ProPublica had one of their reports work with gambling addition experts to see how DraftKings would respond to someone presenting signs of a gambling problem. It's a hell of a read, and makes it clear that this company is full of people with absolutely no ethics whatsoever.
People in companies that are a negative public good are by definition unethical. I'm not surprised by anything they do. The real problem is how we've let these companies infiltrate so much of our society so fast. I can't consume any ad supported media without getting some ad about them. This company really defines the phrase "money talks"
At least those often fund things like state education so, over time, the pool of victims is maybe lessened by the success of the program? Maybe?
(I am not defending state lotteries, but I do think there's some distinction to be made between "we actively exploit people to maximize our profits for our own sakes" and "we regulate the passive exploitation of people to supplement taxes in a regressive manner." Or something. I dunno, maybe somebody has more elaborate thoughts on this to share.)
In many places where gambling is banned, there is still gambling. And in places where it's legalized, it can (in theory) be effectively regulated (if there's political will, which is difficult to muster sometimes). And say what you will about lotteries, but it's far easier to blow your life savings at casinos and with sports betting than buying a bunch of lottery tickets.
See nature preserves that are funded by regulated big game hunting of the preserved nature.
It's a fun moral question. At what point do you give up trying to make someone/a population healthier and say "well if you're going to be this way, we might as well get some use out of you"?
"we regulate the passive exploitation of people to supplement taxes in a regressive manner."
I was convinced by this for a full 30 seconds before I realized there are millions of advertisements for the state lotteries. They aren't just regulating a market that will exist with or without the state, they are actively promoting and encouraging it
I've got plenty of negative things to say about state government lotteries, but the ones I'm familiar with are structured in less predatory ways. It's hard to spend thousands of dollars on lottery tickets, and impossible to do so in a way that won't feel obviously stupid, especially since you can't buy them on your phone.
It isn't inherently addictive. Gambling addiction is significantly less common than alcohol addiction, and has no properties that make it inherently addictive to someone who is not predisposed towards that addiction (unlike drugs, for example, which are inherently addictive to all humans).
Some slot machines/casino games are designed to appeal to problem gamblers. DK and co, however, do not design these games, and state regulators do already control aspects of their design. For online operators, this doesn't represent most of their revenue and, I suspect, most would be quite happy not to provide these products.
I've seen this "it only affects problem gamblers" thing so much that I suspect it's an intentional strategy to shift blame that takes advantage of people's natural tendency to believe the just world fallacy (bad things only happen to bad people).
Gambling is absolutely inherently addictive as it's essentially perfectly paired with your brains reward system and hijacks it. There's literally dopamine cycle and tolerance happening. And when compounded by algorithms and notifications which are designed to amplify this even further I'm not sure how you can think it's not inherently addictive.
> unlike drugs, for example, which are inherently addictive to all humans
Define "drugs". Alcohol is a drug. Most users aren't addicts. So is tobacco. Most users are addicts. Cannabis? More like alcohol than tobacco in terms of addictiveness.
There may be some selection bias. Smoking tobacco is an unpleasant sensation. There's no reason to do it other than the addiction and the effects on your brain chemistry afterwards. Whereas many alcoholic drinks taste great in their own right and would be consumed even if they had no chemical effects.
I suspect gambling is like alcohol or cannabis. Engaging in it affects brain chemistry. For some people that's addictive. Most people are able to enjoy the activity without being hooked.
> But the little head rush you get starting the day with a coffee and a cigarette feels great.
That's the effect on brain chemistry I referred to.
Do you actually enjoy the smoke in your mouth, burning your eyes and lungs?
A cold beer on a hot day is refreshing just for its temperature alone. A fruity cocktail tastes good because sugar tastes good. What's enjoyable about the physical sensations produced by smoke?
I mean maybe we're arguing semantics, because the pleasure of eating sugar is possibly also an alteration of brain chemistry. But there is a difference.
The real number we want evaluate is "what percent of the revenue comes from people experiencing significant negative consequences from the product."
For alcohol that number is something like 2/3 revenue from the top 10% of drinkers, who drink an order of magnitude more than the decile below them. I doubt gambling is very different but if you have more info I'm happy to hear it.
IMHO one shouldn't expect a company to have any ethics to achieve a positive outcome for society. This needs to be baked into the rules (taxes, regulation, ...), so the ethical behavior becomes the rational behavior.
You can't have rules in a society, that are against the moral feeling of sizable chunk of the population. That's just going to be a source for conflict. At some point you do need a population with a moral compass or you get nowhere as a ruler, especially in participatory ruling systems like a democracy.
I think we should be able to expect a company to have ethics, just like we should be able to expect them to follow the laws, but we should also regulate them to ensure that they do and punish them meaningfully when they fail to.
companies are a fiction made out of people, they don't have anything, and regardless what the rules are I expect those people to behave ethically at any given time.
I'm not entirely sure when people started to have this idea that when they walk through a company door, as if this is some magical portal into the realm of amorality, give up their human responsibilities and faculties
> I expect those people to behave ethically at any given time.
A company is set up and incentivised to maximize a profit function, and that in turn incentivises to promote people which are not impeded by ethical considerations. The hierarchy furthermore ensures that people which would otherwise act ethical, don't, for fear of losing their job. This structure behaves ethical as long as you put ethics in the profit function.
"I'm not entirely sure when people started to have this idea that when they walk through a company door, as if this is some magical portal into the realm of amorality, give up their human responsibilities and faculties"
how can you became this naive ???? this is literally a company that get profit when you a lose
Would love to be a fly on the wall in whatever board room in the world has somebody saying “yes, we could increase profits by doing X, but that would be unethical so of course we won’t”
This happens at every gambling company in regulated markets like the US or Europe.
For comparison, there are offline casinos who use targeted adverts saying that they do not comply with regulators, and their adverts are designed in such a way as to appeal to people with gambling addiction (usually showing some kind of live play, which is banned in every regulated market afaik).
You can be sceptical of the motives of individuals but there are very strong corporate incentives from state regulators (in the US, particularly those with physical casinos).
> This happens at every gambling company in regulated markets like the US or Europe.
No something clearly different happens in regulated markets. There's a massive difference between "This would make us more money, but we won't do that because it's unethical" and "I wish we could get away with doing this unethical thing to make more money, but sadly current regulations make this one unprofitable for now. Lets increase our lobbying spend to try to fix that."
What usually happens is they talk about statistics rather than demographics. Eg “when doing x we’ve seen a 5% rise in engagement but a 50% rise in spend from those engaged”
Nobody is actually blind to the reality of the stats but this kind approach makes it both easier to dehumanise their actions as well as giving them plausible deniability when asked if they target specific demographics such as addicts.
Meaning that, should they get the memo, they’d change their behaviour to that of a legitimate business? Not being combative here, just not sure I follow what you’re saying.
