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How Kalshi Infects the News
- throwawayffffas 3mo agoIt seems CNN fails to put their mouth where their money is.
- afavour 3mo ago[dead]
- baggachipz 3mo agoThe unprecedented era of gambling on literally everything everywhere is an absolute cancer on society, made completely legal by absolute greed and degeneracy at the highest levels of government. I don't know how we put this genie back in the bottle (amongst many detrimental genies).
- abirch 3mo agoThis has an outsized impact on young men.
- tangenter 3mo agoI try to run YouTube in librewolf with adblockers stacked to the tits but every so often I have to use Chrome. The volume of gambling ads is repugnant.
- el_io 3mo agoUblock Origin Lite is quite capable.
- nradov 3mo agoIt probably depends on the algorithm. I never see gambling ads on YouTube.
- embedding-shape 3mo agoAlso country. Visited Sweden recently, gambling ads everyone on the internet, on TV and in public spaces, but back home Spain I still see some, but nowhere near the level as it was in Sweden.
- hebleb 3mo agoIt may take awhile, but it ends by voting in political candidates that actually care about combatting greed and corruption again
- throwaway27448 3mo agoDemocracy doesn't exactly have a long history of stable states, and the US only been a liberal democracy for about 60 years. In that time we've done very little to hold politicians accountable. It's not clear there is a democratic fix outside of the theoretical realm. Nobody wants to kill the golden goose....
- dieselgate 3mo agoGenuinely curious what the golden goose refers to here?
- throwaway27448 3mo agoThere's a lot of money in gambling. Nobody seems to want do anything that might depress the economy, even if it means the death of democracy.
- topgrain2 3mo agoSee also: the healthcare system, and the military. We pump spectacular amounts of money (~10% of GDP in the former case based on diffing high-end-of-normal healthcare costs for peer states with ours, and who knows how much in the latter but probably around the same) into white collar and blue collar (respectively) jobs programs and wage-supplementation that buy us basically nothing. A ton worse than a proper jobs program building public infrastructure (the CCC or something) or dumping that money into doctor training or whatever. Extremely poor ROI, but we can't touch them or GDP craters (nominally only—these aren't producing much in the first place, the P part of GDP, of course, which is probably part of why the US doesn't feel as rich as it looks on paper)
- dheera 3mo agoI mean, it's instilled into society at every level in the US. If your company offers an FSA, it's asking to make a gamble on how much medical needs you'll have in the next 1 year. The "smart" way to write the tax law would be to just let taxpayers deduct whatever medical expenses they have at tax reporting time. But instead, they want you to make a bet because you're highly likely to either (a) not use all of it and lose it, or (b) realize you haven't spent all of it and spend it on random shit you wouldn't have otherwise bought, handing over profits to some suppliers who are in on the whole game, or (c) underestimate your medical needs and the tax man gets to tax some more of your money. Stuff like this is all over the place in American life.
- ambicapter 3mo agoConflating unavoidable risk in life with games designed to entice you to play while guaranteeing that you will lose is certainly some sort of perverse argument.
- dheera 3mo agoI'm not conflating anything here. Nobody should be asked to make bets on their medical needs. They should just be allowed to tax deduct everything when the need arises. You ARE almost-guaranteed to lose the FSA game, basically. You'll either bet too much or too little, and the collective house wins either way. In my opinion, it's even more sickening that the system is designed to scalp a few extra bucks off of peoples' medical situations in this way. The gambling on sports, I could care less about.
- reaperducer 3mo agoNobody should be asked to make bets on their medical needs. Your entire argument sounds very much like how certain religions are against insurance because they view it as gambling. It's led to the rise of an even riskier practice of shared health benefit pools, which market themselves as not being insurance even though they're pretty much the same thing as "mutual insurance," except that when you need them most, suddenly they're not insurance at all. It also sounds very young. When you get over a certain age, you WILL use up that FSA. Every. Single. Year. And if you're young enough not to, there are plenty of over-the-counter everyday goods that qualify for FSA, like Tylenol.
- DeluluDon 3mo agoIt's really terrible. Gambling addiction is a serious issue that needs to be educated towards people first before any 'Kalshi' mention. I suppose that's what those 'Gambling problem?'ads are for. Well we don't need ads. We need responsible education against the effects of gambling addiction or we need to raise wages, which is it?
- miltonlost 3mo agoOr we could also ban sports betting apps and Kalshi and Polymarket. Where does raising wages have to deal with this?
