know that anyone was really asking for it. But there was money to be made, so of course it had to be legalized. And countless lives will be ruined. One stat that gives me hope: young people aged 18-29, one of the prime targets for this gambling push, were asked if legalized betting is bad for society. In 2022 only 22% did, in 2025 41% do: https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/10/02/americans-increasingly-see-legal-sports-betting-as-a-bad-thing-for-society-and-sports/ https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/10/02/americans... The damage is clear, everyone sees it. Only question is whether anyone will actually do anything about it now that the cat is out of the bag.
- 0_____0 10mo ago
  Via The Economist: > A survey conducted in 2023 by the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA), the governing body of college sport, found that 60% of college students have gambled on sport.
- Drunkfoowl 10mo ago
  [dead]
- phantasmish 10mo ago
  Like social media, there’s a whole nasty well-funded world of businesses behind it doing everything they can to harm people if it means an extra buck. A lot of things that are basically ok when one dude with ordinary human liability does it become horrible when corporations enter the mix. IMO it’s not contrary to liberalism to tamp down on the use of corporations for these purposes. They’re creations of the state, after all.
  - LexiMax 10mo ago
    "Wait, you mean that someone will just...give me money for the privilege of gradually losing to my house edge?" It's very easy to see why it's such a tempting business model.
nharada 10mo ago
The general playbook in the US seems to be "do something that's bad for society but makes money, and eventually the people in charge will get enough FOMO that it'll be officially sanctioned as long as they get a cut".
- jennyholzer 10mo ago
  [dead]
AnotherGoodName 10mo ago
Don't let it take hold! They will absolutely dominate the political lobbying scene and you'll never get rid of it. Sports betting being allowed makes Australia's recent social media ban to U18s clear that the priority is to support traditional media rather than prevent harm to youth. Sports betting ads and apps are everywhere in Australia with practically no restrictions. You cannot avoid it, every free to air channel is basically now sponsored by sports betting ads, every traditional newspaper is kept alive by sports betting ads and every second billboard and poster is for sports betting. Children are now exposed and normalised to it from birth. Absolutely nothing is being done from a regulatory point of view. It enables traditional media and it seems traditional media still call the shots in Australia.
- AnotherGoodName 10mo ago
  And just to really rub this point in: The U18s social media ban was lobbied for by a traditional media backed group that's pro sport betting https://www.crikey.com.au/2025/12/12/pro-teen-social-media-ban-group-funded-firm-making-gambling-ads/ https://www.crikey.com.au/2025/12/12/pro-teen-social-media-b...
- phantasmish 10mo ago
  It’s too late. I got a behind the scenes view of a company that was heavily into online gambling, lobbying for further gambling legalization… and was just one arm of a larger corporation that ran right wing media organizations and produced & distributed for right wing personalities that you have heard of if you’ve looked into that world much at all (one features in a meme-image that’s been popular for many years, for example). Like, they were coupled closely enough that work for the media side crossed over to the gambling side. IDK if the left is as tied up in it as the right, but that was about a decade ago and I haven’t had more insight since, but judging from the effects I believe it must have gotten far worse. Those orgs pull in stupid money and that one, at least, was using it to boost both gambling legality and far-right politics generally. That had the ears of a lot of the public, and of a lot of politicians. Couple that with post-Citizens-United “dark money”… yeah, we’re in a bad place and there’s hardly even any awareness of all this outside some politics-nerd circles.
cm2012 10mo ago
Sports betting ads should be banned, full stop
- __alexs 10mo ago
  Betting should be banned, full stop.
  - iso1631 10mo ago
    Adverts should be banned, full stop.
  - mghackerlady 10mo ago
    That just creates black markets. Drugs are banned, but overdose deaths are at an all time high
  - Ekaros 10mo ago
    Absolutely. We should get rid of options and other type of betting contracts called "insurance" on financial markets.
    - __alexs 10mo ago
      If betting markets were regulated like financial markets they would not look even vaguely the same.
- RIMR 10mo ago
  They are in my state (Washington), but more and more are creeping through online, and my state doesn't seem particularly interested in doing anything about it... And of course, they ignore all the major sports sponsorships from these companies, which would otherwise make it impossible to air the most popular sporting events in the state now.
JohnMakin 10mo ago
I'm not making any kind of statement as to whether or not these prediction markets should exist - but one thing that irritates me is a fundamental error people make when evaluating them. It seems like people conflate "25% of the money is on a yes outcome for xyz event" with "xyz event yes outcome is 25% likely." It isn't. It's merely a measure of people's confidence in the event's outcome, and even if in aggregate people are 99.9% confident of something, they can be wrong (and often are). Yet often, when I get into debates about the likelihood of some event, people will often point to these markets as a refutation of the argument or in support of theirs. It probably shouldn't bother me as much as it does, because there's a lot of money to be made from delusion .
PaulHoule 10mo ago
I'm not sure at all if it is relevant because hardly anybody watches broadcast TV but I was thinking how the interactive features in ATSC 3 could be used to add on-screen sports gambling and that might be the only thing that motivates the industry to go down that road -- and of course news gambling is the same.
mattas 10mo ago
The line between betting, investing, and insurance is blurring. For example, if I want to hedge my exposure to tariffs on copper wire, I can now "bet" that new tariffs will be implemented on metals. That's a good thing? But it opens up a Pandora's box of bad things, too.