I mean what do we expect ???? "the house" is playing fair ????
we literally have mobile game that have "gacha" which is full blown gamble and we pretend that the actual "online casino" is to play moral, ethics or fairness ??
Not just mobile games. Roblox is basically an online child casino, powered by child laborers being compensated in Robux scrip. Fortnite isn't much better. We'd do a lot of good by regulating these games better too. The gambling addicts who got hooked with these games will move on to DraftKings when they're older. DraftKings knows this is their pipeline and has been investing in esports and video games like Call of Duty and establishing partnerships with Riot Games and Activision Blizzard.
What is your point? Bad thing happened in the past, we should continue to let bad thing happen?
Most people find current system of gambling from phone to be too much. Forcing people to physical location and limiting advertising can be good harm reduction without causing increase in crime.
"presenting signs"...there is no way for DK to tell that someone is addicted, which is the same error of logic in the original article.
There are multiple companies that will take your money and data and say they have found a way of identifying gamblers, afaik none of these products actually or can work.
What that article showed is: someone uses a product, they do not activate any features to use the product safely, and then they it is unsafe. DK have safety features integrated with governments already in the product.
Yes, it happens to every gambler who spends a lot of money. That is how VIP tiers are defined, based on how much you spend. There is no way for them (or anyone) to understand the customer's state of mind. Should it be illegal for retailers to offer customers discounts? Compulsive shopping is significantly more common than gambling addiction, do retailers target those customers?
If you never want to gamble, you tell the state regulator you never want to gamble and you will be unable to use any site.
My data science graduate program had a class that analyzed major data science success stories. The very first one covered how Caesar's Entertainment built models and ran experiments to identify their "most valuable customers", figure out how to predict when they were getting ready to leave the casino, and intervene with incentives and perks designed to get them to stay and keep gambling. And also how all of their competitors rushed to implement their own programs in response.
Look at it from the casino's perspective: their entire business model is centered on exploiting quirks of human psychology to separate people from their money. Expecting prosocial behavior from them is like expecting a squirrel to ignore your bird feeders.
The EFF isn't saying it's a surprise that companies are doing this. Nobody's surprised by that. They're drawing attention to it and saying they shouldn't be allowed to.
I like how you have to be an accredited investor to get involved with riskier investment instruments but you can be a total moron with no money and lose whatever you have left betting on sports and prediction markets.
Btw it’s not just those two, add iGaming into the mix which is cell phone gambling glammed up in Candy Crush form. Leeches, all of them.
I believe there are "casino games" on Apple and Android stores that are similar to actual gambling, you just buy "tokens" that can never be redeemed for cash.
Proof if proof needed of the complete pointlessness of casino gambling. Some people will still do it even when they know they can't win anything.
"In the United States, to be considered an accredited investor, a natural person must have a net worth of at least $1,000,000, excluding the value of one's primary residence, or have income at least $200,000 each year for the last two years (or $300,000 combined income if married) and have the expectation to make the same amount this year, or must otherwise be a holder of a specific license in good standing."
Of course you can still lie but legally there is a line.
The standard may be higher, but the implementation is "This is what it means to be accredited: are you accredited? By the way if you say no, I can't sell you the thing I've been trying to convince you to buy."
If you had to take and pass a test, that might filter out more people; although I'm sure the seller would help you pass the test, so maybe not.
In my lifetime I've witnessed America accept new revenue sources by relaxing the moral code. First, it was allowing businesses to be open on Sunday. Then it was allowing liquor sales on Sunday. Then it was liquor ads on television. Then it was very controlled, state-run gambling (the lottery). Then it was casino gambling. Now it's online gambling and 'prediction markets'. Then it was recreational marijuana use. And so on. My point of reference is Missouri, where I grew up, but I think most states have followed a pretty similar path, all in search of new sources of revenue. I predict this trend will continue all the way to prostitution. Yes, that sounds crazy, but if you would've told me in the early-80s that Missouri would have casinos and legal weed, I would've considered that crazy.
Capital constantly needs new frontiers to exploit, and therefore must remove moral and social obstacles that stand in its way. Pseudo-prostitution has already been made widespread via platforms like OnlyFans, it's only a matter of time before in-the-flesh prostitution follows, as you said.
It's curious to me that so many progressives or soi-disant leftists are in favor of dissolving these types of moral and social traditions while being fervently anti-capitalist. It seems that they (meaning the subset who are always looking for new fenceposts to tear down) are in fact the shock troops of Capital.
You know prositution is already legal in certain counties in Nevada, and it's been that way since '71?
The list is far longer than you've mentioned.
Here's a list of things you're allowed to profit on either as an investor or as a participant that are quite wild: Fighting with gloves (more lethal than bare-knuckle), bare-knuckle fights, kids in contact sports (even combat sports), throwing away perfectly good food in order to lower taxable income, not planting a crop specifically because it wouldn't make enough profit, gig-economy not paying living wages, a minimum wage below living wage, predatory lending, algorithmic social media that swings elections, targetted advertisement psyops, marketing to children, cosmetic surgery in general but especially for children, forced conversion 'therapy', experimental life saving treatments gate-kept by money, planned obsolescence, plastic packaging...
In combat sports, we're really not too far removed from the collisuem, just that it's "not meant to be to the death" even though it does often result in death or lifelong conditions. The fighters get paid, the organizers get paid, the arena gets paid, the advertisers get paid...All in the name of watching someone not quite kill someone.
Hell, we've even still got slavery tucked neatly away behind "Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States.", but we know that many sitting in prison are demonstrably innocent. The prison is allowed to require that every inmate works. You're allowed to run an organization that profits from these slaves. You are not legally required to pay in some states.
I think legalizing cannabis was more about not jailing people for consuming a plant.
It's hard to respect a legal system that jails someone who wasn't hurting anyone. Repealing a law that criminalizes victimless behavior, especially when so many people already break it, paradoxically increases respect for other laws. It reinforces that the law serves a purpose: protecting people and promoting the general welfare.
Sorry but Sunday blue laws are religious discrimination. It’s just a day and businesses shouldn’t be restricted by a single religious sect. Gambling and substance abuse are actual public health issues.
In general, there is a bigger philosophical question.
Do we treat humans as
1) having full agency, and thus full responsibility for their actions
2) having less than full agency, and then to what extent must society/governments implement control over things that humans can't control within themselves
Because generally, if you subscribe to 1, there is nothing immortal from taking money from a human that that wants to hand it over, provided that human well knows what is at stake. So as long as these websites aren't defrauding the customers with fake stats, there really is nothing wrong.
If you subscribe to 2, then thats a much riskier line to walk because that affects a lot of things, not just gambling.
Somebody said (I think it was FrostPrime) roughly: Gambling is genuinely the scariest drug, I actually think it's worse than cocaine and it's just right there on your phone.
I think that really framed the issue well to me. Imagine having an addiction problem and having to carry the problem substance around with you 24/7.