- spike021 3mo agoEven something that should be as fun as collecting and trading cards (baseball, pokemon, etc.) revolves around "pull odds" for rare cards. There are people spending thousands of dollars monthly just to rip a desirable card they could flip for money that in most cases would never make up for how much they spent just buying packs and boxes of the product.
- jorts 3mo agoI was taking an Uber from Sonoma back to the Bay, and the driver was one of those people. He wouldn't stop talking about how he was spending thousands a month on rare cards, then reselling them, all the while losing money, his wife, etc.
- spike021 3mo agoI really got into baseball cards a few years back. It is fun to collect for favorite players and all but once you realize it's a money pit you either are too deep and addicted or you're able to wean yourself back off it. Fortunately it was the latter for me. I'd love to keep buying the stuff but it's such a waste. Better to buy singles I actually want. It's just not as fun as me being the one who pulled the card.
- keiferski 3mo agoSociety needs to rediscover the idea that not all moral judgements are religious in nature, and in many cases are just basic pragmatic ones. The bans on gambling were often framed in Christian terms, so as society became more secular, they were undone. Now they probably need to be re-added with practical reasoning.
- peder 3mo agoRediscovering first principles
- thrance 3mo agoI disagree with your assessment, the ban wasn't undone because of secularism. In fact, this prediction market craze was embraced by the right almost instantly, which is the side currently most favored by Christians.
- keiferski 3mo agoGambling bans have been slowly undone for decades. This isn’t something that happened in the recent MAGA populist era; which is the portion of the right that seems to be okay with the gambling stuff.
- thrance 3mo agoI mean, white evangelicals largely sided with Trump last year, so I don't know how cleanly you can separate Christianity (as it currently exists in the USA) from MAGA populism and what policies the movement favors.
- keiferski 3mo agoI don’t think it’s that difficult. Evangelicals’ beliefs and who they vote for are not the same thing; they largely seem to have voted for his Supreme Court nominees and consequently decisions like Roe. That’s a reality of a two party system. Evangelicals are also but one branch of Christianity, something like a third of American Christians, so to suggest that it is the same is wrong from the start.
- JumpinJack_Cash 3mo ago> > The unprecedented era of gambling on literally everything everywhere is an absolute cancer on society, made completely legal by absolute greed and degeneracy at the highest levels of government. I don't know how we put this genie back in the bottle (amongst many detrimental genies). It is just showing you in the clear what propaganda managed to hide from you with regards to the stock market and the bond market , and all the other markets for that matter. Insiders do trade and it's impossible to stop them or catch them, and the further you are from the information (both geographically and socially) the harder it is to be first in line and more probably you are next to last in line and you gotta pray that you find some bigger fool to sell your bags to. If anything there are some things on the prediction markets that really give the advantage to the small guy, for example some farmer whose family has been living there for many years could have a big advantage on weather forecasters and those who bet on them. Say they see the wind pick up or a particular cloud formation that gives an expert eye the idea that rain is gonna come whereas forecasters won't see it coming
- xg15 3mo agoWhat I find almost as depressing is evidently the concerted push to normalize this practice. We were all shocked by Polymarket, but meanwhile others just saw it as yet another emerging market - and now CNN is including it in news segments as if it were the most ordinary thing in the world.
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- nradov 3mo ago[flagged]
- add-sub-mul-div 3mo agoOf course. They didn't treat 45 like a real candidate in 2015 because he deserved to be seen as one, they did it because it's lowest common denominator content and it's what people watch.
- reaperducer 3mo agoPeople still watch CNN? 910,000 in prime time hours in April, which is 909,999 more than you. https://www.adweek.com/tvnewser/here-are-the-cable-news-ratings-for-april-2026/ https://www.adweek.com/tvnewser/here-are-the-cable-news-rati...
- ToucanLoucan 3mo agoWe are incredibly market-brained at this point. A certain kind of person loves markets because they provide decisions on complex questions at scale. And like, that's not NEVER true, but it also takes for granted a lot of rational thinking among people who act completely irrationally with incredible regularity. Perhaps our greatest cultural fiction right now is the "rationality" of markets, and people are looking for insight more than ever on our insane world. So that makes perfect sense to me, really.