- advisedwang 10mo ago
  Hedging exposure to copper wire tariffs is not something ordinary people need to do. There's no reason to allow this at a retail level.
bad_haircut72 10mo ago
Deregulation and the general decay of governance are the major drivers but it should also be pointed out that inequality is a huge driver of gambling. Charlie Munger had a whole speech once about how dumb poor people are for playing the lottery, but thats spoken like a true rich person - from the poor persons perspective, the lottery is one of the only realistic ways out of your current predicament, saving $5 a week will do nothing and just get eaten up elsewhere.
triceratops 10mo ago
Legalized gambling is fine. It takes away a revenue stream from criminals. Gambling advertising is an awful, terrible, no-good idea. Gambling is a zero-sum activity that doesn't increase productivity or happiness. There's no reason to create demand for it. Gambling apps, or any kind of online gambling for that matter, is the same. Allowing online gambling is like piping whisky into every alcoholic's home. Keep all gambling in meatspace. Don't allow it to be advertised.
- mothballed 10mo ago
  Legalized gambling is one of the biggest gifts for criminals. It's basically money launderers gift to heaven. All you have to explain is how you came up with the amount for a winning bet, rather than having to explain how you came up with the winnings plus how much you lost to the house. Not that I think it should be outlawed. But I think it makes more sense to not make money laundering a crime, and allow criminals to put the money straight in the bank rather than having to do this dance where we pretend it is going to gambling or houses or whatever and meanwhile legally enriching even further a bunch of people who otherwise are generating far less 'value' for society.
  - triceratops 10mo ago
    I don't think it's quite that simple to launder ill-gotten money as "gambling winnings". I'm pretty sure I've seen somewhere (maybe a TV show) that legal gambling establishments have to report winnings to the government. So you need someone on the inside to make false reports. I don't know the IRS's stance on money claimed to have been won in unauthorized, backroom card games.
    - mothballed 10mo ago
      The fact that the winnings are reported is a plus, not a negative; there is no need for the casino to do anything in violation of the law. The key here is the losses often don't have to be reported but the winnings do. Thus the winnings are clean reported money, won on (what could plausibly be) a tiny amount of long-shot wagers. Justifying the small amount of income needed to win a long-shot bet is far easier than justifying a sum as large as the winnings. Having reported legal gambling income solves that problem and the criminal now has taxed, reported, legal income and all they lost was the cut to the house plus the normal taxes everyone else pays. Illegal casinos wouldn't solve that problem as they'd be back to square one of explaining the legal source of a large amount of money.
orliesaurus 10mo ago
I'm starting to feel like I'm living in some weird simulation... It isn't just about the money or whether some corporation rakes in a few more dollars... It's about the way this stuff rewires people's brains. I read a piece about sports betting apps driving anxiety and depression in young men recently. And there was another report pointing out that kids as young as eleven are tempted to gamble when their favourite influencers promote betting codes... These little hits of dopamine condition people early... It's not enough to say 'buyer beware' if the buyer is twelve. The normalization of gambling as just another entertainment product is insidious. I REALLY worry that we'll look back at this moment like we do with tobacco ads. People knew something was off, BUT it took decades for the laws to catch up. ALSO the pressure for growth means the industry will keep pushing into new spaces... There are serious public health consequences here and some countries are starting to treat it like that. I hope we don't wait until the damage is everywhere before acting.
ChrisArchitect 10mo ago
Kalshi Reaches $11B Valuation as App Takes over America https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46132609 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46132609
ChrisArchitect 10mo ago
Example mentioned recent Time Magazine Person of the Year ..which ended up being "Architects of AI". People bet on simply "AI" and are told that's incorrect....(debatable variation of meanings of course)... but it just seems so sketchy to me and crazy that anyone would get involved with this when the win/loss comes down to such slim arbitrary differences in language etc.
didibus 10mo ago
Maybe I'm too liberal here, but I have no issues with betting/gambling being legal, though I think it should be somewhat regulated. The only exception is betting on anything political or legal, because once you can take bets on those, you'll be incentivized to influence the result in the favor of your bet. And that will mess up the free markets and the free world of ideas and opinions, and seems like a problem for democracy.
1970-01-01 10mo ago
Betting is an evil problem. Intellectual-level bets such as the bets on https://longbets.org/ https://longbets.org/ and betting via the stock market feels very right. I think we should even encourage this kind of behavior to keep ourselves in-check and in-line with reality. Social gambling is some level below this, but society does not have a big problem with it in general. Where it becomes evil is gambling on random and very unpredictable events. At this low level, it should be heavily regulated due to addiction. Putting big money on lottery numbers, sports scores, and even the weather is downright addiction. Addiction is an evil thing. It certainly should not be left unchecked for biased news networks to experiment with.
stanfordkid 10mo ago
This feels like a nascent form of what Nick Land describes as "hyperstition" ... feedback loops where the presence of it's idea within peoples mind brings it into realization. Worth a read: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperstition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperstition

69 points by FinnLobsien 10mo ago

As sports betting became mainstream in the US, it was only a matter of time before major news networks joined the orbit. The problem is that betting partnerships pull journalism away from public-interest reporting and toward a monetized probability show. When information is framed as odds rather than insight, trust erodes. It’s one more step in turning newsrooms into promotional surfaces instead of watchdogs

techterrier 10mo ago
Obligatory xkcd: https://xkcd.com/904/ https://xkcd.com/904/
- hansonkd 10mo ago
  the hidden text about financial markets is doubly so. Hate every time i open the news and its "$COMPANY stock falls after $EVENT happens" when often the event probably had no bearing on the stock price of multi-trillion dollar companies at all. It just happened at the same time and the news networks want to construct a narrative.
  - deleted 10mo ago
    [deleted]
sbuttgereit 10mo ago
This is a new issue for sure, but what trust is left to erode in the first place? We already are regularly asked to accept mere emotionally motivated opinion as information. Of course its relayed as "fact-based reporting", wrapped in mostly tidy narratives which wear the makeup of a journalistic endeavor. But look at which facts are amplified, suppressed, or omitted; or the adjectives used around the facts or which facts are only ever spoken by the journalists and which facts are allowed to be conveyed directly by the participants. Even the choice of which stories are newsworthy and which aren't plays a role. Modern journalism is already largely a call to action for adopting a particular worldview rather than an effort to ensure that you have the best information in formulating opinions. The press, the government, and activists already have taken the stand that you are a fool that is better manipulated into "correct thinking" by your betters than left to your own devices. Given all that, I would contend that most reporting is not there to inform you in the first place: its there to manipulate your emotions on a subject while convincing you that somehow you are now "informed". I would say under those circumstances that any trust that still exists in the media is already misplaced. The betting question is just another avenue exacerbating an already unreliable journalistic landscape.

rconti 10mo ago

We had a deal. The US has to deal with awful prescription drug ads, and the UK has to deal with awful sports gambling adverts. Legalized sports betting has broken the deal! Now we get the worst of both worlds.

