Seems like a weird mistake to make. If they're going to bait new users, why not just use bets that did exist? Better yet, why not use users who did make a lot of money?
Seems to be a popular means for marketing gambling. There was a scandal of a bunch of twitch streamers doing the same thing for skin gambling websites.
I finally gave in to my curiosity and downloaded Kalshi last week to place a few bets on the World Cup.
I was blown away how easy it was. I placed a bet with real money within 5 minutes of downloading the app.
They allow instant deposits with credit card, and ID verification was real time.
I can’t imagine that the extreme accessibility and the typical dark patterns deployed by every popular app won’t eventually end badly.
(I was also shocked that when looking at my credit card bill online, next to the Kalshi deposit line item it showed a promo “would you like to split this payment over 12 month?” and seemingly was only available for that one transaction. So I could have deposited $1000 via CC into Kalshi and paid it back $83/mo over 12 months.)
Yeah, and also inevitable that a product designed to so efficiently separate people from their money would be overrun by grifters and scammers from the influencer/creator world.
What does make this instance perhaps a bit surprising is that it's Polymarket themselves who are paying those grifters.
They're an incredibly well known US based company targeting US based consumers in a way that is patently illegal. It seems almost unbelievably dumb that they would do this even by the often grotty standards of gambling companies.
They must have realised this would be found out and that, when it was, an investigation and enforcement action would follow? I guess maybe some of the creators will find themselves in hot water as well?
I really don't understand what the long term play is here, other than to be litigated out of business.
Let's compare and contrast this to how credit card companies treat sexual content vendors. Remember when a raft of games got delisted on Steam because of pressure from cc companies?
This is my biggest takeaway, and I really wonder what payment processor(s) they're using, because the chargeback and fraud rate in filling 'real money' into an online gambling account using visa or mastercard must be through the roof.
Exactly same reason why porn sites use their own specialist payment processors (alluded to in popular fiction in Industry season 4 recently, for instance).
The back end of how they're able to get money "instantly" into peoples accounts must be fascinating, in a how the sausages are made kind of way.
> It Ain’t What You Don’t Know That Gets You Into Trouble. It’s What You Know for Sure That Just Ain’t So.
My worry is that social media surveillance could be combined with Polymarket to tailor bets to individuals.
This could be very subtle. You don't really need your punters to always be wrong either. Meaning that sometimes they'd win at the expense of other punters with the illusion they can make money.
You just need them to be wrong, say, 15% of the time and to keep coming back compulsively and consistently over time. The longer the better.
If you're ever around fruit/slot machines you'll notice that they do payout and when they do they make a lot of noise. That hides the fact they slowly cream off a percentage of the money that goes in. In the UK the legal limit is around 30%, keeping it low for new gamblers and ramping up when they're hooked.
With detailed information about punter's lives and no regulation you can weaponise that.
>it showed a promo “would you like to split this payment over 12 month?” and seemingly was only available for that one transaction. So I could have deposited $1000 via CC into Kalshi and paid it back $83/mo over 12 months.
"Would you like to make decisions that are bad for you?" The future is indeed wild, and personal weakness is for sale. This isn't meant as an attack on you, but a lot of people will not be able to manage this sort of reduced friction. People with MBAs will call this "providing value."
Key point though is that Kalshi and similar prediction market betting apps are parimutuel, unlike traditional sportsbooks/Draftkings etc where punters bet against the house. This greatly changes (improves) the incentives for the house, e.g. they don't ban sharks and search only for dumb money punters, they try much less to prevent you from leaving with your winnings etc. The parimutuel house just takes a flat rake percentage off the top of the sum of all bids, so they just want to maximize the amount of money wagered overall instead of doing shady shenanigans.
I'm not a prediction market user/booster nor a sports gambler, but this is a key difference and a strict improvement from traditional sportsbook apps. If our society is going to have widespread legal gambling, we strongly want it to be parimutuel.
All these gambling apps need regulation. And I fear they are buying politicians precisely so that doesn't happen.
If I were to have my way, I'd put a law in place that limits bets to $5 max and monthly bets to $150 per month. Letting them go higher encourages some of the worst aspects of society.
We will see crazy things like athletes being injured or murdered in order to win bets. We are already seeing crazy things like white house insiders placing bets on when wars will start.
One of the few ways to really solve this problem is reducing the possible amount of award so the individuals placing these bets don't feel like they have to take matters into their own hands to win.
Have to remember that regulated gambling also has lobbyist so unless regulated gambling is invested in these apps they are likely trying to get them banned or also regulated
I'd say this goes for more than gambling. Since digitalization, we've removed a lot of friction from depraved behavior, and regulation hasn't caught up to it yet.
I remember in 2006 when online sports gambling was banned, and witnessed first hand some sleaze bags flee to Costa Rica where many of the actual operations were located. What I witnessed regarding addiction and exploitation put me off sports for a long time. Now here we are, with the tech industry and political capital behind it, this time engineered to engulf the entire population. It's repulsive.
I have news for you. That burger is the McDonald's commercial? It's most likely made out of plastic. That happy lottery winner? Probably a stock photo from one of the major visuals providers. And I am ready to bet my bankers don't have this hollywood white teeth looking of banks commercials. Since when is advertising real?