Every personality has something, it seems, that it tends to get addicted to if given the chance. Gambling has never been that to me. I get bored with most of the games and upset at losing money—even if I net win, I’m irritated about the incremental losses.
On the other hand, I have to manually keep track of how many days in a month I drink because if I don’t I’ll happily have half a bottle of wine every evening, and I think I know where that leads. (When I lose money in a casino I almost always translate that into a nice dinner. Which I will, invariably, enjoy far more than winning imaginary numbers.)
> and upset at losing money—even if I net win, I’m irritated about the incremental losses.
While you don't appear to be susceptible, it is notable that this mindset is not something that makes you less likely to develop a gambling problem. It's actually part of how they drive addiction. A customer who is annoyed at every loss is often a customer who will chase their losses with more/bigger bets, trying to get the winning high back.
I don't think there is nearly enough attention on the pipeline that has been created for children to grow into good little gamblers. All major sports games have absolute borderline gambling within their game in the form of those fantasy style Card games. Pair that with watching any live broadcast of a major sport and the gross ads for all these major sports better companies, with the ad reads during the game.
Haven't followed all that closely for some other games, but it very much seems like the model for NBA2k is to release a new game with some minor patches each year, charge 70$, then spend the majority of that year crafting patches for the card game to keep whales interested in constantly spending on new packs(which are promptly devalued on the next release, and straight up killing the prior year's game's online service, makes them entirely worthless the next year).
It’s really disturbing to me because sports are one category of entertainment that is supposed to be family friendly and accessible to kids. They look up to pro athletes as heroes and all the gambling ads are directly being shown to children. It shouldn’t be legal to advertise age restricted products and services to kids, even if they’re not the “intended” target. They’re still being groomed to accept gambling as cool and normal. Gambling, alcohol, all those ads should be subject to the same safe harbor restrictions as sexual content. Ban the ads from stadiums and jerseys too.
I don't watch sports much, but the last times I did they filled the screen with ads for gambling in the middle of the games while they were being played
“Gambling company leans into its target demographic”
I worked with a state lottery that did similar things. Their target demographic was the “every day players” that would compulsively buy at the gas station.
I quit that job because it seems to be morally wrong.
Betting apps are just this taken to the extreme, I feel for people with this addiction but it’s not going away anytime soon.
I worked with a state lottery as well. They had very clear training for the retailers they worked with to identify and stop problem gambling. There was space reserved in ever ad and on every retailer counter for stop gambling assistance. The few meetings I attended all began with what they had done to reduce problem gambling.
It's hard for me to view that as anything other than mostly for show.
The retailers still have every incentive to sell as many lottery tickets as people will buy, because that's how they make a sizable portion of their money.
And the gambling addiction hotlines are too little too late. I've known people who struggled with gambling. They never admitted they had a problem until they had bottomed out. At that point I doubt the lotteries and casinos particularly care because that well's already run dry, anyway.
If the gaming industry really wanted to put their money where their mouth is on this one, they'd figure out ways to prevent people from getting into that situation in the first place. Putting limits on how much money anyone person can lose, even if only at a single establishment, is one idea that wouldn't even be hard to implement. But of course we won't see that because, unlike gambling addiction hotlines, that runs the risk of reducing their profits.
I worked with a heroin distributor as well. They had very clear training for the dealers they worked with to identify and stop problem heroin use. There was space reserved in every text and on every dealer’s coffee table for stop heroin assistance.
Not equating your work for a lottery with dealing heroin, I’m just pointing out that to say you don’t want people addicted to heroin while still selling heroin isn’t sufficient, and I think the same applies to lotteries. If they acknowledge the problem stop even offering it as a product.
The difference is that the regulator controls your licence to operate. So if you do something that fails to meet the guidelines they create for responsible gaming then they take away your licence.
Acknowledging the problem doesn't make it go away: you must be a big war on drugs guy? right?
> I worked with a state lottery that did similar things. Their target demographic was the “every day players”
That's wild. Wasn't the whole point of having a state lottery to put the state in a better position to be able to discourage people from becoming addicted? The very idea of a "target demographic" seems contrary to that goal; the "target" should be to have nobody buying tickets.
> Betting apps are just this taken to the extreme, I feel for people with this addiction but it’s not going away anytime soon.
Why? This wasn't a thing that existed 10-15 years ago, this isn't some long-standing institution. We could ban online betting apps today if we wanted to.
When widespread sports gambling was illegal before, there were not rich and powerful people whose ability to maintain and grow their wealth and power was tied to keeping sports gambling legal.
Now those rich and powerful people exist, and they will use their wealth and power to keep it legal. It is not easy to put the genie back into the bottle.
Ban state lotteries while we're banning DraftKings IMO. I find I cannot have a productive conversation with anyone who thinks the odds of winning the lottery are higher than winning in the stock market buying total market funds.
Ah... Got it... The same galaxy brains that think p(foom) has a materially greater value than an epsilon minimally >0 to avoid divide by zero errors believe in lottery tickets. Got it. Explains a lot, thanks...
Your $1 lottery coupon has extremely low chances of winning a million dollars, but they aren't zero. No one will sell you any stocks for $1, but even if they did what is a chance of a random $1 stock increasing in value one million times?
You have been able to buy mutual funds in dollar increments for like forever, with the significant caveat that there's often a minimum purchase amount, but once you hold that you can add in single dollars if you want +/- they only deal in a certain number of decimals.
Fractional share trading of stocks and ETFs happens at a lot of brokers for the past several years, too. Do they really want you to buy $1 of BRK.A? probably not, but you probably can.
Also, there's like penny stocks. :P
But yeah, there's no mechanism for that $1 to turn into millions of dollars within a few days. It can happen with a very well timed purchase, many decades, and some inflation, but that's not very exciting.
Expected return on a total market fund is 9 to 10% annually.
Expected return on a lottery ticket is 30 to 50 cents on the dollar.
Just like AI p(Doom) in the next decade is approximately zero, but we all have to pretend to it's between 1 and 10% so American frontier labs can implement regulatory capture.
So if what you're saying is you are willing to bet $1 if I give you a 1 in 1 billion chance of winning $1M, I will take that bet. And I will take that bet as many times as you'd like.
But your best chance of winning $1M? Start with $10M.
I frequently get DraftKings ad on YouTube featuring Kevin Hart and Nick Jonas, they're pushing the information that it is now legal in every state.
I also get loads Polymarket and Kalshi ads. Polymarket seems to have invested tons into featuring mega celebs like LeBron in one of their ads. Other ads feature influencers showing off how to trade and such. More obnoxious part is that these companies pay influencers to talk about trading and winning live on streams- without disclosing they're paying those influencers.
Polymarket even set up fake website where influencers showed they were winning hundreds of thousands of dollars. You wouldn't find those bets on the real Polymarket website.