actionfromafar 10mo ago
Next up - legalized drugs in sports.
- mghackerlady 10mo ago
  I wouldn't be that opposed to an 'everything goes' style sports division. Not only would it be fun to watch, but it would partially solve the issue of trans people in sports (which as a trans person I'm passionate about)
  - actionfromafar 10mo ago
    I see where you are coming from. Some of that stuff is known to be very harmful, though. Plus from a practical point of view, you'd have to basically repeal a lot of substance laws, not just change sports rules.
xvedejas 10mo ago
In how much of the US is sports betting legal so far anyway? I'm pretty sure it's not legal here in California yet.
- FeteCommuniste 10mo ago
  Thirty-nine states have legalized sports gambling. California has not: https://rg.org/guides/regulations https://rg.org/guides/regulations
  - rconti 10mo ago
    Aha. I'm also in California. This explains why the ads stand out more to me when watching the (baseball) World Series and listening to podcasts -- because generally, gambling sites don't waste their time and money advertising to me.

iJohnDoe 10mo ago

An associate recently racked up $300k in losses from sports betting. They are obviously struggling greatly now. Has anyone else heard horror stories since sports betting became legal?

RajT88 10mo ago
I'd read somewhere that there is a measurable increase in foreclosures and divorces correlated with the legalization of online sports betting.
smileson2 10mo ago
I've seen one personally, recovering gambling addict who constantly falls off the wagon I don't dig into the details and obviously everyone is diffrent but I imagine not being able to avoid the constant bombardment when trying to quit isn't a good thing
jennyholzer 10mo ago
[dead]
mschuster91 10mo ago
> Has anyone else heard horror stories since sports betting became legal? I worked in the industry over a decade ago and it was nasty already. Know a few people who managed to gamble away entire inheritances. When (not if) stuff like Polymarket gets legal in Germany, it will get even worse.
throw-qqqqq 10mo ago
“How a Psychiatrist Lost $400,000 on Gambling Apps” https://www.wsj.com/podcasts/the-journal/how-a-psychiatrist-lost-400000-on-gambling-apps/c91168e8-8add-48bc-8f5f-324fe4680df6 https://www.wsj.com/podcasts/the-journal/how-a-psychiatrist-... Most was lost at DraftKings’ casino apps though, not their sports betting.
is_true 10mo ago
I live near a school and a teacher told me a lot teenagers gamble during the recess. At least one boy that tried to commit suicide after his family discovered he had lost a lot of their money.

owlninja 10mo ago

>"Last month, Mansour, the C.E.O. of Kalshi, said that the “long-term vision” for the company “is to financialize everything and create a tradable asset out of any difference in opinion.” Sounds wonderful...

RajT88 10mo ago
This was a plot playing out in the background of the film Rat Race. I seem to recall a scene where foreign businessmen were wagering on how long maids could dangle from curtain rods or something.
zzgo 10mo ago
So, how could one manipulate differences of opinion in order to turn a profit on a site like Kalshi?

forgotpwagain 10mo ago

Unpaywalled: https://archive.is/dmp0m https://archive.is/dmp0m

zug_zug 10mo ago

I'd pass a law that you can only lose in a year .1% of your current retirement savings (at which point you're cut off from gambling for the year). It may sound crazy to spend even a 10th of a % of your retirement on gambling, but that means if you have 1mm saved you can gamble $1k a year.

kelseyfrog 10mo ago
Tax losses. It's an easy solution but it's easier to get a kid to eat vegetables than get gamblers to accept that gambling is actually bad.

raincole 10mo ago

I didn't realize how bad it is until the Emmanuel Clase case. People are betting on niche stuff like "first pitch is ball or strike" and the volume is enough to make bribery profitable?

afavour 10mo ago
I can't find the link now but I read an interesting article recently interviewing athletes. They get so much abuse in their Instagram direct messages ("you messed up my parlay! I'm coming for you!")... I don't mean to sound hysterical but there's going to be some horrible high profile crime one of these days.
btown 10mo ago
The November federal indictment, for those unfamiliar or curious: https://www.justice.gov/usao-edny/media/1417041/dl https://www.justice.gov/usao-edny/media/1417041/dl Allegedly, per the indictment: > Overall, between 2023 and 2025, the Bettors won at least $400,000 from the Betting Platforms on pitches thrown by the defendant EMMANUEL CLASE DE LA CRUZ.

