Hacker News Reader

Comment by Mizza | Hacker News Reader

Hijacking this comment a bit, but I haven't watched real TV in a very long time but have been tuning in again because of the Olympics and Jeopardy.

I'm seeing an incredible amount of ads for companies that let you gamble real money on your phone. Sometimes it's back to back to back to back commercials for online app casinos. This seems really dangerous and a sign of a tragically unhealthy and predatory economy - I can't think of anything more negative-value-add than gambling. Has there been a regulatory change that allows this, or has this been going on for some time?

View on HN

In the Netherlands gambling is either done by the state owned company with all profit going to state treasury or heavily regulated when done online. All to prevent gambling addiction.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holland_Casino

It seems harmful to let gambling be unregulated...

Even loot boxes in games are illegal https://boundingintocomics.com/2020/10/30/netherlands-rules-...

>It seems harmful to let gambling be unregulated...

It seems barely any better make a state revenue stream out of it.

It is. If it would be totally banned it would result in an emergence of a black market.

We have the same thing on Hungary, there is one state controlled gambling company that's under heavy regulation (18+ only, full with warning signs against gambling, barely any advertisements, has only a few old-school products like scratch cards)

Sure a black market would be worse, but why not just regulate it. Government shouldn't have an incentive to ensure that gambling exists and remains profitable which they do so long as they're running it. Government shouldn't be directly engaged in the business of any vice for that reason.

Because the government is less prone to bouts of greed.

No stockholders who expect infinite profit growth, no CxO with bonuses dependent on increasing revenue, and has public oversight by default: government should be the only entity trusted to directly engage in any vice business. They are the only entity I trust to put honest effort in decreasing their user base.

To add to the other reply, governments can be pretty good at unoptimizing the user's experience. As opposed to, like, game companies trying to make it really easy and tempting to pay for stuff on your phone, the specific government person in charge of this stuff is (hopefully) not walking home with pockets full of money if they get people to gamble.

If it's something like a police officer whose funding comes from collecting fines, sure, there are really bad incentives there. But if the government casino department isn't eating what it kills then it doesn't seem like a problem.

The government still has that incentive if it's taxing companies that profit from gambling.

This view is predicated on whether you trust your government to do the right thing or not. The government is already trusted with policy and handling opiates, without going Perdue pharma

Realistically, your choices are:

- corporation’s primary revenue stream

- local government’s major revenue stream

- state/federal government’s minor revenue stream

- criminal org’s major revenue stream (prohibition)

Given those choices, state+ size governments are least likely to paperclip-optimize for gambling “revenue”, and federal/national government would care the most about negative externalities since they compete with other nations, on metrics removed from raw “tax” revenue.

And the US has state lottos already.

I lived in Eindhoven for two years and passed by its Holland Casino every week. I never knew it was run by the Dutch state!

There is a Chinese Internet slang "智商税" ("IQ tax"), used to describe products with questionable actual value, like pseudoscience-based health products, luxurious goods with crazy price tags. The idea is that only people with poor judgement would buy such products, and in doing so are being taxed for low IQ.

But a state-run casino... that's a literal IQ tax.

We have a similar motto in French, "la taxe des cons"

We also have state-run casinos in Québec, as well as state-run lotteries. They have a legal monopoly on gambling, except for some exceptions for bars and online betting which is practically unregulated.

Is organic food an IQ tax?

German equivalent is "Dummensteuer"(tax for being stupid) regarding lottery.

>Has there been a regulatory change that allows this, or has this been going on for some time?

It was actually less regulated. There were gambling sites for children based on electronic collectibles from video games. It was becoming a billion dollar industry before Steam put their foot down.

A friend was close to launching a venture in the space and their first year revenue projections were around 600k assuming middling/unimpressive growth (he was a teenager at the time, didn't really register how fucked up the business was). Medium-sized ventures in this space raked in several million and the largest were definitely bringing in tens of millions of dollars. I know at some point there were concerns of money laundering...

Playtika just IPO'd for 12B and they seem to mostly make gambling apps. I've seen people play them on planes and it's slightly disturbing. I took an SF -> Miami redeye once and a lady seemingly played it during the entire flight.

There are still tons of games out there with gacha/loot box style elements, basically gambling for kids.

The original lootboxes were trading card games - MTG or Pokemon.

I live in Canada and noticed these same ads - what is this garbage? It seemed insanely predatory and unethical.

I've never seen anything like this in my life and had the exact same reaction.

I realized these things must be heavily invested in and/or making a ton of money if they can afford so many Olympic ad spots. I hope it's investment money that's being pissed away on ad spots, but my fear is that these kinds of apps are very successful and really raking it in.

Which apps are being advertised?

I’m in Southern Africa right now and was watching the Olympics on local TV and noticed the same thing. Some commercial breaks consisted of nothing but back to back ads for the same local-market (ie. southern African) sports betting app. It was weird.

I remember Jim Cramer on CNBC saying he wouldn't recommend fossil fuel, gun, and cigarette companies because of ethical reasons. then he went on to push one of those gambling companies, who on his show said it was their goal to get every family in America gambling on their platform.

I'm like, you said that? are you trying to get banned?

sports betting was legalized in 2018 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murphy_v._National_Collegiate_...)

I listen to a lot of basketball podcasts and they are all, even the biggest national ones, trying to get people to gamble

It seems like it's gotten a lot worse after COVID, though

There was a court decision recently (2 years ago?) that started to open up online gambling in the US.

I follow soccer, and right after that mlssoccer.com started publishing vegas betting odds for all the games, and ESPN FC started using UK betting odds for EPL and EUFA competitions.

They're definitely warming up Americans to the idea of normalizing betting and sports betting in the mainstream.

It was a change in sports betting. You really couldn't gamble on sports legally outside of the major casino sport books previously.

Keep in mind that black market sports betting is/was a multi billion dollar industry in the US so much of what you are seeing now is just more visible.

In the US its been crazy, before gambling was heavily frowned upon in the big four sports: Michael Jordan was heavily scrutinized for gambling, not on sports but just gambling for fun on his days off(when he was playing). The 49ers owner(Previous owner) Eddie DeBartolo Jr. was banned from the NFL as an owner due to trying to get a gambling license.

Now the NBA is heavily pushing gambling and the revenue that comes with it, In addition the NFL is also pushing fantasy football which is veiled gambling, a few years ago every commerical for an NFL game had 50% of its ads set to either draftkings or fanduel which are both gambling sites. So I see a huge predatory gambling cloud enveloping all sports which is a really sad turn of affairs.

Problem here in Australia too.

TV aside, there has been some drama over this on Twitch. Streamers are shown gambling massive (to you or me) amounts of money daily. Kids watch this. It's entirely unregulated (maybe not in theory, but in practice). Some people have done investigations into the companies and they seem very shady. There's absolutely no reason to believe these companies aren't directly supporting or sponsoring the streamers monetarily, or even tweaking the numbers behind the scenes to make them lucky. It's been alleged for gacha games in the past, and I definitely believe people will go further for real money if they can.

It seems to be a global trend in countries where there is not proper legislation or heavy lobbying . In my country this has been happening the last four of five years and now the national football cup is now called the betsson cup and all along the matches the commentators refers to the odds and how easy it is to bet using only the app. There is a bet to make on much more than who wins and who looses: spread, number of fouls and types of plays per player and per team, and so on. There was even the chance to bet on the latest presidential election.

You watched real tv on your computer or real tv/cable tv? If on your computer... maybe jeaopardy viewers are more likely to gamble? I don't recall seeing any gambling commercials while watching the olympics on hulu live tv (am on the live tv and no ads bundle which for some reason includes lots of ads).

I've been getting a lot of gambling related ads from Google on YouTube, which is a bad look for an advertising company. Why can't Google find clients that run legitimate businesses?

If you look at Twitch there are plenty of big streamers spending their times on websites like Stake which is literally just an unregulated BTC casino.

Interesting. Can you name some of the apps you've been seeing advertised?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com