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Prediction markets are ushering in a world in which news becomes about gambling

theatlantic.com

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Re: Prediction markets are ushering in a world in which news becomes about gambling

#291
I've seen a lot of weird stuff out of this. People now get angry about things they didn't get angry about before, or get angry with people/players where that didn't exist before.

If you're just someone playing a game of Chess, and someone decides to bet on you via some platform, and then you lose, you now face the fury of random strangers where none existed before.

This applies to all sorts of things. I've seen live streamers get bad treatment because people bet on some outcome on their streams, like innocent Track of the Day races in Trackmania; not even a commercial event.

This sort of thing will suck the fun out of literally everything, and then replace that fun with stress/anxiety/anger/frustration when outcomes aren't met, and when they are met, dangerous monetary/emotional/brain-chemical feedback.

Even disregarding the dangers of gaming the system with insider trading or other fraud, the way that everything is increasingly having a monetary value attached to it is destroying that thing just being itself.

I really, really hate how money corrupts literally everything. In part I think the current financial fuck-ups causing living expenses to be unsustainable leads many to find other ways to make some money, but people have always done this even when times were better. So I guess it's somehow human nature combined with greed and opportunity.

Other things like Pokemon cards are also increasingly about money and not at all about Pokemon itself anymore. People buy packs of cards, look for the high-value ones, then throw the rest out. It's fucked.

I don't really know where this is going but the Cyberpunk 2077 feels like a good predictor. Literal corpo hellscape, and much of it is self-induced by grubbing for the next buck at every innocent opportunity.

Similar to the VC/investment landscape. Take a good product/company, add some VC/investment, and now the incentives are aimed at satisfying shareholders over providing value to customers.

Re: Prediction markets are ushering in a world in which news becomes about gambling

#292
post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The gamblification of everything is just another stepping stone on the path to the financialization of everything. Many of our best and brightest dedicate their lives to “financial innovation”. It’s sad.

Gamblification is very, very different from financialization.

A financialization example: Somehow some company's stock became the go-to for investors that had continuous expectations just for the stock, and not about actual company health. And the company chose to prop up the stock quarter per quarter, instead of investing in long term development, until it crashed.

This is somewhat similar to dangers of gamblification I guess. Where the expectations of the investors (gamblers) start shaping the decisions of the professional management of the company.

Re: Prediction markets are ushering in a world in which news becomes about gambling

#293
Its just gambling, for the stupid to loose there money, for the rich to have a little bit of fun, for the smart ones to take it from others while having some way of moral excuse to justify it.

The stock market at least gives you ownership/partial of a real thing.

The depressing thing is, when you see all these cliches in real: Go to some casino and you will see the guy having a coke nail talking gambling garbage like 'were is the bank teller? My luck is coming back' :(

Re: Prediction markets are ushering in a world in which news becomes about gambling

#294

The gamblification of the country will go down as one of the darker chapters of USA.

Still a good chance that something will happen in these four years that makes the gambling crisis look completely trivial. I suppose I should bet on that, or would it be in poor taste?

Many, many years ago the libertarians had something they called "assassination politics", in which it was pointed out that the ability to bet on the death of famous figures also created an "untraceable" way to funnel money to someone who could make that event happen.

Re: Prediction markets are ushering in a world in which news becomes about gambling

#295

Not just America, everything is. With stock market, at least we can somehow stop the bad actors, insider traders, corporate manipulation, pumps and dumps - with prediction markets, there is no way. With prediction markets? Next to impossible. The markets being tied to crypto makes it even worse - things get harder to track, jurisdictions get blurry, proving becomes a ping pong between bureaucracy. And proving somethi…

Stock market integrity is important because of their function in the economy. Scamming of gambling addicts is tragic but not detrimental to society.

Depends on how many of those gambling addicts there are.

If a huge enough portion of the population try to solve the statue quo of their economic problems by betting all on red, that's not gonna be great for society, including those who don't gamble.

Re: Prediction markets are ushering in a world in which news becomes about gambling

#296

Not just America, everything is. With stock market, at least we can somehow stop the bad actors, insider traders, corporate manipulation, pumps and dumps - with prediction markets, there is no way. With prediction markets? Next to impossible. The markets being tied to crypto makes it even worse - things get harder to track, jurisdictions get blurry, proving becomes a ping pong between bureaucracy. And proving somethi…

Stock market integrity is important because of their function in the economy. Scamming of gambling addicts is tragic but not detrimental to society.

>Scamming of gambling addicts is tragic but not detrimental to society.

It certainly is at scale.

Re: Prediction markets are ushering in a world in which news becomes about gambling

#298

I am broadly in favor of the existence of prediction markets. They are powerful tools for forecasting complex events that can help enrich and empower folks from across a range of backgrounds. The article has two core points, but fails to go deep enough in addressing either. This leads to a _somewhat_ incorrect scapegoating of prediction markets rather than acknowledging head on some more core issues with the state of…

> They are powerful tools for forecasting complex events that can help enrich and empower folks from across a range of backgrounds.

gross. This sounds like a press release.

It's gambling dressed-up as forecasting.

Re: Prediction markets are ushering in a world in which news becomes about gambling

#299
post #275

> These markets are also manipulable. In 2012, one bettor on the now-defunct prediction market Intrade placed a series of huge wagers on Mitt Romney in the two weeks preceding the election, generating a betting line indicative of a tight race. The bettor did not seem motivated by financial gain, according to two researchers who examined the trades. “More plausibly, this trader could have been attempting to manipulate…

>As this new kind of writing draws readers away from traditional media, we should be prepared for whatever PR mutates into to compensate. When I think how hard PR firms work to score press hits in the traditional media, I can't imagine they'll work any less hard to feed stories to bloggers, if they can figure out how.

I think it's safe to say they figured it out.

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