It is disturbing what has happened to pokemon cards in recent years. I remember as a kid no one wanted those packs because it as basically acknowledged by everyone the shit odds of getting something cool like a charizard vs a bunch of stupid cards. If you wanted a charizard, you'd just go to a card show with a dealer who has dozens of charizards and pay them like $20. You would never pull countless packs in effort to get one, everyone thought that was extremely stupid.
The WSJ ran an earlier article stating that unless you have access to a lot of data, computing power, and statisticians, you're going to lose on those bets.
You don't need Colossus-level compute or a genius-level IQ to evaluate the question "Will the steam machine cost more than $700 at release", or "Will 2026 be the hottest year on record".
I made an article a day back how Polymarket is not exactly fair when it comes to market resolution (https://omarabid.com/polymarket-bet/) They actually don’t decide on market outcomes, they outsource that to UMA which is as opaque as it can get.
Consider the probabilities in polymarket as the prob. of the polymarket market itself outcomes rather than reality.
The alternative would be to ask both sides of the bets to record a video, and tell them to only post winning bids, but to pay out to both sides. Is that really better? Classic tactic by the bet picking gambler gurus and is impossible to confirm.
I guess Polymarket too will learn to be more subtle now.
> He compared the videos to fast-food commercials, where food can appear more appealing than it does in real life.
> “We’re depicting what actually happens,” he said.
The cope is real. They all know they are destroying lives by promoting gambling to young people and eventually some of them are going to overspend and get addicted. But yeah, it's just like an ad for a burger
66 comments
[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 76.4 ms ] threadI was blown away how easy it was. I placed a bet with real money within 5 minutes of downloading the app.
They allow instant deposits with credit card, and ID verification was real time.
I can’t imagine that the extreme accessibility and the typical dark patterns deployed by every popular app won’t eventually end badly.
(I was also shocked that when looking at my credit card bill online, next to the Kalshi deposit line item it showed a promo “would you like to split this payment over 12 month?” and seemingly was only available for that one transaction. So I could have deposited $1000 via CC into Kalshi and paid it back $83/mo over 12 months.)
This industry is wild.
https://www.gamblinginsider.com/news/114277/massachusetts-ig...
https://sportsbettingalliance.org/take-action/ohio_igaming/
https://sportsbettingalliance.org/take-action/texas/
https://mgaleg.maryland.gov/mgawebsite/Legislation/Details/h...
What does make this instance perhaps a bit surprising is that it's Polymarket themselves who are paying those grifters.
They're an incredibly well known US based company targeting US based consumers in a way that is patently illegal. It seems almost unbelievably dumb that they would do this even by the often grotty standards of gambling companies.
They must have realised this would be found out and that, when it was, an investigation and enforcement action would follow? I guess maybe some of the creators will find themselves in hot water as well?
I really don't understand what the long term play is here, other than to be litigated out of business.
This is my biggest takeaway, and I really wonder what payment processor(s) they're using, because the chargeback and fraud rate in filling 'real money' into an online gambling account using visa or mastercard must be through the roof.
Exactly same reason why porn sites use their own specialist payment processors (alluded to in popular fiction in Industry season 4 recently, for instance).
The back end of how they're able to get money "instantly" into peoples accounts must be fascinating, in a how the sausages are made kind of way.
My worry is that social media surveillance could be combined with Polymarket to tailor bets to individuals.
This could be very subtle. You don't really need your punters to always be wrong either. Meaning that sometimes they'd win at the expense of other punters with the illusion they can make money.
You just need them to be wrong, say, 15% of the time and to keep coming back compulsively and consistently over time. The longer the better.
If you're ever around fruit/slot machines you'll notice that they do payout and when they do they make a lot of noise. That hides the fact they slowly cream off a percentage of the money that goes in. In the UK the legal limit is around 30%, keeping it low for new gamblers and ramping up when they're hooked.
With detailed information about punter's lives and no regulation you can weaponise that.
"Would you like to make decisions that are bad for you?" The future is indeed wild, and personal weakness is for sale. This isn't meant as an attack on you, but a lot of people will not be able to manage this sort of reduced friction. People with MBAs will call this "providing value."
I'm not a prediction market user/booster nor a sports gambler, but this is a key difference and a strict improvement from traditional sportsbook apps. If our society is going to have widespread legal gambling, we strongly want it to be parimutuel.
If I were to have my way, I'd put a law in place that limits bets to $5 max and monthly bets to $150 per month. Letting them go higher encourages some of the worst aspects of society.
We will see crazy things like athletes being injured or murdered in order to win bets. We are already seeing crazy things like white house insiders placing bets on when wars will start.
One of the few ways to really solve this problem is reducing the possible amount of award so the individuals placing these bets don't feel like they have to take matters into their own hands to win.
Do you think in a food commercial the people eating the product are showing their genuine emotion? It's all acting.
God I cant believe I wrote that
If you go to polymarket, Iran related bets have a specific subpage on their website no different than the sports subpage.
Consider the probabilities in polymarket as the prob. of the polymarket market itself outcomes rather than reality.
I guess Polymarket too will learn to be more subtle now.
> “We’re depicting what actually happens,” he said.
The cope is real. They all know they are destroying lives by promoting gambling to young people and eventually some of them are going to overspend and get addicted. But yeah, it's just like an ad for a burger