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Polymarket has flooded social media with deceptive videos by paid creators
- lobito25 4mo agoBait from polymarket to get new users, They should get sued.
- ekjhgkejhgk 4mo agoSeems like a weird mistake to make. If they're going to bait new users, why not just use bets that did exist? Better yet, why not use users who did make a lot of money?
- impish9208 4mo agoGift link: https://www.wsj.com/business/media/polymarket-social-media-bets-prediction-market-441cdeb5?st=HhTZY2 https://www.wsj.com/business/media/polymarket-social-media-b...
- Baljhin 3mo agoSeems the gift has already run its course - for me, still getting paywalled. Are such links rate-limited?
- rcxdude 4mo agoSeems 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.
- realJared54 4mo ago[flagged]
- october8140 4mo agoIs this fraud?
- realJared54 4mo agoYes, it is 100% a misrepresentation of reality to fool the general public into joining a platform that condones deceptive user acquisition strategies.
- jordanb 4mo agoI was listening to a podcast and heard an ad for supplements (I think it was collegian). The thing that struck me was the specificity of the health claims they were making in the ad. There was no "promotes healthy whatever" it was like "this will make your skin younger and eliminate/prevent wrinkles and other signs of aging." Then the quiet fast-talking guy said that none of their health claims have been reviewed by the FDA. So that's where we are now. Everything is scams and nobody will do anything about it.
- dylan604 4mo agoI don't see an end to any of it when the Grifter-in-chief is in office.
- cj 4mo agoI 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.
- parm26 4mo ago[flagged]
- dylan604 4mo agoBased on the ad they are running during World Cup of the guy in the dentist office, they just don't care how/where money is spent as they just print money.
- znyboy 4mo agoI think you missed the point entirely. All of these "prediction market" gambling platforms are actively predatory to their users, with very little (if any) regulatory oversight.
- holistio 4mo agoBack in the good old days you needed a few more steps before you got into debt after gambling.
- ElProlactin 4mo agoBack in the good old days non-payment of gambling debt was a threat to your knee-caps. Today, you might get cut off from Klarna and have to extend your next auto loan to 256 months.
- trel1100 4mo ago[flagged]
- cogman10 4mo agoAll 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.
- ExpertAdvisor01 4mo agoThis would just push everyone to unlicensed casinos/bookmakers . Means no tax revenue + even worse player protection.
- bdangubic 4mo agomake this severely illegal with minimum two decades behind bars and what how they disappear… this is a very solvable problem which no one wants to solve
- ExpertAdvisor01 4mo agoGood luck with cross-border enforcement. Also the operator is completely legal/compliant with it's jurisdictions laws as they allow us players (many now blacklist the us, but some not ) So they won't accept any foreign judgement . That's why most countries rather target their infrastructure (psps/banking etc ..) Even Eu countries had/have severe problems with Malta (due e.g Article 56A of the malta gaming act, which shields the operator from foreign judgements)
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- charcircuit 4mo ago
- polnurfer 4mo ago[flagged]
- Mobius01 4mo agoI 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.
- sooheon 4mo agoNobody is forcing anyone to place bets they can't back, isn't this a personal responsibility issue? edit: to be clear, if companies are committing fraud in their marketing, that should be prosecuted or if regulations around misleading marketing are weak, that should be legislated of course.
- handoflixue 4mo ago> Nobody is forcing anyone to place bets they can't back, isn't this a personal responsibility issue? Honestly, calling it "personal responsibility" when a powerful group is actively working to exploit that flaw seems a little weird. But even accepting that, we outlaw plenty of things because we think society isn't currently responsible enough to handle them.
- fl4regun 4mo agoPersonal responsibility is an excuse for lazy regulation. These things are designed to be harmful, for the express purpose of squeezing money out of people, as efficiently as possible. We know that some people are psychologically and genetically more prone to addiction than others, and that people like that will be extremely likely to form addictions with gambling or drugs when we make those things easy to access. What would you rather have? More regulated gambling and less addicts, or unregulated gambling and more addicts? Personally, I prefer the former.