Ritewut 10mo ago

Gambling is one of the worst things and the unfettered spread of gambling is a attempt to further squeeze the middle class. A16z and YC should be shamed for investing in them but line goes up so who cares.

munificent 10mo ago
> a attempt to further squeeze the middle class. I think it's both a cause of and a symptom of the middle class disappearing. Part of the compulsion towards gambling and lotteries is this sense that there's no other viable path upwards from where you are. If you can't even imagine a reasonable chance of success from starting a small business, finding a better job, going back to school, or some other healthy path towards security and prosperity, then literally rolling the dice starts to seem like the most tangible (if unlikely) path towards wealth. People gamble when they believe they don't have any better opportunities to spend their meager amount of discretionary income on. (Of course, there is a separate compulsion towards gambling that is more a direct mental illness like alcoholism. But if you see a large-scale rise in gambling, I think you need to look for societal causes.)
- chung8123 10mo ago
  To me this is more about our reduced attention span than no upward mobility. People want instant returns now and cannot imagine building their wealth slowly. The middle class is at the top of this since they have the money to invest.
  - kkukshtel 10mo ago
    This is the most boomer response. The idea of a long horizon to build your wealth against implies some faith in the future, which a lot of younger people no longer (righfully) believe in. But for a lot of the working public it seems a lot like they will not get to benefit from a future promised to them, and so have no stock in trying to work with the system to believe in it. https://reallifemag.com/play-to-lose/ https://reallifemag.com/play-to-lose/
10mo ago

afavour 10mo ago

Broadly speaking I'm a "whatever goes" kind of person. Don't regulate too much, let people do what they want. But this recent rise in gambling is making me feel like a censorious pastor or something. It's so obviously damaging. I don't even know that anyone was really asking for it. But there was money to be made, so of course it had to be legalized. And countless lives will be ruined. One stat that gives me hope: young people aged 18-29, one of the prime targets for this gambling push, were asked if legalized betting is bad for society. In 2022 only 22% did, in 2025 41% do: https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/10/02/americans-increasingly-see-legal-sports-betting-as-a-bad-thing-for-society-and-sports/ https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/10/02/americans... The damage is clear, everyone sees it. Only question is whether anyone will actually do anything about it now that the cat is out of the bag.

0_____0 10mo ago
Via The Economist: > A survey conducted in 2023 by the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA), the governing body of college sport, found that 60% of college students have gambled on sport.
Drunkfoowl 10mo ago
[dead]
phantasmish 10mo ago
Like social media, there’s a whole nasty well-funded world of businesses behind it doing everything they can to harm people if it means an extra buck. A lot of things that are basically ok when one dude with ordinary human liability does it become horrible when corporations enter the mix. IMO it’s not contrary to liberalism to tamp down on the use of corporations for these purposes. They’re creations of the state, after all.
- LexiMax 10mo ago
  "Wait, you mean that someone will just...give me money for the privilege of gradually losing to my house edge?" It's very easy to see why it's such a tempting business model.

nharada 10mo ago

The general playbook in the US seems to be "do something that's bad for society but makes money, and eventually the people in charge will get enough FOMO that it'll be officially sanctioned as long as they get a cut".

jennyholzer 10mo ago
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AnotherGoodName 10mo ago

Don't let it take hold! They will absolutely dominate the political lobbying scene and you'll never get rid of it. Sports betting being allowed makes Australia's recent social media ban to U18s clear that the priority is to support traditional media rather than prevent harm to youth. Sports betting ads and apps are everywhere in Australia with practically no restrictions. You cannot avoid it, every free to air channel is basically now sponsored by sports betting ads, every traditional newspaper is kept alive by sports betting ads and every second billboard and poster is for sports betting. Children are now exposed and normalised to it from birth. Absolutely nothing is being done from a regulatory point of view. It enables traditional media and it seems traditional media still call the shots in Australia.