- Terr_ 3mo ago> A certain kind of person loves markets because they provide decisions on complex questions at scale. And like, that's not NEVER true, but it also takes for granted a lot of rational thinking It also tends to assume a certain hypothetical ideal of perfect information, where all prices and transactions are public, secret deals don't exist, and ownership/interests are never hidden.
- deaton 3mo agoIts just another symptom of the silicon valley startup "do something illegal, scale fast, and dare the government to do something about it" business model. It is an absolute cancer to society, if there is such a thing as late stage capitalism that is it, and we need to vaporize companies that do it with fines and jail time. On a broader scale it can be viewed as part of modern culture going towards "screw everyone else, I'm gonna do whatever to get ahead." Kids on tiktok are teaching each other how to scam people. At this rate we'll have scam call centers in the US by the end of the decade and nobody will do anything about it.
- allthetime 3mo ago"I don't know how we put this genie back in the bottle" laws, that's how. push it back down to the dark net where most people can't be bothered to get at it.
- spacechild1 3mo ago> I don't know how we put this genie back in the bottle Just ban or regulate it? It's only a form gambling after all.
- blini-kot 3mo agothere was a certain approach tried back in 1917 in Russia isn't without its issues of course, but you know, desperate times call for desperate measures
- testbjjl 3mo agoFeels like we’re the ones being put in a bottle as rational thinking, integrity, consideration of the greater good on all things big and small are interpreted as being weak and/or arresting people’s freedoms. When you forget hard learned lessons, they have a way of reminding you eventually.
- Spooky23 3mo agoSomething bad will happen, and the idiots will just follow whatever the next thing is.
- martythemaniak 3mo agoHere's an answer for you: we need a new temperance movement. Sounds pretty ridiculous at first, but that's because people know little of the temperance and progressive movements of the late 19th and early 20th century besides "prohibition failed". There was a whole lot more to it than mere anti-alcohol push, it included labour rights and reform (Upton Sinclair's The Jungle, etc), Anti-trust and anti-monopoly laws, anti-political corruption, consumer protection (food regulation), women's suffrage, etc. The 20th century progressives essentially saw a huge concentration of money and power turning society into a cruel, exploitative machine that ground people up and spat them out. Rampant alcoholism was only one part of it. A modern version would be different in details but similar overall. Alcohol and cigarettes are not major problems, but corruption, monopoly, and engineered addiction are very real and very problematic. A new temperance movement would be about tackling rampant gabling and addiction (everything from gas station drugs to social media algorithms), political corruption, tech monopolies, misinformation etc. Big problems need big solutions, but I suspect things will have to get worse before people realize the scale of the problem they're facing.
- anduril22 3mo agoIt's both a key driver and symptom of societal disintegration and ultimate downfall.
- nlarew 3mo agoYou are 100% free to not gamble
- baggachipz 3mo agoAnd I don't, save for a Super Bowl square or fantasy football entry fees. My point is that it's doing real damage to the most vulnerable and acting like it's some flippant choice is both myopic and selfish.
- lenerdenator 3mo ago> I don't know how we put this genie back in the bottle (amongst many detrimental genies). You severely punish those involved with prison time for whatever you can find on them. And I'm not talking a few months at Club Fed.
- Austiiiiii 3mo agoYeah, the prevailing fear (at least out loud) is that going after "outcome markets" would open Pandora's box on everything from options and futures to the very concept of insurance. Obviously there's a huge and easily definable difference, but people love their slippery slopes, and nuanced discussion would mean giving up an easy way for connected people to cash in on non-public knowledge.
- pacman1337 3mo agoAdults should have the freedom to gamble if they feel like gambling. I don't like the government trying to daddy me. If I want to blow my money on some stupid bet that is my problem. As long as the rules are clear and fair then it should absolutely be legal. CNN not disclosing is bad, but that has nothing to do with gambling in general.
- throw0101a 3mo ago> I don't know how we put this genie back in the bottle (amongst many detrimental genies). Why don't we just let The Market™ decide? /s
- Pxtl 3mo agoIt's amazing how naked it is that laws just don't apply to certain people. Kalshi et al are obviously gambling, and yet somehow all the laws about gambling have been politely forgotten by law enforcement.
- boredatoms 3mo agoSame thing happened in the early days of Uber, with taxi licenses
- hvs 3mo agoAnd DraftKings/FanDuel
- lr4444lr 3mo agoWhile your analogy is valid, I find it hard to get upset at people who flout an artificially imposed limit to a license to engage in employment. I'm aware the vehicles and drivers were at first highly unvetted, but the moral impulse that's got everyone so up in arms about prediction markets isn't remotely the same as Uber smashing through antiquated monopolies that existed more by historical accident than any unavoidable public safety need.
- Pxtl 3mo agoExactly. While there isn't much of a legal distinction between regulatory capture and consumer protection, there's obviously an ethical one. Uber was ignoring rules that apparently mostly protected established investors rather than end-users of car-hiring services.
- miltonlost 3mo agoSome states are trying to fight against Kalshi. One of the problems is the President's family has a financial interest in these markets and so the Republican party does their best to say "hey, these are clearly "swaps" and not bets!!!1!" https://www.yogonet.com/international/news/2026/06/29/125136-kalshi-sues-illinois-over-prediction-market-regulations-ahead-of-july-1-deadline https://www.yogonet.com/international/news/2026/06/29/125136...
- btbuildem 3mo agoThe "best" part of this is all the trading algos that scrape the news act on it. They 1) can't vet sources all that well and 2) absolutely cannot discern lies (eg, anything coming out of the official admin channels) from facts. You can see this for example in the absurd discrepancy between paper and physical crude prices.
- dheera 3mo ago> discrepancy between paper and physical crude prices If you see mispricing, trade the hell out of it and pocket the cash before some hedge fund does. The system is rigged against us normal folk and given any opportunity to take money legally from the system, I absolutely would. (Now sometimes, there are good reasons for paper and physical to differ, most particularly if the paper is structured in a high-risk way, and you need to be aware of that.)
- Legend2440 3mo ago>You can see this for example in the absurd discrepancy between paper and physical crude prices. This was a temporary discrepancy that has gone away now that physical prices have fallen. This means the future traders were right; the $150+ prices for a physical barrel of oil were a short-term situation that would resolve in a few months. It was correct for futures to be priced substantially lower. What's absurd is internet commentators thinking the market is broken because they see something they don't immediately understand.
- cliglot 3mo ago[dead]
- DavidContext 3mo agoThis is a really interesting piece. It's weird seeing Kalshi adverts in the World Cup. Not sure how I feel about the whole thing in general.
- frollogaston 3mo agoReminds me of news articles that are just Twitter screenshots, except now there's money directly involved. Btw every ad around the stadium in World Cup is for Kalshi now. Really makes me question the fairness of the games.
- yousif_123123 3mo agoThey blocked gambling ads from in stadium ads for the world cup, but Kalshi was still able to get one in because it's "predictions" and not gambling.
- game_the0ry 3mo agoDid anyone else think it was strange how fast legitimate news orgs (cnn for example) integrated prediction markets into their businesses?
- DonsDiscountGas 3mo agoNot really. It's easy "content"for them and adds a veneer of quantitative rigor to what would otherwise be pure vibes.
- mcmcmc 3mo agoNot sure why you’re getting downvotes, this is exactly the case, along with I’m sure a nice payoff from the prediction markets for sponsored segments. Same reason betting odds are so heavily integrated into sports news
- DonsDiscountGas 3mo agoMaybe people read it as an endorsement rather than an observation. No biggy, just Internet points. Though you have apparently rescued me from -2 to +5 so thank you.
- thrance 3mo agoI mean, it only feels weird if you missed Kalshi becoming a CNN partner 6 months ago. Media is entirely captured by capital, so I wasn't even surprised when they did that. https://news.kalshi.com/p/kalshi-cnn-prediction-market-partnership https://news.kalshi.com/p/kalshi-cnn-prediction-market-partn...