Except online poker (here in the states)! Gotta keep that one prohibited. Now, betting on every freethrow Joe BBall takes in a game ... we're morally good there. It's those pesky immoral cards we have a problem with!
meanwhile, free-to-play gaming's business model is to speedrun through the population via ads to find the most mentally unwell or underdeveloped people with access to credit cards or at least grandmothers who will buy them gift cards
Some betting company made a partnership with my area's public bus system to put their ads on the side of the bus. There is no recourse for this, it seems, and this explosion of gambling ads is only going to get worse.
What do you expect? They thrive on addicts. No different than NYSE:META, and NYSE:RDDT, and NYSE:BUD and NYSE:TAP and NYSE:(fill in whatever proven-to-be-addicting product you want)
And this is the sort of use of AI that ought to be regulated. But it's not as exciting as an AI going foom and cleansing the planet of the scientifically illiterate so it doesn't get traction.
Why regulate the AI bit instead of the behavior itself? If you don’t want people to exploit addiction, then outlaw that, rather than saying you just can’t use AI to exploit addictions.
They'll always do this. It's not even "AI" it's just a boring old ML model.
Money Stuff did a great bit on this a few days ago. There's 2 functions inside DraftKings:
- Fin the most lucrative customers, to keep engaging them.
- Finds addicted gamblers, to get them help to quit gambling.
These are the same people.
Sure, yeah, there's a nice little story about gambling within your means, blah blah. But if you're optimizing your gambling app, you're going to find and create problematic gambling as the core objective.
AI, ML, whatever. It's a gambling company. It targets gamblers. It probably shouldn't exist.
Michael Lewis did a similar series for one of the seasons of his podcast.
What amazed me was that Chris Christie (then governor of NJ) used state money to fund SIX consecutive lawsuits trying to get online gambling legalized in New Jersey.
This should come as no surprise to anybody. They have every incentive to exploit those who can't resist their offering. Gambling is the new tobacco industry.
Online dating apps do the same exact thing. When you try to disengage they spam you with notifications and emails saying a bunch of people want to talk to you.
You actually login or god forbid pay for a subscription, all of your matches are disabled bot accounts. I actually have a theory that daiting apps are responsible for a significant portion if not most of those bots.
I’m actually more willing to work on a gambling or prediction product vs a dating app.
Another perfect example of why we don't need new laws, we "simply" need to enforce them. Supposedly, Dark Patterns are illegal. If the corporation had to tell you how they use your data, would you let them?
DraftKings: Hi we're going to give you extra incentives!
User: Hmm, sounds like I might like that. How do I get them?
DraftKings: You have to lose constantly! And then when you start winning, we take them away! You like that, don't you?
User: No.
Dark Pattern. No new rules needed. "Just" enforcement.
I would be surprised if this was not already systemic and endemic across the retail space preying on people who have compulsive spending, gambling issues.
Really this is the entire economy now, giant companies that have billions invested in mass surveillance and heavily min-maxed dark patterns targeting the wallet of the average unsuspecting consumer. Nonsense subscriptions that are impossible to cancel, replacing ownership with "license", customized pricing, endless advertising, zero customer service, shrinkwrap licenses that change daily, etc etc etc.
If you are vetting a romantic partner or a business partner, I would strongly urge you to check their phone. If they have DraftKings or FanDuel installed... run. Some might even say they lose some but it's for entertainment. I'd still trust them less than a social heroin user.
You will find a lot of people who will tell you they win at these things. They don't. How do I know this? Because if you win consistently, they kick you off. You're bad for business because the pigeons need to win occasionally to keep playing (and losing).
Gambling (and I include Kalshi and Polymarket here) shouldn't be this accessible. Back when you had to go to a casino, it was still bad but that barrier prevented a lot of harm. Being able to gamble away your future and your family's future from the comfort of your phone simply shouldn't be allowed.
Why wouldn't they? We have no consumer protections so this type of thing is happening everywhere all the time on every level of society.
People with personality disorders, depression, anxiety, etc. all algorithmically being plied for attention. It's disgusting and nobody is doing anything about it, which will eventually erode buy-in in the system until someone is willing to let it all go without an adversary even firing a shot.
ProPublica had one of their reports work with gambling addition experts to see how DraftKings would respond to someone presenting signs of a gambling problem. It's a hell of a read, and makes it clear that this company is full of people with absolutely no ethics whatsoever.
https://www.propublica.org/article/draftkings-sports-gamblin...
People in companies that are a negative public good are by definition unethical. I'm not surprised by anything they do. The real problem is how we've let these companies infiltrate so much of our society so fast. I can't consume any ad supported media without getting some ad about them. This company really defines the phrase "money talks"
> this company is full of people with absolutely no ethics whatsoever
I believe this applies to any company which sells an inherently harmful, predatory, and addictive product or service
Yes. Gambling goes a long way. I just recommended Natasha Dow Schüll and Addiction by Design.
That leads us to BJ Fogg's Persuasive Design Lab at Stanford and the addictive software design.
Tobacco industry owners figured out their time's out and bought food stock and put their addiction department to design food to be addictive.
Where should we head next?
Revolution.
Obviously “AI”
Hope you're including all the state governments and their lotteries in this assessment.
The incentives driving state lotteries are not nearly as strong as those driving private companies like Draft Kings but yeah not great either.
Used to work at 7-Eleven and we would have people come in and out for hours on end pouring money into scratch tickets.
State lotteries are just a regressive tax targeting the poor.
> State lotteries are just a regressive tax targeting the poor.
As bad the odds are, the lottery is still the best chance most players will ever have to be millionaires
At least those often fund things like state education so, over time, the pool of victims is maybe lessened by the success of the program? Maybe?
(I am not defending state lotteries, but I do think there's some distinction to be made between "we actively exploit people to maximize our profits for our own sakes" and "we regulate the passive exploitation of people to supplement taxes in a regressive manner." Or something. I dunno, maybe somebody has more elaborate thoughts on this to share.)
In many places where gambling is banned, there is still gambling. And in places where it's legalized, it can (in theory) be effectively regulated (if there's political will, which is difficult to muster sometimes). And say what you will about lotteries, but it's far easier to blow your life savings at casinos and with sports betting than buying a bunch of lottery tickets.
Permit lotteries. Ban lottery advertising. A moral government shouldn't advertise products known to be harmful to the public.
Sports betting apps are so “gamified” now that many people don’t stand a chance. They’ve made a bleeding edge addiction platform
See nature preserves that are funded by regulated big game hunting of the preserved nature.
It's a fun moral question. At what point do you give up trying to make someone/a population healthier and say "well if you're going to be this way, we might as well get some use out of you"?
And the legal option makes it less likely that organized crime will jump in to offer the service.
(To me, it seems) The same people who screamed to legalize weed a few years ago are vehemently against alcohol and gambling.
"we regulate the passive exploitation of people to supplement taxes in a regressive manner."
I was convinced by this for a full 30 seconds before I realized there are millions of advertisements for the state lotteries. They aren't just regulating a market that will exist with or without the state, they are actively promoting and encouraging it
> At least those often fund things like state education so, over time, the pool of victims is maybe lessened by the success of the program? Maybe?