AnotherGoodName 10mo ago
And just to really rub this point in: The U18s social media ban was lobbied for by a traditional media backed group that's pro sport betting https://www.crikey.com.au/2025/12/12/pro-teen-social-media-ban-group-funded-firm-making-gambling-ads/ https://www.crikey.com.au/2025/12/12/pro-teen-social-media-b...
phantasmish 10mo ago
It’s too late. I got a behind the scenes view of a company that was heavily into online gambling, lobbying for further gambling legalization… and was just one arm of a larger corporation that ran right wing media organizations and produced & distributed for right wing personalities that you have heard of if you’ve looked into that world much at all (one features in a meme-image that’s been popular for many years, for example). Like, they were coupled closely enough that work for the media side crossed over to the gambling side. IDK if the left is as tied up in it as the right, but that was about a decade ago and I haven’t had more insight since, but judging from the effects I believe it must have gotten far worse. Those orgs pull in stupid money and that one, at least, was using it to boost both gambling legality and far-right politics generally. That had the ears of a lot of the public, and of a lot of politicians. Couple that with post-Citizens-United “dark money”… yeah, we’re in a bad place and there’s hardly even any awareness of all this outside some politics-nerd circles.

cm2012 10mo ago

Sports betting ads should be banned, full stop

__alexs 10mo ago
Betting should be banned, full stop.
- iso1631 10mo ago
  Adverts should be banned, full stop.
- mghackerlady 10mo ago
  That just creates black markets. Drugs are banned, but overdose deaths are at an all time high
- Ekaros 10mo ago
  Absolutely. We should get rid of options and other type of betting contracts called "insurance" on financial markets.
  - __alexs 10mo ago
    If betting markets were regulated like financial markets they would not look even vaguely the same.
RIMR 10mo ago
They are in my state (Washington), but more and more are creeping through online, and my state doesn't seem particularly interested in doing anything about it... And of course, they ignore all the major sports sponsorships from these companies, which would otherwise make it impossible to air the most popular sporting events in the state now.

JohnMakin 10mo ago

I'm not making any kind of statement as to whether or not these prediction markets should exist - but one thing that irritates me is a fundamental error people make when evaluating them. It seems like people conflate "25% of the money is on a yes outcome for xyz event" with "xyz event yes outcome is 25% likely." It isn't. It's merely a measure of people's confidence in the event's outcome, and even if in aggregate people are 99.9% confident of something, they can be wrong (and often are). Yet often, when I get into debates about the likelihood of some event, people will often point to these markets as a refutation of the argument or in support of theirs. It probably shouldn't bother me as much as it does, because there's a lot of money to be made from delusion .

PaulHoule 10mo ago

I'm not sure at all if it is relevant because hardly anybody watches broadcast TV but I was thinking how the interactive features in ATSC 3 could be used to add on-screen sports gambling and that might be the only thing that motivates the industry to go down that road -- and of course news gambling is the same.

mattas 10mo ago

The line between betting, investing, and insurance is blurring. For example, if I want to hedge my exposure to tariffs on copper wire, I can now "bet" that new tariffs will be implemented on metals. That's a good thing? But it opens up a Pandora's box of bad things, too.

advisedwang 10mo ago
Hedging exposure to copper wire tariffs is not something ordinary people need to do. There's no reason to allow this at a retail level.

bad_haircut72 10mo ago

Deregulation and the general decay of governance are the major drivers but it should also be pointed out that inequality is a huge driver of gambling. Charlie Munger had a whole speech once about how dumb poor people are for playing the lottery, but thats spoken like a true rich person - from the poor persons perspective, the lottery is one of the only realistic ways out of your current predicament, saving $5 a week will do nothing and just get eaten up elsewhere.

triceratops 10mo ago

Legalized gambling is fine. It takes away a revenue stream from criminals. Gambling advertising is an awful, terrible, no-good idea. Gambling is a zero-sum activity that doesn't increase productivity or happiness. There's no reason to create demand for it. Gambling apps, or any kind of online gambling for that matter, is the same. Allowing online gambling is like piping whisky into every alcoholic's home. Keep all gambling in meatspace. Don't allow it to be advertised.