- aucisson_masque 4mo agoYou are promoting gambling to young people, easily manipulated. That's why you see so many college boy on their marketing video. It's completely fine when you're old enough to be responsible, and to know that gambling is a degenerate behavior that you can allow yourself sometimes to release the steam, but these companies don't make money from us. They make money from the kids overspending because they are convinced they are going to get rich doing that. That's manipulation. It would be like showing McDonald ads to starving African kids, of course they are going to make the wrong choice when offered food. They can't think rationally in that state.
- charcircuit 4mo agoEvery 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.
- Zambyte 4mo agoThis is like a food commercial where someone shows an extreme reaction to food that isn't the product they're selling, or acting like they're eating something that isn't food at all. There are laws regarding food advertising that require it to present the real food (though the presentation of it is usually way better).
- advisedwang 4mo agoOK but you know that you're seeing an ad. These are ads that are pretending to be users just posting their experiences.
- charcircuit 4mo agoCreators are supposed to make it clear that it is add. Usually they add a #ad to their post. But many creators don't understand the rules and don't correctly mark their post as being sponsored.
- advisedwang 4mo agoIt is reasonable to be mad at polymarket if there is a pattern of their content creators failing to disclose ads.
- N_Lens 4mo agoMcDonalds should show people who choked on a Big Mac in their ads /s
- uberex 4mo agoI think ads for addictive things like gambling, alcohol, tobacco need to be held to a very high standard, if allowed at all.
- thenayr 4mo ago[dead]
- BobbyTables2 4mo ago[flagged]
- arjie 4mo agoThey are transparently marketing using outrage and bullshit. Pretty good tactic for the market.
- AIorNot 4mo agoGood luck - polymarket sponsored trumps White House UFC Extravaganza God I cant believe I wrote that
- asdff 4mo agoPeople in the white house are using polymarket to front run whitehouse actions. Someone made bank over maduros capture. If you go to polymarket, Iran related bets have a specific subpage on their website no different than the sports subpage.
- cm2187 4mo agoI 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?
- OrangeDelonge 4mo ago“The truth is most of what you see in food photographs is real. FTC laws state that whatever you’re selling with a photo must be real in the image. To use a familiar example, if you’re selling corn flakes the flakes must be real. But then it gets interesting. You can use white glue instead of milk in your bowl of flakes because you’re not selling the milk, only the corn flakes.”
- advisedwang 4mo agoYeah, but you know those are ads.
- wodenokoto 4mo agoWhile the dressed burgers aren’t exactly edible, they are a far cry from being plastic. McDonald’s Canada famously gave a candid behind the scenes of dressing a burger: https://youtube.com/watch?v=Pbh1UAWLOgU&ra=m https://youtube.com/watch?v=Pbh1UAWLOgU&ra=m
- tty456 4mo agoAlso, kids get scammed daily on YouTube on Pokemon card pulls with "loaded" packs and otherwise fake pulls for views.
- jmcgough 4mo agoThe live scammers targeting kids are pretty vile: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NYTPI57GLac https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NYTPI57GLac Seems like it's just a game of whack-a-mole, nothing is really being done to stop scammers from making new accounts and continuing their scams.
- tty456 4mo agoA lot of it is straight up sponsored by card makers too
- atakan_gurkan 4mo agoCan you back this claim up? I don't think they need to do this. After all, WotC was doing pretty well way before these videos became widespread.
- andrepd 4mo agoThere are really only two businesses in the modern economy, fraud and gambling. Some are both.
- abrookewood 4mo agoPorn?
- pjc50 4mo agogambling (intermittent dopamine hit)
- globular-toast 4mo agoDon't forget addiction.
- cindyllm 4mo ago[dead]
- gregjw 4mo agoa complete surprise to nobody
- WalterBright 4mo agoThe 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.
- FinnLobsien 4mo agoIt’s gambling, and the house always wins.
- Saline9515 4mo agoThere is no house on polymarket, it's pvp.
- minraws 4mo agoNot true, polymarket and kalshi have a lot of system bets, basically bets where the other side is the market, and further they take a cut from the money gambled. There are other things as well, like they control which side wins, so they can leverage trade or even swing trade internally with a few bot accounts, not saying that they do but I don't see a ToC that says they can't.
- Saline9515 4mo agoPolymarket can market-make, but so can you (i.e be on the both sides of the order book). You can't do that in a casino for instance. They don't control which side wins (UMA voters do). You should read up about prediction markets and in general sport gambling. Sport gambling platforms with a "house" usually derive their odds from pvp markets. Polymarket is similar to a classic order book market.
- minraws 4mo ago1. Kalshi doesn't use UMA. 2. Yeah spend more money to get UMA votes to decide controversial decisions. That's how polymarket works. I have a lot of experience with similar systems, that's what we call rigging the election. Imagine a handful of anonymous UMA wallets dominate Polymarket’s contested resolutions, and reporters have linked some deciding wallets to positions in the very markets they judged. :But you don't have to it happens way too often and there is no oversight against it: https://www.wsj.com/finance/polymarket-bet-disputes-fb1b8c6a https://www.wsj.com/finance/polymarket-bet-disputes-fb1b8c6a https://www.barrons.com/articles/polymarket-prediction-market-disputes-uma-crypto-e3eae345 https://www.barrons.com/articles/polymarket-prediction-marke... I hope we can all agree to read this stuff. > Polymarket can market-make, but so can you (i.e be on the both sides of the order book). You can't do that in a casino for instance. That's like saying Elon can be a trillionaire, but so can you, I mean sure, anyone can, but how lucky do you think you have to be for your market to actually get any meaningful traction and for you to make any money. And even when you do, you are basically suggesting you should insider trade or rig bets to make money... I am certain that might be a flex for some but man I don't think that's the dunk you were looking for. At the end the only folks making money are the markets, but who am I to stop the blind. Best of luck, hopefully you don't regret it. I only hope people don't get addicted or robbed by this stuff, rich people can have their own fun I don't really care.
- csomar 4mo agoI made an article a day back how Polymarket is not exactly fair when it comes to market resolution (https://omarabid.com/polymarket-bet/ 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.
- Saline9515 4mo agoAlso UMA holders who get to judge do participate in markets.
- felooboolooomba 4mo agoNot a stretch to call that a conflict of interests.
- KeplerBoy 4mo agoWow, this is so much worse than i thought.
- felooboolooomba 4mo agoYes, an recent example here: https://www.reddit.com/r/Polymarket/comments/1ubxixr/am_i_in_the_wrong_here/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Polymarket/comments/1ubxixr/am_i_in...
- flowerthoughts 4mo agoThe 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.
- tecleandor 4mo agoThere's no "both sides" of the bets in this case. All the bets researched by the WSJ were fake, none of those bets was ever placed.
- flowerthoughts 4mo agoYes. That's not an argument against my point: they could achieve the same biased result using recordings of real bets. Be happy they (maybe) haven't yet, because that conartistry is much harder to show. Don't trust anything anyone says about probabilities of real-world future events. We still can't even predict the weather a week in advance, despite huge computational resources being thrown at it.
- aucisson_masque 4mo ago> 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
- jjcob 4mo agoThe burger ad is also getting people addicted and destroying lives. But with burgers most people blame the victims. In my opinion it's all the same. Gambling, junk food, drugs, guns... Lots of money to be made, lots of lives destroyed.
- noisy_boy 4mo ago> The burger ad is also getting people addicted and destroying lives. I think it will take quite a while to wipe out one's life savings eating burgers.
- expedition32 4mo agoIt is time to admit that the Chinese were right when they built their great firewall. You either protect yourself from America or your civilization is lost to the void.
- TFNA 4mo ago
- pulkas 4mo ago[dead]
- mastermage 4mo agothe fact that apps like Polymarket seem to be legal is absolutely crazy to me.
- Zealotux 4mo agoI was baffled to see gambling completely take over advertising in CSGO years ago with no one batting an eye, Valve also had its share of responsibility with loot cases but they have such a great reputation it's difficult to call them out on that.