You have some numbers to check.
(“Elaborate thoughts” aren’t needed here - are more people spending less on the lottery? where does each state spend the money?)
I've got plenty of negative things to say about state government lotteries, but the ones I'm familiar with are structured in less predatory ways. It's hard to spend thousands of dollars on lottery tickets, and impossible to do so in a way that won't feel obviously stupid, especially since you can't buy them on your phone.
especially since you can't buy them on your phone
Yet
It isn't inherently addictive. Gambling addiction is significantly less common than alcohol addiction, and has no properties that make it inherently addictive to someone who is not predisposed towards that addiction (unlike drugs, for example, which are inherently addictive to all humans).
Some slot machines/casino games are designed to appeal to problem gamblers. DK and co, however, do not design these games, and state regulators do already control aspects of their design. For online operators, this doesn't represent most of their revenue and, I suspect, most would be quite happy not to provide these products.
I've seen this "it only affects problem gamblers" thing so much that I suspect it's an intentional strategy to shift blame that takes advantage of people's natural tendency to believe the just world fallacy (bad things only happen to bad people).
Gambling is absolutely inherently addictive as it's essentially perfectly paired with your brains reward system and hijacks it. There's literally dopamine cycle and tolerance happening. And when compounded by algorithms and notifications which are designed to amplify this even further I'm not sure how you can think it's not inherently addictive.
> unlike drugs, for example, which are inherently addictive to all humans
Define "drugs". Alcohol is a drug. Most users aren't addicts. So is tobacco. Most users are addicts. Cannabis? More like alcohol than tobacco in terms of addictiveness.
There may be some selection bias. Smoking tobacco is an unpleasant sensation. There's no reason to do it other than the addiction and the effects on your brain chemistry afterwards. Whereas many alcoholic drinks taste great in their own right and would be consumed even if they had no chemical effects.
I suspect gambling is like alcohol or cannabis. Engaging in it affects brain chemistry. For some people that's addictive. Most people are able to enjoy the activity without being hooked.
>Smoking tobacco is an unpleasant sensation.
I disagree but maybe I’m just addicted.
There’s no “maybe” about it.
As a former smoker (I started and quit twice), I strongly disagree that "Smoking tobacco is an unpleasant sensation."
It's terrible for your health, it's "burning money", it literally makes you stink, it makes you winded walking up stairs, and is generally terrible.
But the little head rush you get starting the day with a coffee and a cigarette feels great.
> But the little head rush you get starting the day with a coffee and a cigarette feels great.
That's the effect on brain chemistry I referred to.
Do you actually enjoy the smoke in your mouth, burning your eyes and lungs?
A cold beer on a hot day is refreshing just for its temperature alone. A fruity cocktail tastes good because sugar tastes good. What's enjoyable about the physical sensations produced by smoke?
I mean maybe we're arguing semantics, because the pleasure of eating sugar is possibly also an alteration of brain chemistry. But there is a difference.
The real number we want evaluate is "what percent of the revenue comes from people experiencing significant negative consequences from the product."
For alcohol that number is something like 2/3 revenue from the top 10% of drinkers, who drink an order of magnitude more than the decile below them. I doubt gambling is very different but if you have more info I'm happy to hear it.
IMHO one shouldn't expect a company to have any ethics to achieve a positive outcome for society. This needs to be baked into the rules (taxes, regulation, ...), so the ethical behavior becomes the rational behavior.
You can't have rules in a society, that are against the moral feeling of sizable chunk of the population. That's just going to be a source for conflict. At some point you do need a population with a moral compass or you get nowhere as a ruler, especially in participatory ruling systems like a democracy.
I think we should be able to expect a company to have ethics, just like we should be able to expect them to follow the laws, but we should also regulate them to ensure that they do and punish them meaningfully when they fail to.
> we should also regulate them to ensure that they do and punish them meaningfully when they fail to
Fully agree, that's what I mean.
companies are a fiction made out of people, they don't have anything, and regardless what the rules are I expect those people to behave ethically at any given time.
I'm not entirely sure when people started to have this idea that when they walk through a company door, as if this is some magical portal into the realm of amorality, give up their human responsibilities and faculties
> I expect those people to behave ethically at any given time.
A company is set up and incentivised to maximize a profit function, and that in turn incentivises to promote people which are not impeded by ethical considerations. The hierarchy furthermore ensures that people which would otherwise act ethical, don't, for fear of losing their job. This structure behaves ethical as long as you put ethics in the profit function.
"I'm not entirely sure when people started to have this idea that when they walk through a company door, as if this is some magical portal into the realm of amorality, give up their human responsibilities and faculties"
how can you became this naive ???? this is literally a company that get profit when you a lose
for their ethics, its inline with company mission
This is not a naive take. He doesn't say there can't be bad people/companies, he says the ethics of a company are the ethics of their constituents.
Would love to be a fly on the wall in whatever board room in the world has somebody saying “yes, we could increase profits by doing X, but that would be unethical so of course we won’t”
This happens at every gambling company in regulated markets like the US or Europe.
For comparison, there are offline casinos who use targeted adverts saying that they do not comply with regulators, and their adverts are designed in such a way as to appeal to people with gambling addiction (usually showing some kind of live play, which is banned in every regulated market afaik).
You can be sceptical of the motives of individuals but there are very strong corporate incentives from state regulators (in the US, particularly those with physical casinos).
> This happens at every gambling company in regulated markets like the US or Europe.
No something clearly different happens in regulated markets. There's a massive difference between "This would make us more money, but we won't do that because it's unethical" and "I wish we could get away with doing this unethical thing to make more money, but sadly current regulations make this one unprofitable for now. Lets increase our lobbying spend to try to fix that."
What usually happens is they talk about statistics rather than demographics. Eg “when doing x we’ve seen a 5% rise in engagement but a 50% rise in spend from those engaged”
Nobody is actually blind to the reality of the stats but this kind approach makes it both easier to dehumanise their actions as well as giving them plausible deniability when asked if they target specific demographics such as addicts.
I worked for the "gaming" (as they call themselves) industry.
They seem to have not gotten the memo that they're a legitimate business now.
Meaning that, should they get the memo, they’d change their behaviour to that of a legitimate business? Not being combative here, just not sure I follow what you’re saying.
fork found in kitchen
I mean what do we expect ???? "the house" is playing fair ????
we literally have mobile game that have "gacha" which is full blown gamble and we pretend that the actual "online casino" is to play moral, ethics or fairness ??
we literally past that point ages ago
Not just mobile games. Roblox is basically an online child casino, powered by child laborers being compensated in Robux scrip. Fortnite isn't much better. We'd do a lot of good by regulating these games better too. The gambling addicts who got hooked with these games will move on to DraftKings when they're older. DraftKings knows this is their pipeline and has been investing in esports and video games like Call of Duty and establishing partnerships with Riot Games and Activision Blizzard.