mothballed 10mo ago
Legalized gambling is one of the biggest gifts for criminals. It's basically money launderers gift to heaven. All you have to explain is how you came up with the amount for a winning bet, rather than having to explain how you came up with the winnings plus how much you lost to the house. Not that I think it should be outlawed. But I think it makes more sense to not make money laundering a crime, and allow criminals to put the money straight in the bank rather than having to do this dance where we pretend it is going to gambling or houses or whatever and meanwhile legally enriching even further a bunch of people who otherwise are generating far less 'value' for society.
- triceratops 10mo ago
  I don't think it's quite that simple to launder ill-gotten money as "gambling winnings". I'm pretty sure I've seen somewhere (maybe a TV show) that legal gambling establishments have to report winnings to the government. So you need someone on the inside to make false reports. I don't know the IRS's stance on money claimed to have been won in unauthorized, backroom card games.
  - mothballed 10mo ago
    The fact that the winnings are reported is a plus, not a negative; there is no need for the casino to do anything in violation of the law. The key here is the losses often don't have to be reported but the winnings do. Thus the winnings are clean reported money, won on (what could plausibly be) a tiny amount of long-shot wagers. Justifying the small amount of income needed to win a long-shot bet is far easier than justifying a sum as large as the winnings. Having reported legal gambling income solves that problem and the criminal now has taxed, reported, legal income and all they lost was the cut to the house plus the normal taxes everyone else pays. Illegal casinos wouldn't solve that problem as they'd be back to square one of explaining the legal source of a large amount of money.

orliesaurus 10mo ago

I'm starting to feel like I'm living in some weird simulation... It isn't just about the money or whether some corporation rakes in a few more dollars... It's about the way this stuff rewires people's brains. I read a piece about sports betting apps driving anxiety and depression in young men recently. And there was another report pointing out that kids as young as eleven are tempted to gamble when their favourite influencers promote betting codes... These little hits of dopamine condition people early... It's not enough to say 'buyer beware' if the buyer is twelve. The normalization of gambling as just another entertainment product is insidious. I REALLY worry that we'll look back at this moment like we do with tobacco ads. People knew something was off, BUT it took decades for the laws to catch up. ALSO the pressure for growth means the industry will keep pushing into new spaces... There are serious public health consequences here and some countries are starting to treat it like that. I hope we don't wait until the damage is everywhere before acting.

ChrisArchitect 10mo ago

Kalshi Reaches $11B Valuation as App Takes over America https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46132609 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46132609

ChrisArchitect 10mo ago

Example mentioned recent Time Magazine Person of the Year ..which ended up being "Architects of AI". People bet on simply "AI" and are told that's incorrect....(debatable variation of meanings of course)... but it just seems so sketchy to me and crazy that anyone would get involved with this when the win/loss comes down to such slim arbitrary differences in language etc.

didibus 10mo ago

Maybe I'm too liberal here, but I have no issues with betting/gambling being legal, though I think it should be somewhat regulated. The only exception is betting on anything political or legal, because once you can take bets on those, you'll be incentivized to influence the result in the favor of your bet. And that will mess up the free markets and the free world of ideas and opinions, and seems like a problem for democracy.

1970-01-01 10mo ago

Betting is an evil problem. Intellectual-level bets such as the bets on https://longbets.org/ https://longbets.org/ and betting via the stock market feels very right. I think we should even encourage this kind of behavior to keep ourselves in-check and in-line with reality. Social gambling is some level below this, but society does not have a big problem with it in general. Where it becomes evil is gambling on random and very unpredictable events. At this low level, it should be heavily regulated due to addiction. Putting big money on lottery numbers, sports scores, and even the weather is downright addiction. Addiction is an evil thing. It certainly should not be left unchecked for biased news networks to experiment with.

stanfordkid 10mo ago

This feels like a nascent form of what Nick Land describes as "hyperstition" ... feedback loops where the presence of it's idea within peoples mind brings it into realization. Worth a read: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperstition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperstition