They're built on adtech, which people don't understand.

You have many adtech online dossiers that are basically a virtual you, that can be poked, prodded and studied for interests and behaviors.

for a very minimal look, maybe check out amazon "about you":

https://www.amazon.com/slc/hub?useAiMode=1

Our representatives both dem and republican (but slightly more Republican) have decided that the mountain of data that for profit companies have on is a benefit overall to the economy and we’re the guinea pigs for psychological experiments - the “American consumer” is the #1 commodity the US mines.

We are unethical for letting it get to the state it has. The voters define the phrase "money talks".

  The real problem is how we've let these companies infiltrate so much of our society so fast

- Glass stiegel repealed - Automatic weapons ban lifted - Sports gambling ban lifted - Many more

All the hard work of the people who suffered and fought to achieve this wisdom only for it to be abandoned.

Generations making the same mistakes over and over even with boundless knowledge at our fingertips. Really showcases how important education and especially reverence for education is.

This includes a large portion of big tech workers, many of whom reading this.

I feel like a much larger fraction of the economy is predatory than is made out to be in these gambling discourses. Examples:

* FSA plans are designed to get you to gamble on how much medical expenses you will have; if you overestimate, you either lose the money or spend it on shit you otherwise wouldn't buy; if you underestimate, you pay taxes on stuff you shouldn't be paying taxes on. The healthy alternative would be: Cut the FSA, let people just tax deduct medical expenses at tax time, even small ones.

* Extended warranty plans are baiting you to pay for something you are statistically unlikely to need. The healthy alternative would be: Just service things past warranty and charge a much more reasoanable price for it.

* Insurances but co-insurances, deductibles, clauses: "We'll bait you into paying because you think we'll pay but we'll not actually pay because it says in the fine print"

* Trip protection: Asking you to gamble on the probability of a mishap, instead of just covering mishaps out of the box

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?

Hope you're including all the state governments and their lotteries in this assessment.

Meta, ByteDance, ...

The problem is, some humans seem to be consistently drawn towards products or services that fit that description.

In the 1980s, if you wanted to gamble in my city, you went to a gambling den operated by the Civella crime family. If you got caught in a police raid, your life was ruined. If you got behind on your debts, the mob might take it out of you, literally. These were known risks, but people did it anyways.

Then, in the 1990s, there was a change in the casino gaming laws. Casinos opened with harm reduction measures in place. You can absolutely destroy your finances for life in one, but there are ways out.

These apps need regulation like in-person gambling has. Whatever they currently have, it's not enough.

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.

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.

So, you want government to decide what is good and bad behavior?

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

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).

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.

It's only the most cutthroat people who end up being in the position to make the decisions. So they end up making the decisions that come naturally to them

At least with a car you know exactly what you're getting, you might not value it but many people out there are absolutely getting their money's worth back from a 100k car, be it ego or aesthetics or whatever, a gambling addict is just getting exploited and abused, there's no positive to it.

Have you ever heard of gacha? This is the entire shtick as I understand it

Yep, check out PlayTika's slew of games for an example. They're a pretty large company specializing in this kind of stuff.

"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.

> 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.

The fact that you think you incrementally lose but are a net winner indicates to me you're illinformed.

As someone with years of experience in this industry, only a fraction of a percent of gamblers actually meet this defination. But they all think they're net winners and write off losses as "incremental"

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

beyond that, every sports podcast actively encourages gambling. hosts lightheartedly joke about their bad beats like its a pratfall. while entertaining as a non-gambling outsider, i think its a colloquial rationalization of life-ruining behavior

i've always wondered at the intimate relation between risk, dopamine, anticipation, and utility. I'm not an expert and only going by amateur armchair observation, but i suspect that evolution has spent a lot of attention on the problem of non-guaranteed rewards, and the phenomenon of gambling addiction is merely a reflection of that, just like how that of adhd is a reflection of ancient humans needing to be overly alert for subtle signs of danger (or something like that, not an expert)

That "live in a place with possibility" surely triggers the anticipation part of dopamine (which is what it really is, more so than the pleasure part). Dopamine is also intimately connected to movement: i.e. the shakes for people with neurological conditions as well as addicts going through withdrawal or about to relapse.

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.

Imagine having a "stop gambling assistance" section of your fking AD to promote gambling to people

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.

One of the arguments was to make gambling legal, less harmful, and regulated to protect players from cheating. In my state the state lottery company puts out TV ads. Stores have scratch off vending machines with strobe lights on top. So much for harm reduction and making gambling something that you have to actively seek out.

"poor tax" framed by the state to help fund things education.

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?