“Let the passed be past” is ironically sage.
You and the people who downvote me literally miss an entire point
What is your point? Bad thing happened in the past, we should continue to let bad thing happen?
Most people find current system of gambling from phone to be too much. Forcing people to physical location and limiting advertising can be good harm reduction without causing increase in crime.
"presenting signs"...there is no way for DK to tell that someone is addicted, which is the same error of logic in the original article.
There are multiple companies that will take your money and data and say they have found a way of identifying gamblers, afaik none of these products actually or can work.
What that article showed is: someone uses a product, they do not activate any features to use the product safely, and then they it is unsafe. DK have safety features integrated with governments already in the product.
If there's no way to distinguish, why was the author "made a VIP"? Or does that happen to every gambler
Again, the same mistake.
Yes, it happens to every gambler who spends a lot of money. That is how VIP tiers are defined, based on how much you spend. There is no way for them (or anyone) to understand the customer's state of mind. Should it be illegal for retailers to offer customers discounts? Compulsive shopping is significantly more common than gambling addiction, do retailers target those customers?
If you never want to gamble, you tell the state regulator you never want to gamble and you will be unable to use any site.
I would be genuinely surprised if they weren't.
My data science graduate program had a class that analyzed major data science success stories. The very first one covered how Caesar's Entertainment built models and ran experiments to identify their "most valuable customers", figure out how to predict when they were getting ready to leave the casino, and intervene with incentives and perks designed to get them to stay and keep gambling. And also how all of their competitors rushed to implement their own programs in response.
Look at it from the casino's perspective: their entire business model is centered on exploiting quirks of human psychology to separate people from their money. Expecting prosocial behavior from them is like expecting a squirrel to ignore your bird feeders.
The EFF isn't saying it's a surprise that companies are doing this. Nobody's surprised by that. They're drawing attention to it and saying they shouldn't be allowed to.
I like how you have to be an accredited investor to get involved with riskier investment instruments but you can be a total moron with no money and lose whatever you have left betting on sports and prediction markets.
Btw it’s not just those two, add iGaming into the mix which is cell phone gambling glammed up in Candy Crush form. Leeches, all of them.
I believe there are "casino games" on Apple and Android stores that are similar to actual gambling, you just buy "tokens" that can never be redeemed for cash.
Proof if proof needed of the complete pointlessness of casino gambling. Some people will still do it even when they know they can't win anything.
Have you ever heard of gacha? This is the entire shtick as I understand it
To be fair, those "investor knowledge" checks are self-reported knowledge.
Some brokerages are more strict, but plenty just let you check boxes.
"In the United States, to be considered an accredited investor, a natural person must have a net worth of at least $1,000,000, excluding the value of one's primary residence, or have income at least $200,000 each year for the last two years (or $300,000 combined income if married) and have the expectation to make the same amount this year, or must otherwise be a holder of a specific license in good standing."
Of course you can still lie but legally there is a line.
The accredited investor standard is higher then a basic test.
The standard may be higher, but the implementation is "This is what it means to be accredited: are you accredited? By the way if you say no, I can't sell you the thing I've been trying to convince you to buy."
If you had to take and pass a test, that might filter out more people; although I'm sure the seller would help you pass the test, so maybe not.
GP didn't say test. They said "self-reported knowledge [about yourself]". Which is correct.
Legalizing sports betting and online gambling was such a massive mistake. They are sleazy immoral industries that profit on suffering.
Legalizing targeted advertising was a massive mistake too.
In my lifetime I've witnessed America accept new revenue sources by relaxing the moral code. First, it was allowing businesses to be open on Sunday. Then it was allowing liquor sales on Sunday. Then it was liquor ads on television. Then it was very controlled, state-run gambling (the lottery). Then it was casino gambling. Now it's online gambling and 'prediction markets'. Then it was recreational marijuana use. And so on. My point of reference is Missouri, where I grew up, but I think most states have followed a pretty similar path, all in search of new sources of revenue. I predict this trend will continue all the way to prostitution. Yes, that sounds crazy, but if you would've told me in the early-80s that Missouri would have casinos and legal weed, I would've considered that crazy.
Capital constantly needs new frontiers to exploit, and therefore must remove moral and social obstacles that stand in its way. Pseudo-prostitution has already been made widespread via platforms like OnlyFans, it's only a matter of time before in-the-flesh prostitution follows, as you said.
It's curious to me that so many progressives or soi-disant leftists are in favor of dissolving these types of moral and social traditions while being fervently anti-capitalist. It seems that they (meaning the subset who are always looking for new fenceposts to tear down) are in fact the shock troops of Capital.
You know prositution is already legal in certain counties in Nevada, and it's been that way since '71?
The list is far longer than you've mentioned.
Here's a list of things you're allowed to profit on either as an investor or as a participant that are quite wild: Fighting with gloves (more lethal than bare-knuckle), bare-knuckle fights, kids in contact sports (even combat sports), throwing away perfectly good food in order to lower taxable income, not planting a crop specifically because it wouldn't make enough profit, gig-economy not paying living wages, a minimum wage below living wage, predatory lending, algorithmic social media that swings elections, targetted advertisement psyops, marketing to children, cosmetic surgery in general but especially for children, forced conversion 'therapy', experimental life saving treatments gate-kept by money, planned obsolescence, plastic packaging...
In combat sports, we're really not too far removed from the collisuem, just that it's "not meant to be to the death" even though it does often result in death or lifelong conditions. The fighters get paid, the organizers get paid, the arena gets paid, the advertisers get paid...All in the name of watching someone not quite kill someone.
Hell, we've even still got slavery tucked neatly away behind "Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States.", but we know that many sitting in prison are demonstrably innocent. The prison is allowed to require that every inmate works. You're allowed to run an organization that profits from these slaves. You are not legally required to pay in some states.
I think legalizing cannabis was more about not jailing people for consuming a plant.
It's hard to respect a legal system that jails someone who wasn't hurting anyone. Repealing a law that criminalizes victimless behavior, especially when so many people already break it, paradoxically increases respect for other laws. It reinforces that the law serves a purpose: protecting people and promoting the general welfare.
Sorry but Sunday blue laws are religious discrimination. It’s just a day and businesses shouldn’t be restricted by a single religious sect. Gambling and substance abuse are actual public health issues.
In general, there is a bigger philosophical question.
Do we treat humans as
1) having full agency, and thus full responsibility for their actions
2) having less than full agency, and then to what extent must society/governments implement control over things that humans can't control within themselves
Because generally, if you subscribe to 1, there is nothing immortal from taking money from a human that that wants to hand it over, provided that human well knows what is at stake. So as long as these websites aren't defrauding the customers with fake stats, there really is nothing wrong.
If you subscribe to 2, then thats a much riskier line to walk because that affects a lot of things, not just gambling.
> So as long as these websites aren't defrauding the customers with fake stats, there really is nothing wrong.
This is a moral stance that not everyone agrees with.
We didn’t legalize it. These people are criminals.
At least where I live it is explicitly permitted as long as you get government authorization: https://igb.illinois.gov/sports-wagering/sports-authorized-o...
Somebody said (I think it was FrostPrime) roughly: Gambling is genuinely the scariest drug, I actually think it's worse than cocaine and it's just right there on your phone.
I think that really framed the issue well to me. Imagine having an addiction problem and having to carry the problem substance around with you 24/7.
> Gambling is genuinely the scariest drug
Every personality has something, it seems, that it tends to get addicted to if given the chance. Gambling has never been that to me. I get bored with most of the games and upset at losing money—even if I net win, I’m irritated about the incremental losses.
On the other hand, I have to manually keep track of how many days in a month I drink because if I don’t I’ll happily have half a bottle of wine every evening, and I think I know where that leads. (When I lose money in a casino I almost always translate that into a nice dinner. Which I will, invariably, enjoy far more than winning imaginary numbers.)
> and upset at losing money—even if I net win, I’m irritated about the incremental losses.
While you don't appear to be susceptible, it is notable that this mindset is not something that makes you less likely to develop a gambling problem. It's actually part of how they drive addiction. A customer who is annoyed at every loss is often a customer who will chase their losses with more/bigger bets, trying to get the winning high back.
Imagine having a gambling addiction and trying to watch sports! I swear every third commercial is for gambling.
I don't think there is nearly enough attention on the pipeline that has been created for children to grow into good little gamblers. All major sports games have absolute borderline gambling within their game in the form of those fantasy style Card games. Pair that with watching any live broadcast of a major sport and the gross ads for all these major sports better companies, with the ad reads during the game.
Haven't followed all that closely for some other games, but it very much seems like the model for NBA2k is to release a new game with some minor patches each year, charge 70$, then spend the majority of that year crafting patches for the card game to keep whales interested in constantly spending on new packs(which are promptly devalued on the next release, and straight up killing the prior year's game's online service, makes them entirely worthless the next year).
It’s really disturbing to me because sports are one category of entertainment that is supposed to be family friendly and accessible to kids. They look up to pro athletes as heroes and all the gambling ads are directly being shown to children. It shouldn’t be legal to advertise age restricted products and services to kids, even if they’re not the “intended” target. They’re still being groomed to accept gambling as cool and normal. Gambling, alcohol, all those ads should be subject to the same safe harbor restrictions as sexual content. Ban the ads from stadiums and jerseys too.
I don't watch sports much, but the last times I did they filled the screen with ads for gambling in the middle of the games while they were being played
and also blasted into your face at any opportune moment (TV, billboards, print media, in person conversations)
“Gambling company leans into its target demographic”
I worked with a state lottery that did similar things. Their target demographic was the “every day players” that would compulsively buy at the gas station.
I quit that job because it seems to be morally wrong.
Betting apps are just this taken to the extreme, I feel for people with this addiction but it’s not going away anytime soon.
I worked with a state lottery as well. They had very clear training for the retailers they worked with to identify and stop problem gambling. There was space reserved in ever ad and on every retailer counter for stop gambling assistance. The few meetings I attended all began with what they had done to reduce problem gambling.
So I'm guessing this varies state by state.
It's hard for me to view that as anything other than mostly for show.
The retailers still have every incentive to sell as many lottery tickets as people will buy, because that's how they make a sizable portion of their money.
And the gambling addiction hotlines are too little too late. I've known people who struggled with gambling. They never admitted they had a problem until they had bottomed out. At that point I doubt the lotteries and casinos particularly care because that well's already run dry, anyway.
If the gaming industry really wanted to put their money where their mouth is on this one, they'd figure out ways to prevent people from getting into that situation in the first place. Putting limits on how much money anyone person can lose, even if only at a single establishment, is one idea that wouldn't even be hard to implement. But of course we won't see that because, unlike gambling addiction hotlines, that runs the risk of reducing their profits.
I worked with a heroin distributor as well. They had very clear training for the dealers they worked with to identify and stop problem heroin use. There was space reserved in every text and on every dealer’s coffee table for stop heroin assistance.
Not equating your work for a lottery with dealing heroin, I’m just pointing out that to say you don’t want people addicted to heroin while still selling heroin isn’t sufficient, and I think the same applies to lotteries. If they acknowledge the problem stop even offering it as a product.
The difference is that the regulator controls your licence to operate. So if you do something that fails to meet the guidelines they create for responsible gaming then they take away your licence.
Acknowledging the problem doesn't make it go away: you must be a big war on drugs guy? right?
Imagine having a "stop gambling assistance" section of your fking AD to promote gambling to people
> I worked with a state lottery that did similar things. Their target demographic was the “every day players”
That's wild. Wasn't the whole point of having a state lottery to put the state in a better position to be able to discourage people from becoming addicted? The very idea of a "target demographic" seems contrary to that goal; the "target" should be to have nobody buying tickets.
> Betting apps are just this taken to the extreme, I feel for people with this addiction but it’s not going away anytime soon.
Why? This wasn't a thing that existed 10-15 years ago, this isn't some long-standing institution. We could ban online betting apps today if we wanted to.
When widespread sports gambling was illegal before, there were not rich and powerful people whose ability to maintain and grow their wealth and power was tied to keeping sports gambling legal.
Now those rich and powerful people exist, and they will use their wealth and power to keep it legal. It is not easy to put the genie back into the bottle.
Sports gambling definitely existed 10-15 years ago. And it's hard to ban things on the internet with cryptocurrency being a thing.
It's pretty wild that we let it be advertised and boggles my mind that pro leagues jumped on the train.
> “Gambling company leans into its target demographic”
This was my takeaway as well. Is anyone surprised at this outcome?
Ban state lotteries while we're banning DraftKings IMO. I find I cannot have a productive conversation with anyone who thinks the odds of winning the lottery are higher than winning in the stock market buying total market funds.
Ah... Got it... The same galaxy brains that think p(foom) has a materially greater value than an epsilon minimally >0 to avoid divide by zero errors believe in lottery tickets. Got it. Explains a lot, thanks...
"poor tax" framed by the state to help fund things education.
It would be fairer if the state returned the money to taxpayers and funded education out of the general fund.
And yet somehow education still doesn't seem to have enough funding, despite the lotteries raking in cash.
Education has plenty of funding. Per pupil K-12 spending has grown relentlessly higher than inflation for decades.
Well, aren't they though, technically?
Your $1 lottery coupon has extremely low chances of winning a million dollars, but they aren't zero. No one will sell you any stocks for $1, but even if they did what is a chance of a random $1 stock increasing in value one million times?
> No one will sell you any stocks for $1,
You have been able to buy mutual funds in dollar increments for like forever, with the significant caveat that there's often a minimum purchase amount, but once you hold that you can add in single dollars if you want +/- they only deal in a certain number of decimals.