- jackb4040 3mo agoNot for those of us around in 2018 when they became QVC for sh*tcoins
- nlarew 3mo agoNot really? It's an interesting proxy for public opinion that requires zero investment from the news org. They don't have to pay a polling agency or wait for someone else to. Of course that suffers some likely substantial bias from oversampling a specific domain/sub-population
- jmyeet 3mo agoOver the last 2+ decades gambling has increased massively. By "gambling" I include sports betting, prediction markets, online casinos and crypto (including NFTs). Yes, I'm including crypto under gambling. When ordinary people buy crypto it's mostly because they saw the stratospheric rise of Bitcoin, don't really understand why and don't want to miss out on the next Bitcoin.. Straight up. That's gambling. But why? Ease of access (ie the Intenret and particularly smartphones) are obviously a factor. There was a time when if you wanted to gamble you had to do it illegally or you had to go to a physical casino in Las Vegas or Atlantic City (and then riverboats, etc). You can look across to see how ease of access to gambling absolutely increases the amount of gambling and thus gambling addiction. A good example are the poker machines that are available in some states in Australia but not all. But there's something deeper than that (IMHO). And I think that thing is the increasing inequality [1] and the affordability crisis. People may be talking about affordability a lot now but it's not a new issue. It was a key issue in the 2016 election, for example. The thesis is that as people become increasingly desperate to have enough money (and espeically if they fall below that level) then gambling increases because people see this as the only way they can get ahead (eg [2]). I believe gambling is a symptomo and indicator of a deeply broken societ and a deteriorating society. The sad reality is that gambling is an excellent way of extracting what little wealth poor people have and it makes everything worse on a macro scale. Gambling should be relatively inaccessible. Yet we have the Federal government suing to stop states to ban prediction markets [3]. [1]: https://wir2026.wid.world/ https://wir2026.wid.world/ [2]: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8643406/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8643406/ [3]: https://www.cnbc.com/2026/05/21/where-the-feds-are-fighting-states-over-prediction-markets.html https://www.cnbc.com/2026/05/21/where-the-feds-are-fighting-...
- mghackerlady 3mo agoThere's 3 kinds of crypto buyers: The investor, the criminal, and your weird libertarian uncle
- erikerikson 3mo agos/investor/speculator/
- mflaherty22 3mo agoFelt this video I saw this morning was relevant: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VV3rpuf8iAk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VV3rpuf8iAk
- anduril22 3mo agoKalshi is a virus
- tsunamifury 3mo agoWe are reaching a new post-rational or neu-rational stage of our society which i think many HNers and educated people will find deeply uncomfortable The difficult truth is that as we've engeineered our society over the last 50 years into more and more deterministic outcomes, and began to assign morality itself TO determinism. Where in we've reached a point where when we must face that life is probablistic (i.e. gambling) we assign that space a moral evil As a person who is deeply entrenched in this way of thinking I find gambing uncomforatable, but when we invented the core AI technology of prediction systems at Google that power LLM tech today, 'gambling' on probablistic outcomes at a super short term and long term level is questining the determinism of life itself. Gambling is a collective signal on cohort outcomes and wisdom of crowds, which becomes training data itself for long/high dimensional-vectors required to fuel intelligence. In other words, it turns out EVERYTHING is gambling, some things just have better odds than others, and most of those better odds choices come from OHTERS gambling to make those odds better for you. Humanity moving forward out of this trap of high odds probability gravity wells and growing as a species will involve a lot of gambling i suspect.
- gordian-mind 3mo agoPersonally I see nothing wrong with prediction markets, so it feels weird to see people around here freak about it as if it was the antichrist put in place by <current politicians they don't like>.
- tsunamifury 3mo agoI did a startup with one back in 2008... it resulted in some bizarre outcomes https://www.computerworld.com/article/1584145/idg-revives-the-industry-standard-online.html https://www.computerworld.com/article/1584145/idg-revives-th... 1) Winners could influence future outcomes. 2) The more they won the more they could influence outcomes. This seems to be a pretty good mirror of today's society no?
- doctorwho42 3mo agoWow this is a very weird way to mash a bunch of principles and ideas together to sound smart, but not actually say anything.
- com2kid 3mo agoIt's funny, the only place I see Kalshi mentioned is here on HN for articles about how bad Kalshi is. Same for all the sports betting sites. I'm sure they are all bad, but damned if I never encounter them outside of HN.
- jhickok 3mo agoIt's bad on social media, especially Tik Tok. I don't use it often, but when I do I bet I get 3 Kalshi ads every 10 minutes easy.
- com2kid 3mo agoI don't use tik tok (it never managed to adjust itself to me, YT shorts figured me out faster). I pay for YT Premium so I don't see ads, and I have ad blockers everywhere else, and I just refuse to use any platform that forces ads on me. Related - ads are a pox upon society.
- asimovDev 3mo agothey run ads in the current World Cup for example, greatly increasing their exposure I reckon. Although might not matter, I am assuming they do not operate outside of North America
- josefritzishere 3mo agoThis is all gambling. It should be heavily regulated.
- bastard_op 3mo agoI always find it hilarious CNN as the last bastion of democracy will slog Polymarket in their "numbers" segments constantly. Way to jerk off the president still CNN, can't turn down those advertisements.