- xpct 4mo agoSince ublock stopped working on twitch, I've learned that all ads they show for me are localized gambling ads, and it's sickening.
- DontchaKnowit 4mo agoThank donald trump jr
- RaSoJo 4mo agoI 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.
- onetrickwolf 4mo agoIs this paid for by Meta or something?
- Dilettante_ 4mo agoYeah, if I don't make my six-year-old drink with me every once in a while, he's never gonn learn to hold his liquour!
- BLKNSLVR 4mo agoFacebook and Google really have a lot to answer for. Where's the regulation that's been increasingly needed for the last decade?
- jmyeet 4mo agoThis is a well-trodden path. A few years ago crypto gambling really took off. The big fish here is Stake. Back when Twitch still allowed slots, there was a flood of slots streamers. Ultimately this led to Twitch banning gambling. This was such an issue that Stake created their own live streaming platform (ie Kick). That should tell you how lucrative it was. But what came out was that there was different contracts the streamers had. Some were paid a hefty fee and they got to keep any winnings. Why anyone would choose this is beyond me because over time your expected return is negative. The other option was that you could "gamble" with fake money. None of it was real. And none of it was disclosed. I never understood why people would atch someone play slots all day but some people did. I think psychologically it's a bit like mukbang where people live vicariously through someone else's gluttony. With gambling, the psychological hook is so strong that it can be triggered by watching someone else gamble. But that's just a guess. Luckily, I've never been bitten by the gambling bug. It's one of the worst addictions. I think fake gambling in particular should be illegal or, in the very least, disclosed publicly.
- mihaic 4mo agoHow is this not gambling? I mean, any mobster bookie could simply claim prediction market in this case, and simply take a cut. Where is the line drawn? On how much money the organizers give to the Trump family?
- 3997531578 4mo ago[dead]
- wiseowise 4mo agoUnregulated gambling website is fraudulent? Jesus Christ, how did that happen? I'm baffled, completely shocked!
- skc 4mo agoWe're living in the golden age of the grifter
- nlitsme 4mo agoI think when you voluntarily view ads, than you have to accept being lied to.
- everdrive 4mo agoSo too has nearly everyone else who is peddling someone's interests. Social media currently exists to bend you to someone else's will. This was always true in some sense: newspapers, television, radio, etc, but I'd point out a few things: - This is precisely what made television such a bad experience. You could really feel the hand reaching through the screen to shake you. Demanding that you feel one way or another. Particularly with commercials, but of course with everything else as well. - The mediums of television and radio were heavily gate-kept (even with the advent of cable) compared to the internet and social media. You didn't have the insanity of Twitter accounts from east Asia spamming BBC (not the news channel) propaganda, or Russia, Iran, and others attempting to inflame racial hatred, etc. It's not a wholly brand new thing, but the reach, scale, and variety are so much greater that it might as well be brand new.
- tgtweak 4mo agoIt's the same for all the gambling platforms - they give creators and influencers privileged accounts that win more than they lose so when they stream it looks like they're not losing constantly.
- quietsegfault 4mo agoIsn’t that auditable by gambling regulators?
- derwiki 4mo agoIs it illegal? What gambling regulators are working with polymarkets?
- quietsegfault 3mo agoWhoops, I thought by “they” you meant “all the gambling platforms”, not just polymarket.
- castwide 4mo agoAlternative link without paywall: https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/companies/they-looked-like-they-were-getting-rich-on-polymarket-but-none-of-it-was-real/ar-AA269SCe https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/companies/they-looked-like-t...
- aussiegreenie 4mo agoSo Polymarket did marketing....what a shock.
- ne11nn 4mo agothis reminds me of the social media "turbolearn ai" slop. i feel like the vastness of this form of marketing is becoming the new ai slop on social media.
- damnesian 4mo agoAll businesses that make their fortunes from gambling must deceive to get people to participate. It's such a major red flag.
- Predivex 4mo ago[flagged]