Fractional share trading of stocks and ETFs happens at a lot of brokers for the past several years, too. Do they really want you to buy $1 of BRK.A? probably not, but you probably can.
Also, there's like penny stocks. :P
But yeah, there's no mechanism for that $1 to turn into millions of dollars within a few days. It can happen with a very well timed purchase, many decades, and some inflation, but that's not very exciting.
Expected return on a total market fund is 9 to 10% annually. Expected return on a lottery ticket is 30 to 50 cents on the dollar.
Just like AI p(Doom) in the next decade is approximately zero, but we all have to pretend to it's between 1 and 10% so American frontier labs can implement regulatory capture.
So if what you're saying is you are willing to bet $1 if I give you a 1 in 1 billion chance of winning $1M, I will take that bet. And I will take that bet as many times as you'd like.
But your best chance of winning $1M? Start with $10M.
I frequently get DraftKings ad on YouTube featuring Kevin Hart and Nick Jonas, they're pushing the information that it is now legal in every state.
I also get loads Polymarket and Kalshi ads. Polymarket seems to have invested tons into featuring mega celebs like LeBron in one of their ads. Other ads feature influencers showing off how to trade and such. More obnoxious part is that these companies pay influencers to talk about trading and winning live on streams- without disclosing they're paying those influencers.
Polymarket even set up fake website where influencers showed they were winning hundreds of thousands of dollars. You wouldn't find those bets on the real Polymarket website.
We do seem to be in a “everything is allowed” era
> We do seem to be in a “everything is allowed” era
Except when it comes to protesting certain things.
Except online poker (here in the states)! Gotta keep that one prohibited. Now, betting on every freethrow Joe BBall takes in a game ... we're morally good there. It's those pesky immoral cards we have a problem with!
Elections have consequences
They actually don't. That's the problem.
https://prospect.org/2026/07/07/economic-hit-men-for-gamblin...
meanwhile, free-to-play gaming's business model is to speedrun through the population via ads to find the most mentally unwell or underdeveloped people with access to credit cards or at least grandmothers who will buy them gift cards
Some betting company made a partnership with my area's public bus system to put their ads on the side of the bus. There is no recourse for this, it seems, and this explosion of gambling ads is only going to get worse.
What do you expect? They thrive on addicts. No different than NYSE:META, and NYSE:RDDT, and NYSE:BUD and NYSE:TAP and NYSE:(fill in whatever proven-to-be-addicting product you want)
And this is the sort of use of AI that ought to be regulated. But it's not as exciting as an AI going foom and cleansing the planet of the scientifically illiterate so it doesn't get traction.
Why regulate the AI bit instead of the behavior itself? If you don’t want people to exploit addiction, then outlaw that, rather than saying you just can’t use AI to exploit addictions.
How do you frame that to rein in Meta and Google? That would be a good start.
Physical casinos sell to their whales, they’re what keeps them in business. Digital casinos sell to their whales, they’re what keeps them in business.
Casinos are a for profit business. If we don’t want them pursuing the path of least resistance we need regulation and enforcement.
They'll always do this. It's not even "AI" it's just a boring old ML model.
Money Stuff did a great bit on this a few days ago. There's 2 functions inside DraftKings:
- Fin the most lucrative customers, to keep engaging them.
- Finds addicted gamblers, to get them help to quit gambling.
These are the same people.
Sure, yeah, there's a nice little story about gambling within your means, blah blah. But if you're optimizing your gambling app, you're going to find and create problematic gambling as the core objective.
AI, ML, whatever. It's a gambling company. It targets gamblers. It probably shouldn't exist.
Michael Lewis did a similar series for one of the seasons of his podcast.
What amazed me was that Chris Christie (then governor of NJ) used state money to fund SIX consecutive lawsuits trying to get online gambling legalized in New Jersey.
This should come as no surprise to anybody. They have every incentive to exploit those who can't resist their offering. Gambling is the new tobacco industry.
> This should come as no surprise
We need a better way of responding to journalism evidencing what was previously suspected and accepted.
Hooray capitalism!
Online dating apps do the same exact thing. When you try to disengage they spam you with notifications and emails saying a bunch of people want to talk to you.
You actually login or god forbid pay for a subscription, all of your matches are disabled bot accounts. I actually have a theory that daiting apps are responsible for a significant portion if not most of those bots.
I’m actually more willing to work on a gambling or prediction product vs a dating app.
At least everyone knows gambling is a scam.
Distill it down even further: everything online that promises any kind of reward is a scam.
Why only online?
Another perfect example of why we don't need new laws, we "simply" need to enforce them. Supposedly, Dark Patterns are illegal. If the corporation had to tell you how they use your data, would you let them?
DraftKings: Hi we're going to give you extra incentives! User: Hmm, sounds like I might like that. How do I get them? DraftKings: You have to lose constantly! And then when you start winning, we take them away! You like that, don't you? User: No.
Dark Pattern. No new rules needed. "Just" enforcement.
Ban this shit. Fuck anyone who works at these companies.
We will soon look back at these companies like we did the pharma companies that created the opioid crisis in America.
And by that I mean almost no one in charge will be held responsible.
Then there's me, using my AI tools to build a Fantasy Football lineup tool. Did pretty good last week!
Cool, but you're not running people's finances at scale. It does not compare.
I would be surprised if this was not already systemic and endemic across the retail space preying on people who have compulsive spending, gambling issues.
Really this is the entire economy now, giant companies that have billions invested in mass surveillance and heavily min-maxed dark patterns targeting the wallet of the average unsuspecting consumer. Nonsense subscriptions that are impossible to cancel, replacing ownership with "license", customized pricing, endless advertising, zero customer service, shrinkwrap licenses that change daily, etc etc etc.
"You show me the incentives and I'll show you the outcome"
Back in my day this was called machine learning.
If you are vetting a romantic partner or a business partner, I would strongly urge you to check their phone. If they have DraftKings or FanDuel installed... run. Some might even say they lose some but it's for entertainment. I'd still trust them less than a social heroin user.
You will find a lot of people who will tell you they win at these things. They don't. How do I know this? Because if you win consistently, they kick you off. You're bad for business because the pigeons need to win occasionally to keep playing (and losing).
Gambling (and I include Kalshi and Polymarket here) shouldn't be this accessible. Back when you had to go to a casino, it was still bad but that barrier prevented a lot of harm. Being able to gamble away your future and your family's future from the comfort of your phone simply shouldn't be allowed.
Prevously on source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49765288
Why wouldn't they? We have no consumer protections so this type of thing is happening everywhere all the time on every level of society.
People with personality disorders, depression, anxiety, etc. all algorithmically being plied for attention. It's disgusting and nobody is doing anything about it, which will eventually erode buy-in in the system until someone is willing to let it all go without an adversary even firing a shot.
Passive income? I need massive income.
Anybody seen those billboards? It’s disgusting.
I'm shocked. Shocked!